His response comes back within seconds.
Agreed. Safe house meeting. Both of you. Two hours. And Sarah? Stay sharp. If Victoria's playing us, she'll be looking for tells.
I delete the message thread and start gathering my analysis files for the briefing.
Victoria Cross reads people the way I read signals intercepts—finds the weakness, applies pressure, extracts what she needs. If she's playing us, she'll be watching for any crack in our professional distance.
Micah and I need to be ice-cold with no tells, no complications.
I gather my files and head down the hall.
Victoria Cross doesn't make unannounced visits. She's too controlled, too deliberate. If she's requesting an urgent meetingwithout warning, something forced her hand. The question is whether that something is her guilt or her intelligence.
9
MICAH
The safe house sits outside Echo Ridge territory, tucked into forest land that gives clear sight lines in every direction.
I arrive early because operational security doesn't negotiate with convenience, and because showing up late to a meeting with Victoria Cross is the kind of mistake people make only once. My truck idles in the tree line with the engine off and sight lines clear to the access road. Standard protocol. Old habits from living where one mistake meant a bullet or worse.
I swept the perimeter before parking, checking for surveillance equipment or signs of Committee presence. The location is clean—Victoria chose well. Remote enough for privacy, accessible enough for quick extraction if needed, with multiple egress routes through the forest. She thinks like an operator even though she's never worn a uniform or carried official credentials.
That's what makes her dangerous and valuable in equal measure.
Kane's truck appears at the turnoff exactly on schedule, Sarah in the passenger seat. They exit together—Kane scanning the perimeter with tactical awareness, Sarah already pulling upfiles on her analysis tablet, compartmentalizing whatever she's feeling about working this investigation with me.
About working with me.
I give them a moment before following. Enough time to establish that I arrived separately, maintain the careful distance Sarah's demanded with every word and look since I walked back into her life.
Standard Echo Ridge construction greets me inside—reinforced walls, secure communications, reinforced windows covering all access points. Victoria Cross stands near the analysis table with Kane, her expression carved from granite, cold and immovable, the same armor Sarah's been wearing since my return.
"Ghost." Victoria's greeting is clipped and precise. She knows me from intelligence I provided during my time embedded with Webb's organization, knows I spent years bleeding the Committee from the inside while she bled them from the outside through financial warfare and strategic intelligence leaks.
We're not friends. We're allies of convenience who share a common enemy and the kind of mutual respect that comes from seeing someone operate at the highest level.
"Victoria." I set my tablet on the analysis table beside Sarah's, careful not to crowd her space. "Tommy said you have financial records."
"Financial records that suggest someone in my network has been careless." Her voice carries the fury that makes people who cross her disappear into financial ruin or worse. "Not deliberate betrayal. Carelessness. Which is almost more insulting."
Sarah looks up from her tablet, expression neutral and controlled. "What kind of carelessness?"
"The kind that leaves digital fingerprints across communication channels that should be sterile." Victoria pulls up files on the main display. Financial transaction recordsappear, layered with communication metadata and account activity showing patterns I recognize from tracking Committee money flows. The data is complex and sophisticated, but critically, not the kind of pattern you see from intentional intelligence sharing.
"Multiple small transfers," Sarah says, analyzing the data with the speed that made her one of the NSA's best analysts before she joined Echo Ridge. "None individually significant, but the pattern suggests intelligence fragments being assembled into a larger operational picture."
Victoria nods once, sharp and controlled. "Exactly. Someone in my network has been sloppy with their operational security. Not selling intelligence deliberately but failing to secure channels properly. The Committee's been harvesting fragments and assembling them into actionable intelligence about Echo Ridge operations. It's the kind of intelligence that let Reeve get closer to finding Echo Base than anyone should have been able to manage."
The financial records show the truth Victoria doesn't want to acknowledge—her network has vulnerabilities. Small transfers between shell companies, communication patterns that reveal professional relationships, metadata that maps her entire intelligence network if you know how to read it. Webb's people have been patient, methodical, building a picture of Victoria's operation one fragment at a time.
They're not trying to penetrate her network directly. They're watching it, learning from it, using it as a window into Echo Ridge activities without Victoria ever knowing she was compromised.
Kane leans against the far wall, arms crossed, expression grim. "Do we know which source?"
"Several possibilities." Victoria displays contact profiles. "All cultivated assets who provide intelligence on Committeefinancial networks. All with legitimate reasons to handle information that could infer Echo Ridge operational patterns if assembled correctly."
Sarah studies the profiles with clinical detachment, but her mind already works through the data, identifying connections and building timelines that will narrow down the source of compromise. It's the same analytical process I watched in DC when we were dismantling Committee money laundering operations piece by methodical piece, back when she looked at me with something other than frozen silence and carefully measured words.
