Chapter 6
ROMAN
The airfield is a strip of cracked tarmac carved out of farmland east of Prague, bordered by a rusted hangar and a windsock that looks older than the republic.
The kind of facility that caters to cargo operators and private charters and people who need to leave a country without answering questions.
I've used airfields like this across Europe for years, places where cash buys silence and the manifest says whatever you want it to say.
Vix gets out of the extraction vehicle and scans the perimeter before her feet have fully settled on the tarmac.
She catalogs the approach roads, the tree line, the hangar's sight lines, all of it processed and filed in the time it takes her to close the car door.
I've watched officers with twice her years in the field miss details she catches in a single sweep.
Webb's people burned her network to ash while she ran for her life across three countries, and she still clears a room like she's running operations out of it.
The chartered Gulfstream sits at the far end of the strip with its engines idling and its cabin lights dim.
Two figures wait at the base of the stairs, and I recognize Stryker's silhouette before I can make out his face.
The man stands the way he does everything: square, planted, ready.
Mercer is beside him, leaner and quieter, held still by the discipline of a man who has spent long stretches of his career waiting for permission to do violence.
I've worked with both of them through encrypted channels and secure comms for years.
Hearing a voice over a satellite link gives you operational familiarity.
Seeing the man attached to the voice is different.
Stryker is broader than his voice suggests, built like someone who could carry a body out of a combat zone without slowing down.
Mercer moves with the deliberate conservation of energy that combat veterans develop, each gesture stripped to its essential function.
Vix is already walking toward them. Her stride doesn't falter. She's worked with Stryker and Mercer before, face-to-face, not just through encrypted channels, and the familiarity shows in the way she greets Stryker with a handshake that skips the introductions.
"You look like hell, Cross." Stryker takes her hand, and the ghost of a smile crosses his face. "Rough week?"
"You have no idea." She turns to Mercer, who greets her with a quiet "Ma'am" and the barest dip of his chin.
"I'm forty-two, not the queen. Try again."
Mercer's mouth twitches. "Cross."
"Better." Vix climbs the stairs without waiting for a response, and the dry edge in her voice is the first thing resembling humor I've heard from her since London. The sound lands in my chest and stays there, warm and inconvenient.
I watch her greet them with the easy shorthand of people who have history, and the weight of what I'm seeing settles against my ribs. Vix has met these men. She's sat across tables from them, exchanged intelligence, built a working relationship grounded in professional trust.
And every time she did, Stryker and Mercer looked her in the eye knowing that the partner she'd buried and mourned was alive and feeding them reports from across the continent. They kept my secret. Kane's orders, my choice, their silence. The betrayal isn't just mine. It's institutional.
Stryker catches my eye as I follow her up the stairs. He glances at the bruise on my jaw, now fading from purple to the sickly yellow-green of a healing contusion, and his eyebrows lift a fraction.
"Don't ask," I say.
"Wasn't going to." But his mouth twitches. Stryker is not as subtle as he thinks he is.
The cabin is configured for transport rather than comfort: seats along both walls, a secured communications console bolted to a fold-down table, and cargo netting at the rear holding tactical cases stamped with markings I don't recognize.
Vix takes a window seat on the port side and settles in with the precision of a woman who has spent too many hours on aircraft that weren't chartered for her comfort.
She doesn't rest. She turns to Stryker before the wheels leave the tarmac.
"Walk me through the facility's security architecture.
" The words carry no question mark. An instruction, delivered in the clipped British tone that I've watched reduce senior intelligence officers to compliance.
"External surveillance coverage, internal compartmentalization, communications protocols, and whatever redundancy you're running on the encryption. "
Stryker blinks once. He glances at me, and I give him nothing, because watching Vix interrogate my organization is not something I intend to interrupt.
"You know that Tommy runs the technical infrastructure," Stryker begins. "Counter-surveillance on all known Committee communications channels, continuous sweep. Internal systems are air-gapped from external networks. Biometric access control at every security checkpoint."
"Air-gapped entirely? No bridge connections, no maintenance access points?"
"Tommy would rather burn the whole system down than create a bridge. His words."
Vix presses. "Communications with field operatives?"
"Encrypted satellite links. Rotating protocols. Tommy changes the cipher suite on a schedule he doesn't share with anyone, including Kane."
"Good." The word carries approval, and Stryker registers it with the look of a man whose security has just passed inspection by someone who knows where all the cracks hide. "What about physical approaches? How many access routes to the facility?"
Stryker runs through the approach corridors, the concealment measures, the defensive positions.
Vix listens with her whole body angled toward the data, fitting each answer into existing models, and her questions are precise, targeted at the joints where security might be the weakest. She asks about emergency evacuation protocols and contingency communications in the event of a breach.
She asks about personnel rotation and how the team manages operational fatigue in a closed environment.
By the time she's finished, Stryker has spent the better part of an hour being professionally debriefed by a woman who is technically a civilian asset, and the look on his face suggests he's both impressed and slightly unsettled. Vix turns back to her window, satisfied and visibly done with him.
I watch her settle into silence, and the shape of the next few hours recalibrates in my mind. Vix isn't being transported to Echo Base. She's conducting a preliminary assessment of whether Echo Ridge deserves her.
Prague falls away beneath us, the Vltava catching the last of the afternoon light before the cloud cover swallows it.
Somewhere down there, Marek's building is surrounded by police tape and his neighbor is answering questions she doesn't have answers to.
Somewhere down there, the Committee is sifting through the debris of a dead broker's flat and finding whatever Marek left behind, which may or may not be worth the body they paid for it.
The flight is long. Hours over the Atlantic, refueling at a private facility in Newfoundland, then the run southwest across the continent.
Stryker sleeps in shifts with Mercer, one of them always awake, always keeping an eye on the communications console while mostly using the autopilot to fly the plane.
Sleep has never come easy for me in transit, a useful deficiency during the years when transit meant moving between safe houses with the Committee's kill teams working the same corridors.
Vix doesn't sleep either. She sits in her window seat with her face turned toward glass that shows nothing but darkness and cloud and the occasional distant light of a city far below. The rations Mercer sets out go untouched. The water I place on the armrest beside her stays where I put it.
I'm bringing her to the one place the Committee hasn't found.
The last secret I've kept from her, even after the larger lie collapsed, even after she learned I was alive and working for Kane.
Echo Base represents everything I chose over her: duty, security, the mission, the team.
And now she'll see exactly what I traded her for.
Whether the facility and its people measure up against what she lost is a verdict I'm not ready to hear.
At some point over the Midwest, she speaks. Not to me. To the window, or to the darkness beyond it, or to the dead.
"I brought him the money and told him to run.
Less than two hours later, they were pulling a sheet over his face.
" Her voice is flat, stripped clean. "Every person I've tried to save this week is dead because I reached them.
Every warning I sent was a targeting beacon.
Webb turned me into the weapon, and I didn't see it until Marek. "
I could offer reassurance. I could tell her that Marek's death wasn't her fault, that the Committee was already watching, that the timeline suggests they were in position before she arrived.
All of it would be true, and none of it would matter, because Vix doesn't need comfort.
She needs to complete the analysis so she can move past it and into whatever she's building.
"You see it now," I say.
She turns from the window. The cabin's dim lighting catches the silver threading through her hair and the shadows beneath her eyes, and for one unguarded second she looks exactly like the woman I let slip through my fingers in Budapest, before the years I gave her to grieve a lie hardened her into the blade she's become.
The expression disappears as fast as it arrived, her jaw tightening, her eyes going flat, the shutters slamming back into place. But I saw it.
"If Echo Base is compromised because of me, I disappear before I let it burn." Her voice carries no drama, no martyrdom. Just operational intent.
"It won't be."