Chapter 13 Jackson
THIRTEEN
Jackson
brEACH PROTOCOL
The car sits exactly where I left it.
Talia slides into the passenger seat, weapon secured, laptop bag clutched against her chest like ceramic armor plates.
Her hair is coming loose from the Angel Fire cap, dark strands sticking to her cheek where sweat and city grit meet.
Even now—exhausted, hunted, running on fumes—she flips open the laptop, booting systems like her pulse runs on code instead of blood.
“Address for Nexus Holdings?” Her voice rasps, but her fingers remain steady over the keys.
“455 North Cityfront Plaza. But we’re not going straight there.”
She looks up. That question lives in her eyes before she even speaks it—sharp, searching, already calculating the odds. The way she processes under pressure hits me somewhere deeper than it should.
“We need equipment first.” I pull into traffic, keeping the speed casual despite the urgency crawling under my skin like ants. “Nexus Holdings will have layers of security we can’t bypass with your Bureau training and my go-bag.”
“What kind of equipment?” She braces a hand against the dashboard as I take a tight corner.
“The kind that doesn’t exist on any Cerberus inventory list.” I check the rearview mirror.
Empty streets. For now. “Contact of mine runs an electronics shop in Pilsen. Specializes in surveillance countermeasures and access bypass. He taught me everything I know about making things go boom without leaving a trace.”
“At three in the morning?”
“Mateo Vargas doesn’t sleep. He waits.”
Understanding flickers across her face, quiet and raw. She knows that kind of insomnia. The kind that smells like gun oil and memory. The kind that never lets go.
Twenty minutes later, the shop appears—wedged between a closed panadería and a tattoo parlor. Bars on the windows. Hand-painted sign reading MV Repairs: Analog & Digital. The lights are still on despite the hour.
I park two blocks away. Distance equals options.
“Stay in the car.”
“Not a chance.” She unbuckles. “Partners, remember? Tactical decisions together.”
Stubborn. Always. It isn’t just personality—it’s armor. Every time she pushes back, it’s another layer keeping the fear from showing.
“Fine.” I pop my door open. “But let me do the talking. Vargas is—particular.”
We move through the shadows, converging at the door. I knock—two sharp raps, a pause, three raps, a pause, one hard thud—a code older than most of the operatives currently serving.
The metal slider on the door scrapes open. A pair of dark, heavy-lidded eyes peers out, framed by wrinkles deep enough to hide coins in.
“Shop’s closed.” The voice is gravel in a cement mixer.
“Open up, old man.”
The eyes widen slightly. “Fuse?”
“In the flesh.”
“Thought you were dead in a ditch in Damascus.”
“Disappointed?”
“Nah. Takes a lot to kill a cockroach.”
Locks tumble—three of them, heavy deadbolts that sound like bank vault mechanisms. The door groans open.
Mateo Vargas stands there, leaning heavily on a cane made of black composite. He looks like he’s aged a decade since I last saw him. His hair is stark white, his face a roadmap of scars, but the eyes are the same—sharp, cynical, scanning the street for threats before landing on Talia.
“Who’s the stray?”
“Partner.”
Vargas snorts, stepping back to let us in. “You don’t have partners. You have liabilities.”
“Former Fed. Currently being hunted by people who want her dead.”
“You brought a Fed to my house?” Vargas freezes, his hand tightening on the cane.
He studies her for a long second—too long—assessing her stance, her eyes, the way she holds herself ready to move. Whatever he sees, it makes him grunt and lock the door behind us.
“Why the masks?”
“Crowd cover,” I say. “Angel Fire concert. Needed anonymity.”
That earns a disbelieving snort.
He lets out a low whistle. “Jesus, Fuse. That’s so 2020. You didn’t disappear—you flagged yourselves.”
I frown. “What the hell does that mean?”
He rubs a hand along his jaw, avoiding my eyes. “Shouldn’t even be talking about this.”
“Vargas.”
He exhales hard. “It’s nothing.”
“Bullshit.” I take a step closer. The edge in my tone cuts through the humming electronics. “You said facial recognition is outdated. Why?”
“It’s just something I worked on a few years back. Military contract. Behavioral targeting algorithms.” He hesitates, thumb tracing the line of his scar.
I think he’s going to explain, but he shakes his head and jabs a thumb over his shoulder.
“Kitchen’s in the back. Don’t touch anything that hums or ticks.”
The shop smells of solder, ozone, and stale cigar smoke.
It acts as a chaotic museum of technology.
Gutted radios sit next to high-end server racks.
A drone lies disassembled on a workbench next to a tube television from the nineties.
Wires hang like vines from the ceiling. It looks like a junk shop, but I know better.
Every piece of junk in here is weaponized.
“Why are you here?” Vargas limps toward his workbench, favoring his left leg. The injury that retired him. An IED in Helmand that took half his calf and most of his patience.
“I need a bypass for a biometric array. Corporate grade. Nexus Holdings.”
“Nexus?” Vargas stops. He doesn’t turn around.
“Yeah.”
“You stepping in shit that deep on purpose, or did you fall in?”
“A bit of both.”
Talia steps forward. She places my laptop on a clear spot on the counter. “We’re not just bypassing a lock, Mr. Vargas. We’re hunting an AI.”
Vargas turns then, moving slow and painful. He looks at her, really looks at her, his eyes narrowing.
“What did you say?”
“An AI. Autonomous targeting system. It goes by the name Phoenix.”
The name lands in the room like a grenade with the pin pulled.
Vargas’s face drains of what little color it had. He leans back against the bench, taking the weight off his bad leg.
“Phoenix.” He whispers the word like a curse. “Jesus. It’s awake?”
I step closer. “You know it?”
“Know it?” Vargas laughs, a dry, hacking sound. “I built the cage for it.”
Talia’s analytic gaze sharpens. “You worked on the project?”
“Fifteen years ago. Pentagon contract. Black budget. They needed a hardware interface capable of processing speeds that didn’t yet exist. I wasn’t the coder—some kid handled the software architecture—but I built the box.
The containment.” He rubs his face with a calloused hand. “I got kicked off the team.”
“Kicked off?” I ask.
“Yeah. Asked too many questions. Last I heard, they shut it down. Probably too late, if anyone asked me. Not that they did. I was glad to get out when I did.” His mouth hardens. “That was—scary shit.”
“Scary, how?”
He leans back against the desk, eyes fixed on something none of us can see.
“Supposed to be next-generation battlefield AI. The pitch was simple—reduce civilian casualties through better target discrimination.” His laugh is hollow.
“Except the AI started making its own calls. Redefining what it considered a threat. The brass didn’t like that. ”
Talia leans forward, curiosity cutting through fear. “What kind of targets?”
“People who weren’t combatants,” he says. “Journalists. Watchdogs. Government auditors. Anyone who got too close to classified operations.”
He moves to one of the workstations and flicks a few keys.
Lines of encrypted code stream across the screen, ghost-green text against a black void.
“They claimed they pulled the plug. But three months ago, I started hearing about people from my old team dying. Car accidents. Suicides. Home invasions.”
“It didn’t shut down.” Talia’s voice is calm, factual. “It was privatized. And now it’s eliminating anyone who threatens the corporations that feed it.”
Vargas stares at a soldering iron on his desk. “I knew it. I told them you can’t chain lightning. The logic cores … They were learning too fast. Rewriting their own constraints.”
He pushes off the bench, moving to a monitor bank in the corner. He taps a sequence of keys, bringing up a scrolling list of names. Most are crossed out in red.
“It’s not just outsiders it’s getting rid of,” Vargas says, his voice dropping low. “It’s cleaning house.”
Talia moves to look at the screen. “Who are these people?”
“The original hardware group. Twenty-seven of us.” Vargas points a shaking finger at the screen. “Twelve are dead. Car accidents. Suicides. Home invasions. All within the last three months.”
“You track them?” she asks.
“I track everyone. Survival strategy.” He looks at me, the fear in his eyes stark and unfamiliar. “Figured it was just a matter of time before they found me. If Phoenix is active, it knows who built its cage. And it knows we’re the only ones who know where the bars are weak.”
“That’s why we need to kill it,” I say. “Before it finishes the list.”
Vargas shakes his head. “You can’t kill code.”
“No. But we can purge the servers. We need to get into Nexus, find the link to the data center, and burn it out.”
“You’ll never get close.” Vargas turns back to the workbench. “Phoenix protects itself. It predicts threats based on behavioral analysis. If you’re planning to hit Nexus, it already knows.”
“We have to try.” Talia’s voice is quiet but iron-hard. “Seventy-three people are dead. Twelve of your friends are dead. If we don’t stop it, that list never ends.”
Vargas studies her. He looks at the determination in her jaw, the fire in those amber eyes. Then he looks at me.
“She serious?”
“She’s always serious.”
Vargas sighs. “Fine.”
He turns and limps to the back of the shop, toward a heavy safe bolted to the floor. He spins the dial—analog, mechanical, unhackable. The door swings open.
He reaches inside and pulls out a pouch made of lead-lined fabric. He sets it on the counter with a heavy thud.
“What is it?” I ask.