CHAPTER 43
Brynn
Geneva, Switzerland
Days Twenty-Seven to Twenty-Eight Off Grid
In daylight, Club Darrow could almost pass for normal. A closed club. A locked door. Blacked-out windows. The kind of silence that made sense before noon because rich men with secrets and expensive watches didn’t usually start sinning over breakfast.
I lifted my camera and caught the corner of the building through the frame.
Stone, glass, no movement.
Nothing worth photographing unless you knew what was happening underneath it.
Jameson’s voice came through the earbud hidden beneath my hair. “Don’t stare at it too long.”
I lowered the camera and pretended to study the screen. “I’m pretending to be a tourist.”
“You’re pretending to be a tourist who’s very interested in a closed door,” he said.
“That’s because it’s a photogenic closed door.”
“It’s not,” he said.
I looked through the lens again. “You just don’t know art.”
“I know surveillance,” he said.
“Less romantic.”
“More useful,” he said.
He stood across the street, half-turned toward a watch shop window with a coffee in one hand and a phone pressed to his ear. To anyone passing, he looked like a businessman on a call he didn’t want to be having.
Which was accurate, because the call was real.
It was just to me.
“First rule,” he said, his mouth barely moving as he watched the street through the glass. “We don’t linger in one place.”
“I’m devastated. I brought emotional support chips.”
“No chips,” he said.
“What if they’re quiet chips?”
“No,” he said.
“You’re taking the glamour out of espionage.”
“There shouldn’t be glamour in espionage,” he said.
“There’s always glamour in espionage. Otherwise, why do people keep wearing black?”
I couldn’t see his face well enough to know if he almost smiled.
I smiled anyway.
Hope counted.
I watched in the reflection of a shop as he adjusted the cuff of his coat, the movement small enough to look casual and deliberate enough to make me pay attention.
“We don’t use the same angle twice if we can avoid it,” he said. “We don’t stare directly at the building longer than the average person would. We don’t take the shortest route between positions. We don’t cross the same camera twice at the same interval.”
I glanced at him over the top of the camera. “At some point, we should discuss the types of dates you take me on.”
“This isn’t a date,” he said.
“Exactly... It’s loitering with accessories.”
His eyes flicked to mine from across the street, not amused.
Maybe a little amused.
“Mirrorstream doesn’t need to know why we’re here,” he said. “It only needs enough repeated behavior to decide we matter.”
I looked back at Darrow, but this time I didn’t lift the camera right away.
The street kept performing normally around it.
Café doors opened and closed. Umbrellas bloomed against the rain.
A woman in a camel coat paused outside a boutique window, pretending to consider the handbag inside while checking her lipstick in the glass.
Two men in suits laughed too loudly near the curb, both of them wearing watches that cost more than my first car.
Nothing about it looked sinister.
That was Geneva’s favorite trick.
Make everything polished enough, and people stopped asking what paid for the shine.
It only had to look like it belonged.
For the first pass, I was the tourist.
Camera around my neck. Hair loose. Scarf bright enough to make me look harmless and just annoying enough to be believable.
I photographed windows, wet stone, iron balconies, old signage, a pigeon with the personal confidence of a tax attorney, and every usable angle around the club without ever seeming to care about it specifically.
Jameson stayed on the phone, but kept moving while he talked to me, his pace slow enough to look distracted and precise enough that he never gave the same camera a clean view twice.
Sometimes he stopped near a window. Sometimes he turned his back to traffic.
Sometimes he looked down like he was reading something from the phone.
He wasn’t watching Darrow. That was my job.
He was watching everything that could watch us watching Darrow.
Which was very Jameson.
Annoying, useful, and unfairly attractive.
“We move in twenty-seven seconds,” he said in my ear.
I adjusted my lens. “And twenty-seven fixes that?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Obviously. Silly me.”
“It’s not clean,” he said. “Thirty is clean. Forty-five is clean. A minute is clean. Random isn’t just unplanned. It has to avoid looking chosen.”
“That is a deeply unsettling sentence.”
“Systems like clean intervals. People like clean intervals,” he said.
“God forbid we be people.”
“We’re not people right now. We’re noise,” he said.
I lowered the camera just enough to hide my mouth. “Wow. Possessive, annoying, and now numerically judgmental.”
“Visible and repeated,” he said.
“Same thing, emotionally.”
“Move, Brynn,” he said.
I took another photograph, this time of the café awning. Darrow sat blurred in the background, caught in the edge of the frame like an accident.
Not the subject, just part of the city.
Exactly how Jameson wanted it.
We moved again after fourteen minutes.
Not fifteen.
Because apparently fifteen was memorable.
I crossed with a group of pedestrians while Jameson stayed on his call and turned the opposite direction. We split for half a block, then rejoined near a newspaper kiosk where I pretended to study postcards and he pretended to be the kind of man who cared deeply about Swiss financial headlines.
“You look constipated,” I murmured.
“I’m reading,” he said.
“You’re holding it upside down.”
He went still.
Not dramatically. Not enough for anyone else to notice.
But I saw it.
The half-second recalculation. The tiny tightening at the corner of his mouth. The look of a man realizing his own cover had slipped because too much of his attention was probably on me.
Then he folded the paper and tucked it under his arm like that had been intentional.
It absolutely had not been.
I bit the inside of my cheek.
By evening, Darrow should have started pretending to be alive.
It didn’t.
No lights came on behind the blacked-out windows. No staff arrived through the side door. No security rotation settled into place. No delivery van idled in the alley. No private car pulled up long enough for someone important to disappear inside.
The street changed around it anyway.
Restaurants warmed behind glass. Headlights smeared gold across wet pavement. People appeared in better coats and sharper shoes, drifting toward reservations, bars, rooms where money made everything softer and uglier at the same time.
Darrow stayed dark.
I lowered my camera.
For the first time all day, I wanted to look directly at it.
Jameson’s voice came through the earbud before I could. “Don’t.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You were,” he said.
I exhaled through my nose. “It should be open by now.”
“I know,” he said.
I glanced toward the shop window and caught the edge of his reflection. Phone still to his ear. Shoulders easy. Face unreadable.
Only his eyes had changed.
He wasn’t looking for movement anymore.
He was looking for what was missing.
“So what?” I asked. “We call it?”
“For tonight,” he said.
“Good,” I said, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. “Because my feet hurt.”
His reflection came into focus in the shop window. “Your ankle?”
“No. My feet.” I glanced down like they had personally disappointed me. “Both of them. Apparently we’re doing symmetry now.”
“Brynn.”
“I’m fine.” I lifted the camera again before he could turn concern into a full tactical review. “I’m just saying surveillance has a very misleading danger-to-foot-pain ratio.”
We left separately, six minutes apart, taking different routes back to the hotel.
***
The second day, we changed the story.
Wig for me, hat for him. Different coats. Different shoes. A cheap pair of sunglasses that made Jameson look like he belonged in either private security or a very stern cologne ad.
This time, we were a couple.
Not a happy one.
Happy couples looked at each other too much.
Jameson said that like it was a rule, which meant he’d probably timed happiness once and filed the results somewhere in his terrifying brain.
So we became the kind of couple who walked slowly because they were talking through something neither of them wanted to say in public.
Which was funny, because we didn’t have to fake that part very hard.
I kept my arm tucked loosely through his while we moved around the club.
We decided to take our next angle from a café window.
Jameson chose the table. Not the one with the best view. The one with the best reflection.
“Front entrance is in the glass behind me,” he said as he sat, phone still tucked between his ear and shoulder like the world’s least relaxed businessman.
I followed his gaze and found it.
Barely.
“You’re kind of scary,” I said.
“You asked to come,” he said.
“I did. I’m still allowed to review the experience.”
His coffee arrived. Black, obviously. Mine came with enough foam art to make the barista feel seen.
I picked up the cup and my ring finger tapped against the ceramic.
I took one sip and made a sound before I could stop myself.
Not loud.
Not obscene.
Just soft enough to be a mistake.
Jameson’s hand tightened around his cup.
Barely, but I saw it.
His eyes lifted over the rim, and for half a second, there was no Darrow. No cameras. No surveillance math. Just him, watching my mouth like the sound had hit somewhere lower than reason.
The air between us changed.
I swallowed.
He noticed that too.
His gaze held mine in the reflection, dark and deliberate and absolutely not part of the plan.
Then he set his cup down with too much care.
For one breath, neither of us moved.
Then he shook the moment loose and looked back at the window reflection.
We watched through glass and reflections until the street changed around it again.
Dinner reservations. Headlights. Expensive coats. The soft glow of restaurants filling up for the night.
Darrow stayed dark.
Again.
By the time we moved to the borrowed sedan for one final pass, I was losing my mind.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just in the quiet, simmering way that made me want to throw something at the nearest decorative planter.
We parked two blocks down with a partial angle on the alley. A man walked past the entrance with a garment bag over one shoulder. A courier checked an address two doors down. A woman in a red coat stopped under Darrow’s awning to fix her earring, using the blacked-out glass like a mirror.
None of them looked at Darrow.
None of them noticed it was dead.
We had been there long enough for my hip to ache and my patience to disintegrate.
I shifted in my seat for the hundredth time, trying to get comfortable.
A strange pressure settled low in my body.
Not pain, not nausea, just something. Probably the hours of moving, stopping, walking, sitting, pretending.
Or the cold. Or the stress. Or the fact that we’d been living like fugitives and my body was staging a rebellion.
I ignored it.
Jameson glanced over. “You okay?”
“Fine.”
He didn’t believe me. I didn’t care.
“We’re going in.” I snapped.
He didn’t look away from the alley. “No.”
“Yes.”
“It’s not safe,” he said.
“Neither is orbiting this building like paranoid satellites until one of us dies of boredom.”
“Boredom isn’t the primary threat,” he said.
“It is to morale.”
“Brynn.” He let out a slow breath. “I don’t like this.”
“I don’t like your coffee. We all suffer.”
He didn’t smile.
That was how I knew I’d pushed too hard.
For a second, the borrowed sedan felt too small around both of us. His hand stayed on the gearshift, still and tight, like he needed something solid under his palm that wasn’t me.
“Two days,” I said. “No lights. No music. No staff showing up for a shift. No one coming out for a cigarette. No one slipping in through the side door. Nothing.”
“That doesn’t mean we walk inside,” he said.
“No,” I said. “It means sitting here isn’t going to tell us anything else.”
I looked past him, toward the alley, toward the side door that hadn’t opened once.
“Either it’s empty, or it isn’t,” I said. “But we’re not going to learn which from two blocks away.”
“Or it’s waiting for someone to get impatient enough to come closer,” he said.
My stomach tightened, because he wasn’t wrong.
“I know,” I said. “But if we leave again without checking, we’re still blind.”
He looked at me then, really looked. The kind of look that meant he was calculating every possible outcome and hating all of them.
“Fine,” he said. “We go in.”