Along with everything I was. Everything I built. Everything that made me matter.
Cassandra Brennan, Attorney at Law.
Gone.
Like I never existed at all.
TWO
“The Vanishing”
HALO
The asset is secure.
That’s the mantra. The only thing that matters. Asset. Package. Target.
Not Cassie. Not the woman who fought back with pepper spray and climbed down a fire escape while bullets chewed up the brickwork three inches from her head.
I check the rearview mirror. Clear. Check again ten seconds later. Clear.
But the clock in my head is ticking.
Phoenix will have the stolen Honda flagged by now. Every traffic camera between DC and the Beltway is scanning for these plates. We have maybe forty minutes before the digital net tightens into a noose.
Cassie hasn’t moved since we hit the highway. She’s pressed against the door, knees pulled to her chest, staring out at the darkness. The adrenaline crash hits her hard. Tremors shake her hands. The shallow, rapid breathing. She looks breakable.
She’s not. Civilians don’t jump out of windows. Civilians freeze. She moved.
Stop noticing. She is a mission parameter. Nothing more.
“Where are we going?” Her voice is raw. Scraped hollow by fear.
“Like I said, Virginia,” I repeat. “Safe house in the Blue Ridge. Off-grid. Defensible.”
“For how long?”
“Until we figure out the next move.”
She turns to look at me then. Her eyes are dark, wide, tracking every movement of my hands on the wheel. “That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have.”
I signal right. Merge. Blend. Be boring. Phoenix’s algorithms track anomalies—speeding, weaving, hesitation. So I drive perfectly. I become a ghost in the machine.
“I need to call my sister. I need to tell her?—”
“No.”
“You can’t just?—”
“Whatever you think you need to do, you don’t.” My voice comes out harder than I intend. “Your phone was a GPS beacon. The second you powered it on, Phoenix started triangulating our position. It anticipates calls. It tracks cell tower handshakes. We can’t use it. We can’t use any device that links back to your identity.”
“But she’ll worry?—”
“Better worried than dead.”
Her jaw tightens. A sharp, stubborn line. She doesn’t like it. She hates the loss of control.
