They played the video forty times before dawn.
Rebecca made tea nobody drank and a transcript nobody needed, because by the tenth viewing all three of them could have recited it. Marcus watched his father's hand. It was Travis who finally heard it — Travis, sitting on the floor with his back against the cabinets, because sometime around three in the morning his legs had simply declined the rest of the night.
"It's not Morse," he said. "I keep trying to make it Morse and it keeps refusing. Two, one, three. Then it loops in the edit — the clear-eyed part — two, one, three, and then a long tap at the end. Two-one-three-hold."
"Two thirteen," Marcus said. "Two thirteen. Say it as a place."
"Highway 213?" Rebecca shook her head. "That's forty miles north, there's nothing—"
"The garage," Travis said. He was looking at Marcus. "Foundry Street. The old garage's address was 213 Foundry. Two-thirteen. Your father carved that eagle over the door of 213 Foundry Street in 1978, and he's tapping the address on the arm of a wheelchair to tell his son where his other son is being held."
"The old garage is a husk." Marcus was already standing. "It flooded in '09. Roof's half gone. The city condemned it six years ago and the club sold the lot to a developer who never developed anything. It's a ruin with our name on it."
"It's a ruin with a room under it," Rebecca said, and her voice had gone quiet and quick, the way it did in closing arguments. "A room with Daniel's evidence. A room Sarah and Emily both pointed at — it starts and ends at the old garage, Danny's under— Marcus. She wasn't saying Daniel was held there. Listen to her again. The key is the whole war. The evidence is the war. Whoever holds the founder's room holds fourteen years of proof — the rigging, the laundering, the names. They took Daniel to make him open it or trade it. They took Walter to break Daniel, or to break you. They want Emily because they believe she knows the way in." She looked at the couch, where Emily slept with her mouth open and one hand still curled around the rabbit's good ear. "Daniel turned a little girl into a map because he thought he might die before he could draw one. That's not cruelty. That's a man with no other paper."
"Then we go now." Marcus had the keys to the clubhouse truck in his hand without remembering picking them up. "We go now, we go loud, we take the building apart with our hands if we have to—"
"No." Rebecca did not raise her voice. She never raised her voice; it was her most frightening quality. "You listen to me, Marcus Sullivan, because I'm the only person in this room whose job is thinking at four in the morning. If you convoy forty motorcycles to a condemned ruin at dawn, three things happen. One: you announce to the traitor — who is still unknown, who may be asleep two rooms from Emily right now — that you understood the message. Two: whoever holds Daniel moves him or kills him, and burns the room with him in it. Three: you hand the police a riot instead of a case, and every scrap of evidence in that room becomes fruit of a biker brawl, inadmissible and worthless. Daniel spent fourteen years assembling the proof that would end this. Not wound it. Not avenge it. End it — in court, in daylight, forever. We do it his way or we piss on the whole fourteen years."
Marcus stood in the wreckage of his own kitchen, keys in hand, a president with an army asleep in the next two rooms and a brother in a chair in a concrete room, and felt the hardest truth of command settle on him: that the right move was the slow one, and the slow one felt like betrayal.
"What does his way look like?" he asked, finally.
"Quiet," Rebecca said. "It looks quiet. Tonight, Emily stays here, guarded, with me — and I mean here, inside this clubhouse, with your most trusted six and a story for the rest: she's a runaway we found, police are handling it, nothing to do with the club. Tomorrow, you and I and Travis go to the old garage as three citizens surveying a property the club used to own. If the room is what we think, we secure the evidence — we do not remove it, we secure it, photograph it, and I call a man I know in the state police, a man I have trusted for fifteen years, and after him, if the evidence is what Daniel says it is, the FBI's financial crimes people, because laundering across state lines on charity rides is exactly their liturgy. And Daniel—" Her voice softened at the edges. "Daniel we get back by trading the one thing they want more than him: time. Let them think the club is fractured. Let them think Travis is being expelled and you're paralyzed. A house divided is a house nobody rushes. We give them seventy-two hours of a club eating itself, and we use every one of those hours."
"And if they're hurting him in those hours?"
"Then I need you to be the man your father carved eagles for," Rebecca said, "and carry it. Because Daniel carried fourteen years of it for you, and he did it to buy exactly this: a chance to finish it right."
Across the room, Travis got up off the floor with the stiffness of a man twice his age. "There's one more piece," he said. "The vote. Richard moved to strip my patch, and it was seconded, and if we adjourn it now with no answer, the club smells a cover-up and the traitor — whoever he is — smells safety. We let the vote happen, Rebecca. We let it happen tomorrow night, in full church, and we let it get ugly. Marcus recuses — president can't judge his own brother, everybody knows that rule. And when it's at its ugliest—" He met Marcus's eyes with the wrecked calm of a man volunteering for a firing squad he'd designed himself. "—you let them take my patch, if that's what it takes to sell the fracture. Let them hang me in effigy, brother. I've been dead before. I'm good at it. You just make sure somebody's watching who leaves early, and who makes a phone call when they think the club's looking the other way."
Marcus looked at his best friend — at the man who had climbed out of a burning ditch and walked into fourteen years of darkness as a favor — and understood that he was being asked to endure the second-hardest thing: not the sacrifice, but watching someone he loved make it.
"Seventy-two hours," he said at last, and put the truck keys back on their hook with great precision. "And then, God help the men who took my brother, because I am done being a man whose family dies quietly."