CHAPTER 62

The rain came down in sheets over Lokoja.

Not the usual petty drizzle—this was judgment rain. The kind that washed away footprints and blurred the faces of hunters and prey.

Zainab stood inside the half-finished safehouse, the walls soaked, the roof groaning with every thunderclap. Her fingers moved with muscle memory, stitching a microchip into the lining of a trench coat meant for one of Mallam Yusuf's informants.

But her mind wasn't on the coat.

It was on the face she'd seen in the grainy photo slipped under her door last night. A photo of her father.

Alive.

The man who vanished when she was nine. Who was declared dead by police in Ilorin. Who, according to Mallam Yusuf's note, had been working in a blacksite under a false name, imprisoned and brainwashed by The Jackal's network.

Obi entered with soaked boots and eyes filled with urgency.

"They've traced us here," he said. "We've got twenty minutes. Maybe less."

Zainab folded the coat. "Where's the safe route?"

"Through the old warehouse. Saliu's waiting with a boat by the river."

She grabbed her bag, but paused.

"Obi… if the photo's real—if my father's alive—then we need to change the mission."

Obi looked at her like a man standing between love and logic.

"If we go after him, we break our cover. The Bureau will know."

"I don't care," Zainab said, her voice calm but full of something ancient. "They already took Dapo. They nearly took you. They're not taking him too."

Obi didn't argue. He just pulled the map from his jacket and spread it across a dry crate.

"Then we start here. An abandoned oil rig in Bayelsa. That's the location tied to the code on the back of the photo."

As they traced their route, a series of encrypted messages pinged Zainab's burner phone.

All from Fatihah.

"Abuja is on lockdown.""EFCC insider says a raid is coming.""Be careful. The Raven is moving again."

Zainab's heartbeat stayed steady. She had become the eye of her own storm.

They moved under the cover of rain, crossing the flooded fields, ducking checkpoints, avoiding surveillance drones by minutes.

By dawn, they reached a riverside village, where an old fisherman named Saliu waited beside a wooden boat and a suspiciously high-tech crate wrapped in canvas.

"Safe travels," he muttered, handing Zainab a thermos. "Your mother once crossed this river too. That was before they took her."

Zainab froze.

"You knew my mother?"

The old man nodded. "She wasn't just a tailor either. That's all I'll say."

She held the thermos tighter as the boat drifted into the fog.

Inside, beneath the lid, she found a spool of golden thread—and a flash drive shaped like a thimble.

Obi looked at her.

"What's on it?"

Zainab stared into the mist.

"The rest of the truth," she whispered.