CHAPTER 31
Jameson
Swiss Alps, Switzerland
Day Three Off Grid
That was the problem with a potentially compromised perimeter. The walls still stood. The shutters still held. The locks still engaged in the proper sequence. The alarm panel still gave me a clean internal read.
None of that mattered if someone had already seen enough.
Brynn stood near the kitchen table with the gun in her right hand, hanging loosely at her side.
I checked my own magazine, then looked at her. “You’re staying behind me until we reach the slope.”
Her eyes flicked toward the shuttered windows. “And after the slope?”
“Depends on visibility.”
She nodded.
I pulled a compact evidence pouch from the gear bag, then a pair of gloves, a signal scanner, and a small hard case lined with foam. She watched each item go into my jacket with a quiet focus I was beginning to recognize.
Her humor came out when she was nervous, but when she was afraid, truly afraid, it was the first thing to go.
“You think someone is still out there,” she said.
“I think if I launched a surveillance drone and lost it near a target property, I’d either recover it or destroy it before anyone else could pull data from it.”
Her throat moved once. “So yes.”
“Yes.”
She looked toward the back door instead. “We don’t have much daylight left. We need to move.”
Not we should move.
Not maybe we go.
We need to move.
I didn’t want her outside.
I didn’t want her anywhere near the drone, the slope, the tree line, the consequences of what had just happened.
But there was no version of this where locking her inside made her safer for long.
I keyed the alarm and opened the back door.
Cold air immediately greeted us. The sky had gone flat and pale above the trees, the light starting to drain behind the ridge. Moisture clung to the air, carrying the scent of pine, wet earth, and discharged powder from our afternoon’s activities.
Brynn stepped out behind me without speaking.
I shut the door, locked it, and listened.
Wind moved through branches. Distant water ran over rock. No engine noise. No voices. No additional drones that I could hear.
That meant nothing.
I angled one hand toward the woodline. “Stay on my left. Two steps back. If I tell you to drop, you drop.”
“Okay.” Her voice was low.
I looked at her. The fear was there, but so was everything she had practiced that day. Her grip was steady. Her finger was straight along the frame. She was watching the trees instead of me.
“This is what we trained for,” I said. “You know what to do.”
She held my gaze. “Stay behind you. Listen the first time.”
“Yes.”
I caught the back of her neck and kissed her once, brief and firm, hoping it conveyed confidence instead of comfort.
It was supposed to steady her.
The fact that I needed it too was a problem for later.
Then I released her. “Stay close.”
She nodded.
We moved.
I suspected the drone had gone down beyond the slope, somewhere between the first pine break and the drainage line. Close enough that anyone watching from below might catch sight of us if they knew where to look.
I kept us along the edge of the clearing instead of cutting straight across. Brynn adjusted without asking why, her steps careful over the damp ground.
I wondered if The Huntsman knew how much of him lived in her instincts.
The air turned colder beneath the pines, thick with sap and wet needles, and the safe house disappeared behind us faster than I liked.
“What do you think it saw?” she asked.
“If we’re lucky, nothing useful.”
Her gaze moved through the trees. “You don’t believe that.”
“No.”
She stepped over a root, her hand brushing a tree trunk for balance. “Then what did it see?”
I slowed near a shallow dip in the ground. “That depends on the camera, distance, storage, transmission strength, angle, and whether it was recording continuously or on trigger.”
Her face had gone pale beneath the cold, but her eyes were steady. Worried. Focused. Not asking to be comforted.
“If it captured us,” I said, “the location wouldn’t be the only problem. It would also show that we’re together.”
She absorbed that without blinking. “What else?”
I started moving again because standing still made us easier to observe and made this conversation too much like a confession.
She followed.
“You already know a camera captures more than a face,” I said. “Time. Terrain. Light. Movement. Who stands near you and how close.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly.
“A system can turn those details into a pattern,” I continued. “Whether we move like strangers. Whether we anticipate each other. Whether we trust each other.”
Her steps slowed by half a beat. “You’re making it sound like a computer can read behavior from a photograph.”
I scanned the trees ahead. “A system can use anything if it’s designed to.”
The signal scanner stayed quiet in my jacket, but I didn’t trust it. A drone could transmit in bursts, record locally, use delayed relay, run silent once damaged. Consumer equipment was predictable. Modified equipment rarely was.
And that drone hadn’t flown like consumer equipment.
Brynn’s voice came from behind me. “Why would an image of us make it worse than an image of me alone?”
I stopped beside a cluster of rocks and checked the slope below. “Given everything else, Mirrorstream is the most likely connection. If I’m right, footage of us together would implicate you further.”
She stepped up beside me instead of staying behind.
I let her because the immediate line below was clear.
“I still don’t understand,” she said. “What is your connection to all this? You’ve never really explained.”
“Old work.”
“That’s not an answer,” she said.
“It’s all I can give you while we’re exposed.”
Her eyes held mine. “No, it’s all you want to give me while we’re exposed.”
I looked away.
“I’m not asking for a full history,” she said. “I’m asking how the system could connect us before the connection was obvious to anyone else.”
I moved again.
She followed, but the space between us had changed. She wasn’t pressing to fill silence now. She was following a lead.
Mine.
“It wouldn’t need the connection to be obvious,” I said. “The original architecture didn’t need certainty. It worked from weak signals. Small correlations. Repeated overlaps. Enough fragments in the same direction, and the system knew where to look next.”
Branches thickened ahead. I pushed one aside and held it until she passed.
She didn’t look at me as she ducked beneath it. “You keep saying things like you know how it operates. Intimately.”
My hand tightened on the branch, but I said nothing. I knew this conversation was coming, but I’d have preferred to be back at the cabin for it.
We moved another twenty yards in silence.
I paused and crouched, studying the ground.
A broken fern stem. A fresh scrape in the moss. A small black fragment near a root.
I picked it up with gloved fingers.
Plastic casing.
Matte black plastic, heat-scarred at the edge where a round had struck near a rotor arm.
Brynn crouched beside me, careful with her bandaged hand. “That’s from it?”
“Yes.”
“So it’s close,” she said.
“Yes.”
She looked down the slope, then back at me. “You knew where it would fall.”
“I estimated.”
“You estimate like someone who’s done this before,” she said.
There it was. She had caught the thread, and now she was going to follow it until it led somewhere.
I slid the fragment into an evidence pouch. “I’ve recovered surveillance equipment before.”
Her voice cut through the trees. “Jameson.”
I kept moving.
She followed. “How tied are you to Mirrorstream?”
I stopped.
The woods pressed around us, close and wet and too quiet. The safe house was out of sight. The drone was still unrecovered. We were exposed on a slope with unknown surveillance status and maybe an operator close enough to hear the same water I did.
This was the worst possible place for this conversation.
That didn’t make it avoidable.
She stood two steps above me, one hand braced against a pine, eyes fixed on mine. She looked scared now, openly. Not of the woods. Not of the drone.
Of the answer.
“Brynn.”
“You know too much,” she said. “Not the way someone knows a classified program existed. Not the way someone heard things after. You know how it was built to think. You know what it evaluated. You know what mattered to it.”
I said nothing.
Her throat moved. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
I should have.
I had lied to hostile officers. Diplomats. Killers. Men with guns. Women with knives. People trained to catch a pulse change from across a table.
I couldn’t make myself lie to her.
Not about this.
The wind shifted through the pines.
“I can’t,” I said.
Her face went still. “You can’t tell me I’m wrong.”
“No.”
A bird moved somewhere above us, wings beating once through branches before disappearing into the gray.
She looked at me like the ground had changed under her feet and she was refusing to fall through it.
Her jaw tightened at my silence. “You’re not just some analyst, are you?”
I dragged a hand through my hair, harder than I meant to.
Then I forced the rest out before I could reduce it into something cleaner. “I built Mirrorstream.”
The woods seemed to absorb my words.
Just water running below and the sound of Brynn’s breath stopping for half a second before she made herself take another.
She stared at me.
I should have looked away.
“You—” She searched my face. “You built Mirrorstream.”
“Yes,” I said, because candor was easier than mercy.
Her eyes flashed and she turned away, one hand going to the back of her neck. Her fingers pressed there, hard, like she was physically holding herself together.
I watched the trees instead of watching her because the woods hadn’t stopped being dangerous just because I had outed myself to an investigative journalist.
After several seconds, she turned back. “That thing murdered people, Jameson.”
“That wasn’t what I built it for. It was never supposed to become that.”
“People died because of it.” Her voice tore around the words. “They were killed, and then your system made sure nobody could even prove they were gone.”
I went still.
She pressed a hand to her chest, like the thought had lodged there.
“Do you understand how sick that is? Not just dead. Not just missing. Gone. Their homes, their jobs, their names, their families, everything they had that said I was here, I mattered, I existed, and your system swallowed it. That is every person’s worst fucking fear. ”
Her breath caught in her throat, a sudden, angry gasp. “Matt is dead because of all of this. I almost died because of all of this.” Her mouth trembled, but she didn’t back down. “And you’re standing here telling me that wasn’t the intention?”
I flinched hard enough that she saw it.
Something shifted in her expression, but the anger held.
The thought of a world in which she had been erased, where I might have searched for her and found nothing, hollowed out my chest.
“Yes,” I said, and the word felt inadequate the moment it left me.
“No,” she said, quieter now, and somehow worse. “It didn’t just make people disappear. It buried every trace of them while they were still breathing.”
For years, I had contained what it became inside words like erasure. Containment. Identity displacement.
Standing there with her alive in front of me by margins I did not want to calculate, I finally understood how effectively those words had kept the damage at a distance.
She had found the honest one.
Her shoulders rose with a breath that didn’t quite settle. “I can’t do this right now.”
The words sliced into me, but I deserved them.
“We need to recover the drone and get back,” she added.
I nodded once. There was nothing else to do with the truth after it had already done the damage.
For a second, she looked like she might say more. Her mouth opened, then closed again, and whatever was left stayed trapped behind her teeth.
Then she turned downhill.
The distance between us was different. Not larger physically. Larger everywhere else.
We found the first rotor twenty yards downslope.
Then another piece of casing caught in the wet brush.
The main body had landed near the drainage line, half-buried in mud and pine needles, one arm snapped clean through and the camera housing cracked along the side.
I crouched beside it.
Brynn stopped a few feet back, watching our surroundings instead of crowding me.
Good.
She was angry, but she was still thinking.
I lifted the drone carefully and turned it over.
Too heavy for its size.
Reinforced shell. Extended battery. No consumer serial plate. The camera mount was shielded, the storage compartment protected deeper inside the body than it should have been.
A shallow mark had been stamped into the panel beside the battery housing, but mud filled the grooves and the impact had cracked through one edge. I couldn’t make out the shape here.
Shit.
Definitely not a toy.
A small light still blinked near the underside, weak and red beneath a smear of mud.
Brynn’s voice came low behind me. “What is that?”
“Transmission status.”
“And?” she asked.
I wiped the mud away with my thumb.
The tiny display flickered once.
FAILED SEND.
For the first time since it went down, something in my chest loosened by a fraction.
“It didn’t get the last packet out,” I said.
“Because you shot it?” she asked.
“Because it crashed below the ridge before it finished transmitting. Terrain blocked the signal.”
She exhaled, but not enough to count as relief. “So some of the data might still be on it.”
“Likely.”
“Can you take it?” she asked.
“Yes.”
I opened the evidence pouch and set it beside me, then used a compact tool to pry the damaged panel loose. The storage module sat beneath a shielded plate, cracked at one corner but intact enough to matter.
I removed the module, then the backup chip seated beneath it. After a second, I pulled the telemetry board too and secured all three inside the foam-lined case.
Before sealing the evidence pouch, I cut away the section of casing with the stamped mark and added it to the rest.
Brynn watched my hands. “So if someone comes looking for it…”
“They’ll find a broken craft,” I said, sealing the pouch. “The onboard storage and flight data will be gone. So will anything that could tell us who built it.”
Her eyes moved to the gutted shell in my hand.
I placed the drone back where it had fallen, angled wrong enough to look like impact, not extraction. Then I covered the disturbed mud with pine needles and stood.
“Now we go back,” I said.
Brynn didn’t answer.
She only turned toward the slope, jaw locked, eyes bright with renewed anger she had nowhere to put yet.
And I followed her up the hill carrying the pieces that might tell us who had been on to us.