CHAPTER 34
Brynn
Swiss Alps, Switzerland
Night Three Off Grid
“Two minutes and six seconds older,” Jameson said.
The precision caught somewhere beneath my ribs.
“Oh, Jameson.”
He looked down at the porch boards.
My anger didn’t disappear, but it lost its clean edge.
“What was his name?”
“Harrison,” he said.
I waited, but he didn’t say anything else.
“What happened to him?”
Jameson drew in a slow breath and let it out through his nose.
“We were both CIA,” he said. “He was an operative. I was a handler.”
For a second, all I could do was stare at him.
Of course he was.
The firearms cache, the safe houses, the way he entered every room already knowing where the exits were.
“You were his handler?”
“No.” The answer came quickly, but not rudely. “They would never have allowed it, and I wouldn’t have wanted that responsibility over him. My asset was working the same operation.”
“What happened?”
“We had been following the same organization for years.” He leaned back against the porch rail, his eyes fixed somewhere beyond me.
“It wasn’t one person. It was a structure.
Every time we got close, names changed, accounts disappeared, and people who had never seemed connected moved at the same time. ”
“My asset was inside with Harrison,” he said. “I was across the street, watching the building and listening to a communications channel that stopped working.”
The cold barely registered anymore.
“There was a delivery truck that wasn’t supposed to be there.” His hands came out of his pockets. “It was the wrong day and the wrong time, and the driver looked toward the building when there was no reason for him to.”
His fingers flexed once at his sides. “I saw it. I knew it was wrong. I called for the abort, but the channel was already dead.”
“They couldn’t hear you.”
“No,” he said.
I could see him there now, standing in the street with the answer forming seconds too late.
“The truck detonated before I reached the building. I went through what was left of the window and found Harrison with glass embedded in his chest.” His voice broke around the last word, only slightly.
“They couldn’t save him?”
He swallowed. “The medics took him, but the transport was ambushed before it reached the hospital. There was nothing left to bring home to me.”
My hand rose to my mouth before I could stop it.
The image of him waiting for a brother who never reached the hospital pressed hard against my chest.
I stepped closer. “I’m so sorry.”
He nodded once, but his eyes stayed on the dark. “I spent years believing the failure was mine because I saw the pieces and still didn’t understand them soon enough.”
I had struggled to reconcile the gentle man beside me with the harsh system he had devised.
Now I could see the line between them.
He wasn’t an architect standing apart from the damage or a man who believed every problem could be reduced to data. He was a brother who had watched the warning signs align too late and spent years trying to build something that would never miss them again.
“And that’s why you built Mirrorstream.”
His gaze finally returned to mine, and he nodded.
“I built it because the pieces were there,” he said. “The truck, the timing, the broken communications, the movement around the building. None of it meant enough alone, and by the time it meant something together, Harrison was already gone.”
His voice dropped. “I wanted a system that could recognize those patterns before a person had enough evidence to trust their instincts. Before another failure no one understood until afterward. Before someone else lost someone they loved.”
He looked toward the trees again. “But a pattern is only useful if you can connect it to the people creating it. The organization kept surviving because identities changed faster than agencies could verify them. Names and passports were disposable. Faces were harder to abandon.”
The pieces started to fit.
“So you wanted something that could recognize the same person if the name changed, their hair changed… that sort of thing?”
“Yes, but it went much further than that,” he said.
“Searching for a single face in a database already existed. Mirrorstream was built to recognize the person and attach that face to the patterns around them. Where they appeared. Who moved after they arrived. Which identities kept surfacing near the same financial transfers, border crossings, or operations.”
“And once it connected the face to the pattern, it could keep finding them.”
“Yes,” he said.
“You thought it could find the people responsible for Harrison.”
“I thought it could stop them before there was another Harrison,” he said.
My throat tightened.
He had not built it because he wanted power over people. He had built it because he believed no one else should have to stand in the wreckage and realize the answer had been visible all along.
“And then they took everything you built to find dangerous people and used it against anyone they wanted to disappear,” I said.
“Who are they?”
“No single service,” he said. “The task force was formed by five of them. CIA, MI6, DGSE, BND, and R&AW.”
“I know the first two.”
“France, Germany, and India,” he said. “Each service assigned personnel, intelligence, and technical resources. None of them owned Mirrorstream outright.”
“Then who was in charge?”
“That depended on the operation,” he said. “Officially, authority was shared.”
“And unofficially?”
“Everyone protected their own government first,” he said.
“So everyone had access, but no one had complete responsibility.”
“That was the theory,” he said.
“And in practice?”
“In practice, each service could approve a use the others might never see in full,” he said. “Data crossed borders. Authority shifted. Oversight became whatever the participating governments needed it to be.”
I folded my arms tighter. “And the system just kept doing what it was told.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Even when what it was told had nothing to do with stopping people like the ones who killed Harrison.”
His face tightened. “Especially then.”
Neither of us spoke.
He had built something meant to expose people who survived by hiding inside false identities and disconnected evidence.
Then the services controlling it had realized the same architecture could be turned in the opposite direction, finding a person and deciding which parts of that person should disappear.
I looked at the man who had lost his twin and tried to answer grief with engineering, only to watch other people turn it into another form of loss.
I understood him better than I had an hour ago.
I still didn’t know what to do with that understanding.
“I need to go inside.”
He nodded and stepped away from the door.
No argument. No attempt to follow the conversation to a conclusion neither of us had reached.
I stopped beside him before crossing the threshold.
“I’m still angry.”
“I know,” he said.
“I don’t forgive you because your reason makes sense.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to,” he said.
“And I don’t know what this changes.”
His eyes met mine. “Neither do I.”
I went inside.
The warmth struck my skin, but the house no longer felt as tight as it had before.
It didn’t feel safe either.
Not yet.
I gathered my laptop and notebook from the island.
Jameson remained outside.
I carried everything into the bedroom and closed the door without locking it.
Okay, maybe it did still feel safe with him.