Page 1 of Code Name: Scorpio

Chapter 1

The man in the corner booth had been there for ninety minutes, selling stolen data to a buyer who didn’t exist.

Ryder Sutton watched the whole thing in the mirror behind the bar, nursing a bourbon he had no intention of finishing. Zodiac Tactical had been hired to recover what the man had stolen and bring him in.

Nolan was the bait. Ryder and the rest of the team were the hook.

And their fish was about to get reeled in.

“You know what gets me?” Through the comms piece in Ryder’s ear, Nolan Calder’s voice was warm and easy, the voice of a man thoroughly enjoying himself. “Eight months, and they haven’t changed a single protocol. They’re still running on your architecture.”

“They couldn’t catch it if they tried.” Mitchell Kamola leaned forward and dropped his voice, the kind of move a man made when he wanted only one person in the room to hear him. The open mic on Nolan’s collar picked up enough. “I designed that security architecture from the ground up. Redundancies, access tiers, the whole thing. It’s mine.”

“Which makes the data current.” Nolan lifted his bourbon and held it without drinking, the glass resting in his hand like a prop he’d forgotten he was holding. “That’s rare. Usually by the time something like this hits the market, it’s already outdated.”

“Not this.”

“Not this,” Nolan agreed, and his tone carried just enough admiration to keep Kamola talking.

Ryder scanned the room without turning his head. The hotel bar was half full, dim lighting and leather furniture, the kind of place where conversations were meant to stay at the table.

The target’s bodyguard sat three stools to Ryder’s left, nursing a club soda, positioned where he could see both the booth and the two exits. Broad through the shoulders, alert without being rigid. He’d been checking his sight lines at four-minute intervals since Ryder had sat down. Wristwatch on his left arm, no earpiece, jacket cut to accommodate a shoulder holster. The man took his job seriously.

So did Ryder.

“Lilah.” Ryder kept his voice low, barely a murmur against the rim of his glass. Lilah Collingwood, Zodiac’s newest recruit, was positioned near the service corridor on the far side of the lobby, ready to cut off anything that moved toward the exits. “Three stools to my left.”

“I see him.”

Ian DeRose came through next, steady and unhurried from his position near the lobby entrance. He’d built Zodiac Tactical from the ground up and still ran ops when he chose to. Rumor had it Ian was on this op to see Lilah in action.

“Nolan, how’s the temperature?” Ian asked.

A pause. Nolan adjusted in his seat and touched his collar once. Warm.

The rest of the team all knew what that meant: the target was comfortable, the conversation was moving, and Nolan had the room.

In the booth, Kamola was walking Nolan through what he had. The complete security architecture for a Fortune 500 client. Access credentials, encryption keys, biometric protocols, the full defensive blueprint of a company that didn’t know its walls had been copied.

The detail in his voice, the way he lingered on each layer, said he’d been waiting to tell this story. Six months of running, and nobody he could brag to until now.

Nolan leaned forward at exactly the right moment, his brow creasing like a man recalculating what he was willing to spend. He asked a question that told Kamola he understood the scope of what he was holding, and he asked it in a tone that said he was already figuring out how to use it. “And that’s current? All of it?”

“The full stack. Biometrics, encryption keys, access hierarchies. Everything a buyer would need to walk through the front door.”

Nolan let out a low whistle, soft enough to pass as genuine. “That’s comprehensive.”

“That’s why I’m not in a hurry. I can afford to wait for the right buyer.”

“And what does the right buyer look like?”

Kamola’s pause carried weight. The kind of silence a man used when he wanted the other person to feel the price before he named it. “Someone who understands the value of what he’s holding and doesn’t try to negotiate it down to something insulting.”

Nolan set his glass on the table and folded his hands. When he spoke, his voice had dropped into something quieter, more serious. “I’m not here to insult you, Mitchell. If I were shopping for a bargain, I’d be having this conversation with someone else.”

Ryder watched Kamola’s shoulders ease. Just a fraction, but enough. Nolan had found the right pressure point. Not the money itself, but the recognition. Kamola wanted someone to understand what it had cost him to pull this off, and Nolan had just told him he did.

Nolan was good. Better than good. Ninety minutes of conversation, and he’d matched every shift in Kamola’s energy before the man knew he’d shifted. When Kamola wanted to brag, Nolan gave him an audience.