CHAPTER 60
Jameson
Tallinn, Estonia
Four Months Gone
I had repaired enough of the Gemini Protocol to remain necessary.
I had withheld enough to keep it from becoming Mirrorstream.
The distinction occupied most of my waking hours.
Tomar had recovered fragments of the system after I sabotaged it. Architecture without sequence. Functions without the logic that connected them. Enough to search records, follow movement, and expose contradictions between identities.
Not enough to recognize the person moving through them.
Facial recognition had been one of Mirrorstream’s central strengths.
It could follow a face through age, injury, cosmetic alteration, partial footage, and deliberate attempts at concealment.
A glimpse through rain-streaked glass had once been enough to connect a person to every identity they had used.
Gemini couldn’t do it.
The system compared what it was given and returned percentages that meant very little. Change the angle, alter the hair, obscure half the face, and the match degraded into noise.
Tomar had spent years rebuilding the machine.
She still needed me to make it see.
By the ninth week, no one monitored every line I entered.
The analysts still watched me, but they had stopped understanding what they were looking for.
Familiarity had replaced suspicion. Whitaker reviewed my access reports.
Tomar reviewed my results. Both believed the restrictions around me were holding.
They weren’t.
The restricted analysis room sat three levels beneath the public facility, beyond two badge-controlled corridors and a security door that required a rotating code.
It had no windows or personal devices, only one camera above the entrance and another facing the central console.
The air stayed cold enough to preserve equipment and discourage comfort.
I had compromised the first camera on my third day.
Its four-second blind interval gave me enough room to alter the feed without triggering a continuity alert. From there, I reached the facility’s internal surveillance network one camera at a time.
Not every feed.
Enough to see who came and went.
The second camera had been showing the same empty chair for twelve days.
I sat beneath it now, surrounded by the remains of something I had already destroyed once.
Serpens Geminus presented the Gemini Protocol as a humanitarian breakthrough.
That was what the world saw.
A polished system promising to restore continuity where governments, borders, and institutions had failed. A machine marketed as capable of finding the truth inside conflicting records.
Tomar had learned how to make surveillance sound benevolent.
She rarely came this far beneath the public floors to work on it.
Most days, she remained upstairs entertaining donors, government officials, and executives over long private meals. Men in tailored suits arrived through restricted entrances with security details large enough to seize the facility if the conversation turned against them.
The camera angles were rarely useful. High views. Partial profiles. Faces obscured by open doors, vehicle roofs, or the men surrounding them.
I had run the footage through Gemini anyway.
It returned noise.
Gemini reached farther than Mirrorstream ever had.
That wasn’t Tomar’s achievement alone. Years had passed since the task force ended. Cameras had multiplied. Records had moved online. Governments and private companies collected more information, retained it longer, and connected systems that had once remained separate.
Gemini had grown with the world around it.
It could search more records, cross more borders, and follow a person through more points of contact than Mirrorstream had ever been given.
It still couldn’t reliably recognize the person moving through them.
From the outside, Gemini wore competence well.
In execution, it failed at the one thing Serpens claimed made it extraordinary.
I had spent seven weeks correcting only what they needed to see.
Each repair gave me access to another piece of the system’s core architecture.
I uploaded those pieces slowly, distributing them across encrypted cloud systems buried deep enough in the dark web that no single location held anything useful on its own. Separate, the fragments were meaningless. Reassembled in the correct order, they were the bones of what Gemini had become.
The system was leaving Serpens one section at a time.
I was putting something back in its place.
The virus went in just as slowly, concealed inside the repairs they believed were making Gemini stronger. By the time I triggered it, there would be nothing separate to isolate or remove.
The architecture would survive beyond their reach.
What remained inside Serpens would destroy itself.
That had been the plan.
Preserve the system’s core. Poison what Serpens controlled. Leave before Tomar or Whitaker understood what I had done.
Brynn remained the one variable I couldn’t resolve.
I had searched when I could, using fragments of her history and behavior instead of the facial recognition Tomar still expected me to repair.
The searches had given me nothing useful.
A message appeared in the corner of the display.
Executive level. Immediately.
Tomar.
I closed the hidden upload, returned the screen to the diagnostic work they expected to see, and stood.
Usually the elevator required a higher authorization to reach the executive floors.
Tonight, it accepted mine.
That was new.
I watched the floor indicator climb.
The doors opened into a corridor built to look nothing like the facility beneath it. Dark wood. Soft lighting. Thick carpet that absorbed footsteps. Art selected to suggest wealth without preference.
Two armed men stood near the far wall.
Neither looked at me directly.
The door to Tomar’s office remained open.
I entered without knocking.
She stood near the windows with her back to me, Tallinn spread in fractured light beyond the glass. A long black coat rested over one chair. Three glasses sat on the low table near the sofa. Two were empty. One still held a measure of amber liquid.
Tomar turned. “You came.”
“You summoned me.”
Her mouth curved faintly.
I crossed far enough into the room for the door to close behind me.
The office smelled faintly of perfume, whiskey, and expensive tobacco no one had smoked inside. Someone had carried it in on their clothes.
“Why am I here?”
“There are several reasons,” Tomar said.
“Start with the relevant one.”
Her smile thinned. “You’re tired.”
“That isn’t new information.”
Tomar watched me more closely. “Still refusing to rest?”
“Still staging concern?”
“I remember when you were less suspicious of kindness,” she said.
“You remember incorrectly.”
She turned from the window and came closer, her robe floating open. Black lace showed beneath it, along with the narrow strap of a garter belt.
She stopped an arm’s length away. “Do you know what Whitaker sees when he looks at you?”
“An asset he hasn’t finished using.”
“He sees a man who can still be made useful if enough pressure is applied,” she said.
“He sees most people that way.”
“And what do you see?” she asked.
I let my gaze move over the room. The whiskey, the robe, the exposed garter strap.
“You missed a clasp.”
For half a second, she didn’t understand. Then her gaze dropped.
“There.” I nodded toward her hip. “Left side.”
She looked down.
It was the first real thing she’d done since I entered the room.
When her eyes came back to mine, the warmth had gone out of them.
“You always did prefer mechanics to pleasure,” she said.
“No. I prefer intent to costume.”
Her mouth tightened, then smoothed.
“We were good once,” she said.
“No, we were useful.”
Her eyes narrowed. “And you worked better afterward.”
“I worked the same.”
“You slept. You ate. You stopped carrying every unresolved problem into the room with you.”
“I don’t need your help.”
“You need something.” She moved past me to the desk and touched the rim of the untouched glass without drinking from it.
“You’ve spent weeks searching for a woman who is dead and pretending the failure isn’t affecting your work.”
I watched her more carefully.
She turned toward me, the robe still open. “I’m not asking you to forget her. I’m telling you grief has occupied enough of your mind, and I know how to clear it.”
“By making yourself useful.”
“You didn’t use to be so cruel,” she said.
“Seeing you clearly corrected that.” I looked past her at the harbor, refusing to give her the answer she wanted.
For a second, neither of us spoke.
The performance had failed, but the room remained useful.
Three glasses. Armed men in the corridor. Tobacco carried in by someone accustomed to being protected. Tomar had summoned me after her guests left, but their presence remained in everything around her.
Serpens had hardware, private security, protected servers, cross-border access, and enough live data to feed a system governments had spent years pretending no longer existed.
My attention caught.
Whitaker had influence, but he didn’t have this kind of money.
I looked back at her. “This isn’t government-funded.”
Tomar’s expression didn’t change.
“Whitaker has access and personnel. He doesn’t have the private capital to build this.”
Her mouth curved.
“Who is paying for Serpens?”
“The Bratva,” she said.
For one second, I thought I’d misunderstood her.
“The Russian Bratva?”
“Yes, Jameson,” she said.
“What the fuck?”
Her smile deepened. “There you are.”
I stared at her. “They fund you.”
“They fund the work,” she said.
“You gave organized crime access to the system.”
“I gave them controlled access to a limited system in exchange for infrastructure no government would approve,” she said.
“You built a search engine for a crime syndicate.”
Tomar’s expression cooled. “I built a machine capable of resolving human identity at scale. What lesser people choose to call themselves while paying for it is irrelevant.”
“They traffic people.”
“They move money, weapons, information, medicine, and governments.” She lifted one shoulder. “Spare me the moral shock. You’ve brokered contracts for men with cleaner suits and identical appetites.”
My hand flexed once at my side.
Her gaze dropped to it, then returned to my face. “Lev understands what the work is worth.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“All the same, I’m going to tell you. He provided capital, secure facilities, routes, personnel, and access to data governments pretend they do not collect.”
“And his access to you came with it.”
Her mouth curved, but the movement didn’t reach her eyes. “Is that concern?”
“It’s an assessment.”
“I became whatever gave me the most leverage,” Tomar said.
“You believe that makes you the person using him.”
“I know it does,” she said.
“You gave a Bratva financier access to an identity system you can’t control.”
“I control Serpens,” she said.
“No. You operate it.”
Her face went still.
“But when the records conflict, Serpens still can’t decide what belongs together.” I watched the realization settle behind her eyes. “That’s why you kept me here.”
“You are here because this is where you were always going to end up,” she said.
“No. I’m here because you couldn’t rebuild the one part of Mirrorstream you never understood.”
“I understood all of it,” Tomar said, heat rising into her voice.
“You understood how to build it. You never understood why it had to stop.”
“I took it farther than you ever allowed it to go,” she said.
“Serpens operates across borders you never accessed. It works in real time. It survives jurisdictional interruption. It functions without state permission and without the committees you spent years pretending would save us from ourselves.”
The anger in her voice outpaced the argument.
She had rebuilt it because I had ended it. Every server beneath us was an answer to a decision she had never forgiven me for making.
“You wanted to prove you could do it without me.”
“I did do it without you,” Tomar said.
“Then why did you need me here?”
For the first time, she hesitated, only a breath.
“Because I brought you home,” she said.
It wasn’t an answer. It was an article of faith.
She still believed I had come back for the work.
Worse, she needed to believe it.
I came out of Tomar’s office looking for Whitaker.
The guard said something behind me. I ignored him.
The private elevator opened one floor down, and I saw Whitaker with an analyst beside him, both of them walking as though the building still belonged to them.
“Whitaker.”
He stopped.
The analyst looked back first. Whitaker took another step before turning.
“Mercer,” he said.
I crossed the corridor. “Why does Tomar think Brynn is dead?”
His expression barely moved.
His eyes did. They shifted briefly toward the analyst, then the elevator. Anywhere but me.
Whitaker’s mouth tightened. “This obsession is no longer useful.”
He turned and continued toward the elevator.
I watched him walk away.
He hadn’t denied it.
He hadn’t looked surprised either.
Tomar believed Brynn was dead. Whitaker knew why.
And every search I had run for her had narrowed too quickly and ended too cleanly.
I had called it a flaw.
It wasn’t.
The realization stopped my breath for half a second.
Then I was already moving.