CHAPTER 38
Jameson
Swiss Alps, Switzerland
Day Twenty-Four Off Grid
The next fourteen days in the safe house developed a rhythm.
We built every query offline. We reviewed every answer offline. We lived inside a routine that was equal parts discipline and denial.
We spent the waiting hours outside, repeating routes through the clearing until she stopped making good decisions loudly.
The safe house didn’t look like it had on Day One. Her notes had migrated across the island. My maps had crept up the wall. Two mugs sat by the sink every morning. Her sweater lived on the back of a chair like it had claimed territory.
I had asked once what she was recording.
She’d told me it was for the exposé she intended to write when this was over, as if survival were already a date she could put on a calendar.
I was passing behind her when she caught my sleeve.
Not hard. Just enough to stop me.
I stopped. “What?”
She tugged me down and kissed me, quick, warm, intentional enough to interrupt the sequence I’d been running in my head.
“Emotional maintenance,” she said.
I leaned in again. She let me get close, let my hand find the back of her chair, let the moment tilt.
Then she pressed her palm to my chest. “Nope. That’s all.”
“That’s all.”
“For now.” She pointed her pen at the satellite box. “Go on. Open the sky.”
“It’s not opening the sky.”
She tipped her head. “You open a secret window into the digital underworld from a kitchen table. Let me have my poetry.”
I powered up the laptop.
She tapped her pen against her notebook. “Okay.”
When she flipped to a fresh page, a few square photos slid loose between the pages.
She’d brought one of those Fuji Instax Mini cameras on a hike with us recently, claiming that if we were going to freeze halfway up a mountain, we might as well have proof of it. Someone in a marketing room had probably felt very clever about making a Polaroid smaller and charging more for it.
Many of the photos were from the sunset. A crooked shot of the trail. Snow on the ridge. Brynn in dark glasses, tucked into her scarf with her cheeks pink from the cold. A few of both of us standing close under the low winter sun.
That day, the safe house didn’t feel like a place we were hiding.
It felt like proof that we had built something real here, even if neither of us had been reckless enough to name it.
She pressed the photos flat beneath her palm like I hadn’t seen them.
“Today’s list is...” She scanned her notes, tapping the pen against her knee. “Darrow ownership cross-references, the subcontractor filings, the environmental monitoring invoices that are definitely cameras, and...”
“Brynn.”
She didn’t look up. “And the access control vendor, because that man is hiding something in his metadata. I can feel it.”
“Brynn.”
Her pen froze midair. “What?”
I turned the laptop toward her. “If yesterday’s pull processed the way it should have, we’re not building a list today.”
She blinked. “We’re not?”
“No.” I tapped the screen. “The local system spent the night sorting yesterday’s pull against everything we’ve collected. If it worked, the deep query batch is ready.”
Her brows lifted. “Meaning?”
“Meaning we’re not building new queries by hand today. The system already identified the overlaps and generated the next layer.”
She stared at me for a beat, then slowly lowered the pen. “Oh. So today is Christmas.”
“It is not Christmas.” I angled the laptop slightly. “It’s the first time the shallow returns have given the system enough to build a deep batch.”
“It is absolutely Christmas,” she said.
“Fine. It’s Christmas.”
Her attention remained on the screen, but the pen started tapping again.
“Have you thought about reaching out to someone?” she asked.
I looked at her.
“Someone from the original team,” she continued. “Someone who already understands what Mirrorstream was and what we’re looking at. There has to be at least one person who could help.”
“There are people who could help.”
She waited.
I checked the relay sequence again even though I already knew it was correct.
“Whatever we’re tracking has more than fragments,” I said. “Whoever built it understands enough of Mirrorstream’s architecture to reproduce parts of its reach, its pattern recognition, and its access structure.”
Her pen stilled. “Are you suggesting it might be someone from your team?”
“Possibly.”
Brynn glanced at the satellite box. “Well, that’s... messy.”
“Yes.”
Her pen tapped once. “But surely your own team wouldn’t have wanted you dead.”
I looked at her.
“So the apartment,” she said. “That had to be because of me.”
“Possibly.”
Her mouth tightened.
“I don’t know whom to trust anymore,” I said. “Or how far.”
“So we keep doing this alone.”
“Until I know where the breach came from.”
Her pen tapped once against the notebook. “That could take a while.”
“Yes.”
She studied me for another second. “You hate that.”
It wasn’t a question.
I entered the key sequence. “We’re ready.”
The relay caught after a few seconds, the terminal’s faint hum filling the quiet kitchen.
Brynn leaned in like she was watching a storm roll in, equal parts anticipation and dread.
Eight minutes later, the connection dropped cleanly.
I exhaled. “Done.”
She rubbed her hands together. “Let’s unwrap the presents.”
“It is not...”
“Jameson.”
I let out a sigh and opened the retrieval.
Lines populated fast, faster than shallow queries ever did.
Darrow ownership.
Darrow permits.
Darrow renovation records.
Security vendors.
Access control maintenance.
Staffing firms.
Payment processors.
Drone components.
Helix Dynamics.
Evan Rischard.
Threadbare.
Brynn’s pen tapped once. “Okay, that’s... a lot.”
“Yes.”
She exhaled, slow and steady. “All right. So what are we looking for?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Her brows pulled together. “That’s your answer?”
“Yes. If I knew, I would’ve queried it directly. This is recognition work.”
“Recognition work,” she repeated.
“You look until something doesn’t belong.”
“Comforting,” she said.
“Accurate.”
I scrolled again.
More lines. More data. More of the same until two names appeared.
Brynn Hunt.
Jameson Mercer.
I didn’t speak.
Brynn’s breath caught like she’d been hit. “Jameson, we didn’t query ourselves.”
“No.”
“Then why would our names be in a return batch?”
“Because someone else queried us in connection with something we did search.”
She pushed back from the table so quickly the chair legs scraped against the floor.
“They’re close enough to be searching the same registries we are.”
She paced toward the locked shutters, stopped before reaching them, then turned back. “What does that mean?”
“It means either someone is doing exactly what we are, or someone knew I would see this.”
Her arms folded tightly over her middle. “Neither of those is comforting.”
“No.”
I reached for my phone.
Her eyes widened. “You’re not...”
“I have to.”
“You said turning that thing on was...” Her gaze moved toward the terminal.
“I know what I said.”
I slid the SIM back in.
I powered the phone on, intending to do a quick sweep. Check the open networks. See if anything had shifted. Maybe run a trace on whatever had just crossed our names if the line held long enough.
The screen lit, and before I could even unlock it, a notification pulsed at the top.
A ping.
Not from a system. Not from a network. Not from anything automated.
From a channel that was supposed to stay silent unless the world was on fire, the black site line only two people in the world had ever used.
And she wouldn’t have used it for anything less than catastrophe.
“Brynn.” I looked up at her, and whatever she saw on my face killed the argument before she could start it. “Pack. Now.”
I knew whatever was on this line was bad, and we were likely already behind.
I opened it.
The thread was short.
One message from a week ago.
YOUR NAME HIT MY DESK.
I PUT A BID IN FOR THE CONTRACT.
I drew in a shaky breath.
Satisfaction, because it was Rook.
Dread, because a contract existed at all.
Confusion, because no one should have had enough clean data to connect Brynn and me.
And the sick realization that Brynn had stumbled into something big enough to put her name on a list.
For one irrational second, relief cut through the fear.
She had seen it. She had taken it. Whatever else had gone wrong, Rook had been on the other end of the line.
Then I saw the second message.
BID DENIED. OTHER PLAYERS IN FIELD. MOVE.
Relief evaporated.
I looked at the timestamp.
Sent last night from Turkey.
01:43 TRT.
Hours ago.
Not a warning anymore.
A missed one.
My brain split the room into categories.
Critical. Useful. Replaceable.
The order mattered. The order was the only thing keeping my hands from shaking.
I killed the phone first. Battery out. SIM out. Both into separate faraday sleeves.
Laptop next.
I stripped the connection, wiped the active session, and yanked the drive before the shutdown cycle finished. The machine protested with one thin electronic sound.
I ignored it.
Satellite box. Battery pack. Cables. Relay key. Backup drive. Two paper maps with routes marked in pencil. Brynn’s notes from the island. My notes from the wall.
Critical. Critical. Critical.
Everything went into the hard case in the order I would need it again.
Drive in the shielded sleeve. Relay key in the inner pocket. Backup drive beneath the foam insert. Cables coiled tight, not because it mattered right now, but because tangled cables cost seconds later, and seconds had become currency.
The Darrow printouts went into the document pouch.
So did the scratch sheets, the query trees, the partial vendor list, and the envelope I had used to calculate time windows three days ago because I had run out of clean paper and apparently still had the survival instincts of a grad student.
No loose paper.
No exposed devices.
No second trip.
Critical. Useful. Replaceable.
The rhythm steadied me.
Three minutes for the room. Ninety seconds for the bedroom. Forty-five for the bathroom if Brynn listened the first time.
She wouldn’t.
“Brynn,” I called.
No answer.
I locked the satellite box into the hard case, then opened it again because the relay key was still on the table.
Wrong order.
Fix it.
Relay key in the inner pocket. Drive in my boot. Phone pieces separated. Laptop in the case. Gun on me. Spare magazine right side. Passport left.
“Brynn.”
Still no answer.
I went looking for her.
She was in the bathroom, crouched by the cabinet, shoving whatever she could grab into a bag, her movements too quick and jerky to pass for efficiency.
“Brynn,” I said. “We need to go.”
“I know,” she snapped, crouched beside the cabinet with an opened box in one hand and the bag at her feet.
I caught the label.
Zovirax.
I pointed to the box. “Leave that.”
She blinked at me. “What?”
I nodded toward it. “Zovirax. Not the right kind of antiviral.”
Her face went blank for half a second.
“Oh.” Her eyes dropped to the box again. “Right. Of course.”
“Hurry up.”
She swallowed hard, nodded once, and went back to packing, slower this time, like her brain had suddenly hit a wall she didn’t know was there.
I didn’t say anything else.
I turned for the bedroom and started gathering my own gear.