“Checking surveillance feeds.”
I pull out the chair across from him. It scrapes against the wood floor. “Can I see?”
His typing stops. A beat. Two. He’s deciding if I’m cleared for this. If I’m a partner or a package.
Finally, he turns the screen.
A map fills the display. Dozens of red dots scatter across the DC metro area like a disease spreading. Some cluster around Georgetown. Others stretch outward—Virginia, Maryland, the edges of Pennsylvania.
“What are those?”
“Phoenix’s known surveillance points.” He zooms in. “Traffic cameras. Facial recognition nodes. License plate readers.” His finger traces a cluster near the Potomac. “These three went active forty-eight hours ago. Right after you filed your amended complaint.”
My stomach drops. “They were waiting for me.”
“They were preparing.” He closes the laptop partially, dimming the light. “Phoenix doesn’t react. It predicts. By the time you filed that complaint, the AI had already calculated the probability you would. It had teams in position before you even made the decision.”
“That’s not?—”
“Possible?” He pulls a bottle of water from his pack. Slides it across the table. “It’s predictive modeling. Phoenix analyzes your patterns. Your email history. Your calendar. The documents you’ve accessed. It builds a behavioral profile accurate enough to forecast your actions seventy-two hours in advance.”
The water bottle sits between us. I don’t touch it.
Seventy-two hours.
Phoenix knew I was going to file that complaint before I did. Before I knew. While I was still reviewing documents, still building my case, still believing the system would work—the AI was already deploying kill teams.
“So I never had a chance.”
“You had a chance because we intervened.” He pushes the water closer. An inch. Deliberate. “Most targets don’t get that warning.”
The wordtargetslands wrong. Cold. Clinical.
I grab the bottle. The plastic crinkles loudly in the silence.
“Phoenix is good at what it does,” Diego says. His voice is flat. Instructional. “But it’s not omniscient. It makes mistakes.”
“Like what?”
“Like assuming you’d be alone.” He taps the laptop. “Like not predicting we’d extract you before they could deploy.”
“And if it hadn’t made that mistake?”
“You’d be dead.” No hesitation. No softening. Just a fact. “Probably staged as an accident. Car crash. House fire. Something clean.”
The water tastes like plastic and fear.
“Can I use the laptop?”
“For what?”
“I want to check if—” The words stick. “If my family knows.”
“They know.”
The certainty in his voice freezes me mid-swallow.
“How—”
