He reached the Ciudad del Este distribution hub at 2 AM. The building was a hollowed-out concrete shell, shelves still stacked with unsold electronics and dog food. He found Elena in the women's bathroom, a slim woman in her 40s with a laptop wired to a car battery. Her hands were shaking.
The cartel responded with overwhelming force. Three black SUVs with no headlights cornered Marcus and Elena in a narrow alley behind a mattress warehouse.
They ran through the back dock, past abandoned conveyor belts. Marcus's tablet beeped—he had already loaded a custom route into the Amazon Flex dispatch system.
Kaelen dropped her gun. Her guards ran. In the distance, sirens—real police, not cartel.
"You just declared war on a cartel using cat litter and a return policy."
He hit the last command on his tablet. A protocol he'd coded himself, never deployed: Reverse Logistics Protocol - Global Recall.