CHAPTER 10
Jameson
London, England
London hadn’t bothered to wake up yet.
Fog sat low over the street, softening the buildings, muting the traffic, turning the city into something quiet enough to enjoy. I’d always liked it best like this. Before the offices lit up. Before the suits hit the pavement.
From Philadelphia, I’d narrowed the trace enough to point me across the Atlantic.
Now London would give me tools. It had my flat with clean paperwork and boring history attached. Machines I didn’t travel with. Drives I didn’t carry through customs. A setup that could do more than chase shadows from an ocean away.
I’d gotten in before dawn, keyed into the flat, and started working before I took my coat off.
The monitors flickered to life under my fingers. The first sweep returned the same result as before.
Central Europe.
Too broad to act on.
I leaned forward and fed the system everything I pulled from the forum.
The exact minute the post appeared. The sudden spike in views around it.
The public Wi-Fi nodes near the café where the thread first connected.
Even the flimsy privacy layer the account used, the sort that hides just enough to feel safe but leaves faint footprints if you know where to look.
Threadbare hadn’t left me a name.
But they had left movement.
I let the search run and went for espresso.
The corner café was just opening. One woman behind the counter. A few regulars with newspapers, their faces lit by warm bulbs. A cyclist outside with one foot on the curb and his attention buried in his phone.
Halfway through ordering, the skin on the back of my neck prickled.
I looked toward the window.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
The cyclist didn’t look up. The woman behind the counter was fitting a lid onto my cup. One of the regulars turned a page.
Still, the feeling stayed.
I paid in cash, took the espresso, and stepped back outside.
On the walk back, I kept my pace even and my eyes forward until the café window caught the street behind me in reflection.
The cyclist was watching me.
Our eyes met in the glass.
His head dropped back to his phone a second too late.
So London already knew I was here.
Back in the apartment I moved to the desk and woke the terminal.
I set the cup near the edge of the workstation but held it a second longer, letting my palms soak up its warmth.
Threadbare’s question was still there, preserved where no one else could reach it.
Has anyone ever heard of something called Mirrorstream?
That name should have been buried years ago along with the system.
I minimized the saved post, and the search window appeared behind it.
It had finished while I was out.
Switzerland.
Better than Central Europe. Still not enough to find a person.
The account had no history worth pulling. No profile. No old messages. Just one question swallowed by the traffic around it.
Geography, not identity.
So I kept working the geography.
The city brightened while I sat there. The espresso cooled.
I drank it anyway.
I fed the system what was left and let it keep ruling things out. The wrong answers fell away one by one until the result stopped shifting.
Geneva region.
Now we’re getting somewhere.
A name like Mirrorstream didn’t surface by accident. Not after this long. Whoever Threadbare was, they had touched something, or someone had touched them first.
If I could get this close, someone else could too.
Threadbare needed to be warned.
I couldn’t protect a username. I needed a location close enough to act on or a real identity behind the post.
Preferably both.
The irony was hard to ignore. If Mirrorstream still existed the way it used to, it could have found Threadbare in minutes.
That was exactly why it had needed to die.
I looked at the result again.
Geneva.
Last time I was in Geneva, there had been a woman in a red dress. Red lips. Dark hair. A laugh I hadn’t been able to file away cleanly.
The memory surfaced abruptly and unwelcome.
I pushed it down.
Not now.
Not useful.
Hours went by like that. Refining and adjusting.
By evening, I had barely moved.
The encrypted channel I’d kept dormant pinged once in the corner of the screen.
A single line appeared.
A phone number.
No name. No signature. No context.
It didn’t need one.
Graham Whitaker.
I looked toward the window.
The street below had changed with the day. More traffic. More pedestrians. More cover for anyone who wanted to sit still and disappear inside movement.
I picked up the burner I’d activated when I got into the city and dialed.
It rang twice.
Then connected.
“Mercer,” Whitaker greeted.
“Whitaker.”
“Your passport lit up an old watchlist this morning,” he said. “Is that your way of saying hello? Fancy a pint?”
I leaned back slightly in the chair.
I hadn’t come to London under enough layers to avoid notice, mostly because I hadn’t thought I needed to. After all these years, I wouldn’t have expected anyone to keep an active travel notification attached to my identity.
Whitaker using an encrypted channel to invite me for a drink was excessive.
It was also completely like him.
Only Whitaker could make an active watchlist sound like a casual check-in.
“Were those your men following me this morning?”
A pause.
Then Whitaker laughed, low and brief. “Still assuming every badly trained observer belongs to me?”
“That wasn’t an answer.”
“Wasn’t meant to be,” he said.
I looked back toward the window. “The usual place?”
“Where else?” he said. “Half an hour.”
Geneva was the next move, but arriving tonight wouldn’t give me anything I couldn’t get at first light.
The trace still needed time.
Whitaker had reached out within hours.
I could spare half an hour for a pint.