Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8WVRQ47JY4V1Y08P6AE78G

The rain came down in sheets, the kind that soaked through leather in thirty seconds and turned every gutter into a river. Quinn ran anyway. She'd been watching the Raven's Nest for the better part of a week – nursing bad coffee in a hire car parked opposite the green neon sign, cataloguing faces, making notes that her superintendent would have called circumstantial and her gut called something else entirely. Three years since Morris died in circumstances that still didn't sit right in any file she'd ever read, and the trail had eventually, impossibly, led to a dim bar in Soho. She hadn't expected her quarry to bolt. The man was fast. Mid-thirties, olive-skinned, wearing a grey jacket that was now plastered to his back in the downpour, weaving between the late-night pedestrians on Oxford Street with the kind of practised ease that told her he'd run before. She'd clocked him coming out of the Raven's twenty minutes ago, slipping through the side entrance rather than the front – the kind of detail civilians didn't notice. Quinn noticed everything. "Stop! Police!" Half the street flinched. He didn't. He cut left down a narrow alley between a closed kebab shop and a betting office, nearly wrenching his shoulder on the wall as he turned, and Quinn followed three seconds behind, her boots splashing through a puddle that swallowed her ankle. She grabbed the corner brickwork to keep her momentum, felt the rough surface drag against her palm. The alley spat them out onto a side street and he was already pulling ahead, longer stride, younger legs. Quinn pushed harder, her lungs beginning to burn, the worn leather watch on her wrist catching the amber glow of a streetlamp as she pumped her arms. She kept her eyes on the grey jacket. He knew where he was going. That was the thing – not the blind panic of someone trying to lose a tail, but the deliberate routing of someone with a destination in mind. He wasn't running away from her. He was running towards something. Camden. She realised it when they crossed the canal bridge and the lock materialised out of the rain on her left. He'd taken her north in a route so circuitous she'd barely tracked the direction. The market stalls were long shuttered, tarpaulins straining in the wind, and the high street was thinner of people now, a handful of damp figures outside a chip shop being the only witnesses to the chase. He ducked beneath the railway arches. Quinn slowed, just slightly, because the arches swallowed the streetlight and she had no idea what was on the other side of them. She pressed herself to the brick, drew her torch from her coat. Clicked it on. The beam caught water dripping from the vaulted ceiling, a scattering of crushed cans, and a padlocked service gate at the far end that stood open. She went through. The steps on the other side descended sharply, worn Victorian tile underfoot, and the smell hit her immediately – damp stone, something chemical and sweet, and beneath it all something older she had no name for. She kept the torch up, weight forward on her toes, one hand trailing the wall. The rain faded above her. Her own breathing was too loud. The steps levelled out into a tunnel and she stopped. Light bled from somewhere ahead. Warm, amber, nothing like fluorescence. And sound – voices, dozens of them layered into a low, continuous murmur that had no right to exist this far underground in a disused station she'd walked past above ground a hundred times without ever thinking anything of. She checked her phone. No signal. She hadn't expected any. The grey jacket stood at the mouth of the tunnel, caught between light and shadow, and the man wearing it had stopped. He turned to look at her. Not panicked. Calculating. "Detective." His accent was Spanish, the word unhurried. "You need to go back up." He had a Saint Christopher medallion at his throat, catching the amber light from below, and a scar along his left forearm that the rolled sleeve of the jacket exposed – jagged, the kind left by something deliberate and close. She fixed that detail in her memory alongside everything else. "Tomás Herrera." She kept the torch level, kept her voice level. "You've been providing medical care to individuals in and around the Soho area, off the books. At least three of those individuals are persons of interest in an ongoing investigation." She stepped forward. "So you're going to come with me now, and we're going to have a conversation somewhere that isn't the bottom of an abandoned tube station." He didn't move. He looked at her the way people looked at someone standing too close to an open window, that particular calculation of risk and warning. "You've never been down here before." "And yet here I am." "You don't have a token." He glanced pointedly at the far end of the tunnel where the amber glow was thickest, where the voices drew together into something that no longer quite sounded like ordinary conversation. "They'll know that within thirty seconds of you crossing." Quinn's jaw tightened. Thirty seconds from crossing what, she didn't ask, because she wasn't ready to hear the answer with nothing between her and it but a torch and a warrant card. Her hand moved inside her coat to rest against her sidearm instead, the grip cold and solid and completely familiar, a piece of the world she understood. "Then you come out first and nobody needs to cross anything." Herrera looked at her for a long moment. He was reading her the same way she was reading him, working out which of them had more to lose by the next move. He reached up and closed his fingers around the medallion briefly, a reflex rather than a gesture, and then he began to walk slowly back towards her. Behind him, something in the amber dark shifted its weight. Quinn held her ground.