Page 60 of Cipher: Lethal Algorithm

For three years, isolation was the objective. Solitude kept me breathing. Disconnecting was my primary armor. The silence after a clean exit used to mean victory. Now the silence is agonizing.

I pull a burner phone from my pocket, and dial the encrypted thirteen-digit sequence I memorized off the terminal in the safe house.

Julian answers on the first ring.

“Where the hell are you?” The raw, terrified anger in his voice strips the oxygen from my lungs. The gravel vanishes, replaced by a jagged panic I’ve never heard from him. He survived.

“The drive is secure.” The cold wind cuts down the concrete canyon between the skyscrapers. “It’s at the US Consulate in Hong Kong.”

The silence on the line is total. Not the dead air of a dropped connection. The silence of a man assembling the pieces of an irreversible betrayal.

“You bypassed the airfield.”

“They expected us.” I grip the phone, my nails digging into the plastic casing. “That was a deathtrap. The airfield was compromised before we left the safe house. I had to build a different exit plan.”

Another heavy, crushing silence.

“You cut me out.”

“I protected you.”

“I would never abandon you.” The devastation in his voice breaks something fundamental inside my chest. It isn’t a reprimand. It’s an agonizing statement of fact.

The memory of his mouth against mine an hour ago crashes over me. The heat, the desperation, the promise he would ruin me when the mission ended.

“I know.” I close my eyes.

“We’re supposed to walk out of this together.”

I end the call, because there’s no reason to let him suffer through my guilt too.

Lowering the phone, I watch the morning sun break over the peaks of the high-rises. Stark shadows fall across the pavement. I secured the HSM. Now, I’m walking away.

In the process, I’ve destroyed the only connection to another person I ever wanted to keep.

I stand on the sidewalk in Hong Kong, shivering in the dawn.

The silence after a clean exit used to mean victory. Now the silence is agonizing.

18

The Architect’s Face

JULIAN

The safe housein Hong Kong is a suffocating concrete box. I traced the signal of Ivy’s burner phone during the dawn call, pinning her coordinates to the airspace around the US Consulate.

We made the extraction window by sixty seconds after clearing the eight-man crossfire on the airfield road. Ford “Bronco” Sterling, Task Force 9’s resident pilot, had the twin-engine idling on the tarmac. He’s a massive, bearded Viking of a man who could fly a brick if you strapped an engine to it. He just adjusted the flight plan and got us into Hong Kong under the radar.

The adrenaline from the ambush still burns in my blood, a dark, jagged undercurrent.

I held the line, and she vanished.

Wraith field-strips a SIG Sauer at the kitchen island. Bronco sits in the far corner, dead quiet, reading the room and giving us space. The metallic scrape of the slide racking echoes off the bare walls. Neither of them asks where she went. They don’t have to. She confirmed the drop at the consulate before killing the connection. She didn’t run with the HSM. She walked away.

Vanished.

My secure phone vibrates on the table.