CHAPTER 24 #2
The tenant was on a month-to-month lease. Police are attempting to locate her for questioning.
The last line narrowed everything.
No injuries confirmed meant no body had been found. No tenant on scene meant no easy explanation. And police looking for Brynn meant the people who shot through her balcony doors would know the same thing as soon as this aired.
They had missed.
The owner followed my gaze. “Bad night in Geneva.”
“Looks like it.”
The television cut to traffic, and the moment closed.
The owner smiled faintly. “What do you need?”
“Two prepaid phones. Four SIMs. Basic models. No contract.”
He reached beneath the counter and set the phones down. “Chargers?”
“Two wall plugs. Two portable batteries.”
He added them to the pile, pulled four SIM packets from a drawer, and rang everything up without commentary.
I paid cash. The owner counted it, bagged everything, and gave me the receipt without asking.
I took the receipt, folded it once, then paused before turning away.
The owner had already started clearing the counter.
“One more thing,” I said.
He looked up again. “Yes?”
“I need a newer satellite communicator. Preferably something sold for hikers or maritime emergencies. Text-capable. No contract tied to a personal account.”
His expression changed by a degree. Not suspicion exactly. Calculation. “We don’t keep those in stock.”
“I assumed not.”
He glanced toward the shelves behind him, then back to me. “Emergency beacon?”
“Not just a beacon. Two-way messaging if possible. Satellite hotspot if you can get one clean.”
His mouth tightened slightly. “That is more specialized.”
“Yes.”
He studied me for half a second longer than I liked. “Touring?”
“Mountains,” I said.
It was true enough.
His gaze moved over the phones, chargers, and portable batteries before returning to my face. “I can check with a supplier.”
“When?”
“That depends on what’s available.” He gestured toward the far end of the counter. “Give me a moment.”
He carried a small laptop from beneath the register to a desk near the back wall and opened it. The machine took several seconds to wake. He entered a password, then began searching through a supplier portal with the slow concentration of someone who didn’t often receive requests this specific.
The television continued playing behind him.
Brynn’s building filled the screen again. The broken balcony door. The police lights. The line beneath it confirming officers were still trying to locate the tenant.
Too close.
Shit. Our first safe house had already outlived its usefulness.
The owner clicked through another page, adjusted his glasses, and leaned closer to the screen. “I may have one.”
I looked away from the television.
He read for another moment before turning the laptop slightly toward himself. “Two-way satellite messaging, data hotspot, removable battery. Current model.”
“When can you get it?”
“A week,” he said. “Maybe less. Depends on delivery.”
A week was longer than I wanted.
It was also better than depending on an outdated terminal that could barely hold a connection every time I needed to dig.
“Can it be delivered somewhere else?”
The owner glanced over his shoulder at the television, then back to me. “Where?”
“Farther east.”
He considered it, then returned to the supplier portal. “There’s a partner shop near Sion. I could send it there.”
“When would they have it?”
“The same week. Maybe a day later.”
The extra distance was preferable to creating a return pattern this close to Geneva.
“Send it there. I’ll pay in full now.”
He nodded once.
I paid.
He wrote the partner shop’s address in Sion, the product code, and a pickup number on a scrap of paper torn from the corner of an invoice. No name. No phone number. No account.
Good.
He slid the paper across the counter. “It should be there next week.”
I left through the side exit instead of the front.
Outside, the village had gotten busier. Not crowded. Just awake. A woman pushed open shutters above the bakery. A delivery driver argued into a phone. Two teenagers shared earbuds near the bus stop.
I headed toward the bakery. The smell made the decision easier.
When my turn came, I bought croissants, a loaf I didn’t need, and two pastries because Brynn looked like the kind of woman who forgot to eat until her blood sugar became everyone’s problem.
Outside again, I adjusted the bags in my hands and took the longer route back to the car.
I loaded the bags into the back seat.
The paper map went in the passenger seat.
The phones stayed with me.
Before starting the engine, I opened one prepaid box and removed the phone, battery, and SIM. I didn’t power it on. Not here. Not within range of a place someone might later connect to the purchase.
The second stayed sealed.
I drove out of the village on the western road, not the one I had used coming in.
Brynn had asked me what Mirrorstream was.
I’d given her the clean version because the complete one would have required a confession she probably wasn’t ready to hear and I wasn’t ready to give.
At first, the intelligence had helped us move people because staying visible would get them killed.
Later, people were moved because their visibility threatened the record.
And eventually, some were not moved at all.
They were removed.
The road narrowed as I climbed away from the village. Trees pressed closer, branches still wet enough to flash silver when the light caught them.
Darrow shifted everything.
I had thought Brynn’s exposure began with Threadbare. A forum post, one forbidden word dropped into a public thread for three minutes and twenty-one seconds.
That was enough to put her in danger.
But not enough to explain the timing of the shooting.
The apartment attack had come too soon after I reached her to have started with me.
I had assumed the post had drawn attention from whatever fragments of the old world still watched for the name. Or maybe even watched me.
Incomplete assumption.
But I hadn’t realized just how much exposure she’d had.
First digitally, when Threadbare asked the wrong question.
Then physically, when she walked into Darrow.
She had told me the wig made her hard to recognize.
Maybe it did for people.
But systems didn’t need recognition the way people did. They needed inputs. Angles. Repetition. A face from one camera. A gait from another. A payment pattern. A door entry. A failed identity return that told the system to keep looking.
I didn’t know Darrow’s architecture.
I knew mine.
And mine had been a bloodhound once it had a scent.
Those cameras had Brynn. Not enough to understand her, maybe. Not enough to name her immediately. But enough to keep searching.
Especially now that the news had confirmed she hadn’t died in the apartment.
The road curved sharply. I slowed before the bend and checked the rearview.
No one behind me.
Still, my pulse had settled into a precise rhythm I couldn’t slow.
I needed to find out exactly what was going on at Darrow.
Not because I had enough to solve it.
Because I had enough to know it shouldn’t exist.
If Mirrorstream was waking up, then someone had preserved more than files.
What survived wasn’t just code. It was procedure, doctrine, field logic, the parts of the system that never lived in code.
There had never been many people who understood all of that.
Too small a list for this much movement.
I had kept in contact with Whitaker because he made himself impossible to lose. Reinhardt had disappeared into the kind of silence that either meant regret or survival. Laurent had always been harder to read, even when we were on the same side of the glass.
None of that gave me an answer.
It only confirmed the problem.
Old knowledge had survived somewhere.
And Brynn had walked straight into it.
Which meant Darrow couldn’t stay a question.
I couldn’t hit the club directly. Not from the safe house, not from any device tied to me, and not while Brynn’s presence there was still an unknown variable. A direct probe would announce interest, and interest was often enough to make people start burning evidence.
So I needed the edges first.
Ownership. Permits. Shell companies. Security vendors. Maintenance contracts. Staff rotations. Anyone paid to install cameras, maintain servers, replace locks, clean private rooms, or move through doors guests never saw.
Darrow’s basement had not built itself.
Someone owned the property. Someone paid the invoices. Someone approved the renovations. Someone had connected that room to the outside world.
And people were always cleaner in the center than they were at the edges.
I drove another mile before allowing myself to exhale.
I turned off onto the service road that looped above the safe house instead of approaching directly. The tires crunched over gravel, then mud. I killed the headlights where the trees thickened and let the car roll another twenty yards before stopping.
I got out, shut the door softly, and listened.
Rain dripping from branches.
A bird somewhere upslope.
No voices. No movement.
I took the bags from the trunk and walked up the driveway, the gravel shifting under my shoes as the roof came into view through the trees.
The kitchen shutters were open, exactly as I’d left them that morning.
I paused at the edge of the drive.