The computer dinged. And dinged some more.
Specs rolled her chair closer, eyeing the monitor with sharp precision. Her fingers tapped heavily across the keys.
“So, what’s going on?” Lark asked.
Specs didn’t answer right away. Her fingers moved with an eerie kind of grace, commands flying across the keyboard in bursts. Then her whole body went still. “Not exactly sure,” she whispered.
“It’s been an interesting morning,” Jupiter added from the other side of the room.
Lark couldn’t sit still. She wasn’t sure if it was Specs’ confession or how quickly Specs had dialed into whatever her machine was doing. Lark paced in front of the desk, rubbing her leg. She missed her damn fucking stress ball. Stepping around the desk, she looked at the screens. Not that she understood any of the lines of code that raced across the monitors faster than Roger Rabbit.
“We’ve been combing the dark web. Things pop up. They disappear. We can’t get a line,” Jupiter said.
“We’ve got one now.” Specs didn’t shift her gaze. “Only not from the dark web.”
Jupiter crossed the room, eyes narrowing at the screen. “That’s a military-grade encryption. Who the hell sent that?”
“No idea. But we’re about to find out.” Specs clicked, decrypted, and cracked open the message with surgical precision. Lines of code peeled away like skin, revealing something cold, quiet, and dangerous underneath.
A low-resolution image bloomed on the screen.
It took Lark half a second to recognize it.
It was the meeting. Her meeting. In South America. A wide shot—grainy, with poor resolution—but unmistakably from a corner in the market. From where Mina had been positioned.
“Is that what I think it is?” Kawan stood next to Lark and waved a finger at the screen.
“It sure is,” Specs said.
“Son of a bitch,” Lark breathed. “Was that taken from your system? Could that be what was sent to Lorre?”
“Could be what Lorre has.” Specs shook her head slowly. “But it’s not from my feeds. The angle is off.”
Jupiter leaned in. “See the timestamp?”
Lark narrowed her eyes. “That’s… ten minutes after the first comms blackout, but we hadn’t known it happened. The feeds were on a loop.”
Jupiter pointed to the tiny line of corrupted data running across the lower edge. “And whoever took it scrubbed their metadata—not that we can’t pull something, but it will take some time. Also, this was sent on a ghost route. Military-grade, maybe beyond. Specs?”
“I’m trying to triangulate. But…” Specs trailed off and clicked into the rest of the message.
The second part unfolded in plain text:
You’re not asking the right questions.
Not even talking to the right people.
Things are not as they appear.
I’m not your enemy, but the enemy is closer than you think, and she survived.
I have answers. But not here.
Truck stop diner. Route 14. Forty miles northeast.
3:00 PM. One car. Two people. No weapons.
Watch your six.
