Chapter 4
Chapter Four
The retaining wall rose out of the hillside like a scar that refused to heal. Three feet of poured concrete, cracked, stained, and half-swallowed by sagebrush. It ran forty feet along what had once been the edge of a road or a property line.
This area was all part of "Ghost Under the Lake" or Minto City. And Gideon had only found it two weeks ago. He'd learned about it in school, but he’d forgotten until he stumbled upon it.
Gideon dropped his pack against the base and crouched, running his hand along the surface. The concrete was cold and gritty under his fingers. Somewhere beneath Carpenter Lake, the rest of Minto sat in the silt, drowned and forgotten because someone decided progress required erasure.
He understood that impulse better than he wanted to.
His mind wandered back to the diner. To Praline.
To the way she’d been with him, and the other few customers he’d seen enter Moose & Munch.
She was flirtatious with everyone. Including women.
Always greeted people with that big smile.
While she paid more attention to Gideon, he’d noticed that she did the same with any man who appeared single.
He couldn’t believe she was some kind of operative working for…
who? Someone inside Hyperion? If they wanted to stop Gideon, all they needed to do was call the police.
Prison would put an end to it, and they had cause.
It wasn’t like what he was doing was legal. No reason to kill for it.
He threaded his fingers through his hair and tried to put the death and destruction he’d witnessed out of his mind. He hadn’t even seen that much during his time in the military. Hell, he hadn’t seen it at all.
"Come here often?" Zadie asked. Her question, and her voice, cut through the tension. There was a familiarity about Zadie. It was as if he’d known her for more than a few hours. Or maybe it was just because he’d been alone in the woods for too long.
He loved her dry sense of humor. He also adored that aspect of Felicity, who’d seemed familiar. His thoughts scattered as if they couldn’t coalesce quickly enough for him to make connections he sensed were important.
Betrayal was everywhere.
"Not as often as I bet you get shot at." He winced. That was rude. If his mother were still alive, she’d smacked the back of his head. "Are you still in the military?"
"Technically, I’m dead. Died serving my country.
" Zadie moved along the wall, scanning the area with the kind of efficiency that told him this wasn't her first time making camp in a place no one was supposed to be.
This spot offered excellent concealment from anyone's line of sight. A lost city that, during some months when the lake rose, you couldn’t even see a single part of it.
They’d be safe here for the night. Even if a chopper came buzzing overhead, they wouldn’t be seen.
Zadie had stowed the SxS under a natural overhang of rock and brush about fifty meters back and covered it.
He’d watched every movement, which had been deliberate and served a purpose. Nothing was wasted. It reminded him of the way she moved through encrypted systems—or at least, the way Felicity did.
And that was the problem.
He had no right to be upset. Not to mention that it was illogical. No one used their real identity on the dark web. That would be stupid, and she was far from dumb.
However, he'd trusted Felicity. And then he’d trusted Zadie. The woman who’d saved his life more than once.
Now, in the quiet, with his adrenaline metabolized and the sky turning the color of a bruise, doubt about who this woman really was and what she wanted, needled his brain.
She’d said Darwin sent her. Darwin, who’d stood in that hallway and used the word accusation as if it were a reasonable response to a friend being marched out of a building by security guards. Darwin, who knew something was wrong and let it happen anyway.
Zadie set down her pack across from him and leaned her back against the concrete. She pulled her knees up, resting her arms on them.
"You're thinking hard," she said. "Care to share?"
"When did you figure out I was Flatline?"
"I didn’t. You told me."
"Alright. But you’re the one who dropped Felicity as a name. Like I was supposed to catch on. Why?"
"It was the first name I could think of because using my real name would’ve been sloppy."
"Still dangerous to use a name associated with one you use on the dark web."
"It’s a common enough name. It’s not associated with me or my career. Besides, I had no idea you were Flatline. If I had, our conversation on the way to the diner might have been different."
He believed her. He didn't want to, but he did.
"Why were you asking about Blackridge on the dark web?
What do they have to do with all of this?
" He lowered himself to the ground across from her, his back against his pack.
The surrounding sagebrush was tall enough to hide them and the wall blocked the wind.
It wasn't comfortable, but it was defensible.
Zadie pulled a protein bar from her jacket and tore it open. She offered half to him.
His stomach growled, so he took it.
"Blackridge Security was connected to Finch," she said. "We can support that, but we can’t prove it. Not with a paper trail anyway."
"Connected how?"
"The founder, Peter Ramsey, was using what we believe is TITAN to enhance his security teams. Again, we don’t have proof, except for what we’ve seen with our own eyes."
Gideon stopped chewing. TITAN. TTN-3. Darwin's compound—the one that combined VKR-1 and KTH-1 into a single protocol.
He knew about it. He'd seen the early documentation when Darwin thought it might be a possibility.
But then Darwin put it on hold indefinitely.
It was too unstable. Not to mention VKR-1 had its own set of problems, even if it was being used on the battlefield on a limited basis.
As long as KTH-1 was given early enough, the benefits outweighed the risks.
"I know a little about it," he said. "But TITAN was never manufactured."
"We believe it was, and that Finch used Ramsey's firm and his men as a test run," she said. "He sent enhanced operatives to kill me and my team."
The protein bar sat like chalk in his mouth. He made himself chew and swallow because he needed the fuel, even if his stomach had other ideas.
"Darwin tried to help," she continued. "He found out what Finch was doing, and he tried to stop it. And for that, Finch made sure Darwin took the fall. He's wanted for murder and corporate espionage. None of it’s true, but the charges are real, and so is the warrant."
Gideon leaned his head back against his pack and stared at the sky. The first stars appeared through the haze, faint and indifferent.
He turned her words over the way he'd turn over a line of code, looking for the flaw.
Just a few months ago, he would have believed them without question.
Darwin was the most principled person he'd ever worked with.
The kind of man who lost sleep over theoretical harm, who designed safeguards into compounds that hadn't even been approved for testing yet.
But he’d also stood in a hallway and let Gideon walk into an elevator with his career reduced to an NDA.
"He didn't stand up for me," Gideon said. It came out quieter than he’d intended, and his tone held no real bite. "He fought to have me hired. He was the one who recruited me, and he’s the one who watched me walk without saying a single word in my defense."
"And he’s regretted that decision for as long as I’ve known him." Zadie pulled two thin thermal blankets from her pack, shaking them out. "Darwin has spent every day since trying to undo what Finch has done. He saved our lives. He's the reason we're still breathing."
Gideon watched her spread the blanket on the ground beside her pack.
She sat in the middle of it, running her fingers through the ends of her long braid.
Her movements were unhurried now, the operational edge softened into something calmer and more feminine, and it did something to the air between them that he wasn't prepared for.
She patted the blanket beside her as she opened the second one. "It’s going to get chilly tonight."
She wasn’t wrong.
He set his pack at the edge of the blanket to use as a pillow and inched closer.
"What do you all want with me?" he asked.
She lay down on her side, propped up on her elbow. "We need you to stop destroying the nodes."
"No. It’s the only leverage I have. If he’s doing what you say he is, then he’s using my telemetry system to monitor those enhanced humans. Killing the system will kill the operation."
"Maybe. But it won’t help Darwin. And yours isn’t the only system out there. It’ll only delay him for a short period. What you’re doing is throwing a tantrum with a really sophisticated toolbox."
He chuckled. "That's fair."
"In order to connect Finch to everything—the enhanced soldiers, the unauthorized trials, Darwin's framing, what they did to my team—we need to get into the server. Into ORACLE. Darwin needs to see what Finch has been hiding and everything’s in there."
"Even if you found the software back door," he said, "you wouldn't be able to do it."
"I might not be the great Gideon Rhodes, the legend in signals intelligence and electronic warfare, but—"
"That's what you do, did, in the military?"
"Yes." She rolled onto her back and clasped her hands behind her head. "I got a degree in computer science and programming before joining the military. You were always the standard of what the rest of us were supposed to be."