CHAPTER 13
Jameson
London to Geneva
I got back from the pub with Whitaker’s concern sitting too close to the surface.
Harrison’s anniversary is approaching.
I had no intention of thinking about that.
Mirrorstream was my problem, and I needed to see it through.
I pulled up the search I’d left running before I went to meet Whitaker.
By matching the post time against the public networks active in Geneva that morning, I pinned the first connection to a small café off Rue de l’école-de-Médecine.
Finally.
This was when the real digging began.
People repeated themselves.
Same locations. Same habits. Same assumptions that none of it amounted to a pattern.
I widened the search around the café network, looking for the same privacy service, browser settings, and submission windows.
At first, it was junk. Old uploads. Forgotten comment threads. Article submissions from news sites that didn’t clean up their back doors as well as they should have.
Then the same little café network showed up behind an article submitted to a Swiss outlet the week before.
Different subject. Different account.
Same digital fingerprint.
I kept going.
A Berlin piece two weeks ago. A U.S. publication with an international desk had another upload in the same window. Then another Swiss outlet from a month before that.
Different stories. Different dates. Different editors.
Same byline.
Brynn Hunt.
I stared at the name.
Hunt.
That didn’t prove anything. Coincidences happened. I knew better than to build a conclusion on a familiar name.
But I knew a Hunt.
And The Huntsman was not someone you dragged into a theory without evidence. We were on good terms, as much as men like us ever were, but good terms didn’t make him safe. Beckett had a way of making consequences feel inevitable.
I needed to know exactly what Brynn Hunt was to him before I moved.
I opened a deeper cross-check and let it populate.
Property records came back first. Then old mailing addresses. Then a guardianship filing with two names attached.
There it is.
I sat back slowly.
So Beckett had a sister.
And Threadbare had just become a much bigger problem.
The sky over London had taken on its usual dull gray by the time I pulled everything attached to her actual name. Features, investigations, local pieces.
I opened one article, then another.
The third one finally slowed me down.
A financial analyst in Zurich had flagged a discrepancy in a quarterly report, then vanished from his own life two days later.
No missing person report. No career gap.
No family statement. Three days after that, his employment history corrected itself across four separate systems, placing him in Lisbon six months before Brynn’s article said he’d been in Zurich.
She didn’t call it Mirrorstream.
She couldn’t have. Likely didn’t know its name yet.
But she had documented the seam.
And that was close enough.
I leaned forward, the faint hum of the machine filling the room, and read through the chain again.
How did you get this close, Brynn Hunt?
If she’d gotten this far from dead trails, old articles, and one careless question in a forgotten forum, she wasn’t guessing anymore.
She was circling the architecture without knowing where the walls were.
That made her visible.
Visible meant exposed.
I needed to find her before someone else did.
***
I spent the flight rereading everything I had tied to her name.
By the time the wheels touched down, one thing had settled in.
She was too tenacious to stop just because I asked her to. I was going to need to be more persuasive.
***
Her current address had been buried behind a forwarding service and an old lease, but not deeply enough.
The apartment sat in a quiet corner of the city, wedged between a flower shop and a patisserie.
The building looked untouched for decades.
Mostly retirees. A couple of long-stay expats, judging by the mail slots.
I parked across the street and waited.
Approaching her cold would be a mistake. I didn’t know what she knew, who she’d told, or whether anyone else had already found her. I needed eyes on her first.
Rain started light, then steadied, tapping against the windshield in a soft, uneven rhythm. The glass blurred the traffic lights into smeared color.
Then she appeared, or someone who had to be her.
A woman in a black coat stepped outside, hood up, and locked the front door behind her. Long legs. The age matched. She checked over her shoulder once.
When she finished, she didn’t move right away. She shifted her weight and pulled her phone out, angling the screen slightly as she checked something. The glow lit the edge of her jaw, but not enough to give me her face.
She stayed turned just enough to keep it out of view, and it didn’t matter.
She put her phone back in her bag and set off down the street with purpose.
I followed at a distance.
My shoes hit damp pavement in a steady rhythm, muted by the rain. The air carried the faint scent of wet stone and coffee.
By the time she reached the awning at Club Darrow, I knew two things.
She didn’t fit the place, but she went in anyway.
Across the street, half-shadowed under an overhang, rain misted at the edges of my coat. She passed the front check like she owned it. She never glanced back.
The coat shifted as she moved under the red neon, revealing enough of the dress beneath it to make the strategy clear.
The dress was red, tight, and short enough to turn suspicion into appetite.
It handled the attention for her.
I glanced down at my own clothes. I wasn’t getting in there tonight. I hadn’t dressed for it or built a name or clearance. I didn’t have an exit plan or a clean alias.
I’d followed before I had a plan.
That was unlike me.
Worse, it had worked.
I looked back toward the door she had disappeared through.
I had come to Geneva to warn Brynn Hunt away from Mirrorstream.
Instead, she had walked into a place connected to it before I could reach her.
I crossed back to the car.
Getting inside tonight would require improvisation. Watching every exit would not.
For now, I needed to know whether she came back out alone.