Ian and Ryder looked up when the door opened, read something in Fallon’s face, and didn’t comment.
Isaac pulled out a chair for Fallon and sat beside her. “We need to go on the offensive. We have a short window to catch Kessler by surprise, and we need to take advantage of that.”
Ryder leaned forward immediately. “Agreed. I was about to say the same thing.”
“Right now, Kessler is hunting a woman he thinks is alone, or at best, with one other computer specialist. He doesn’t know she’s aware of the hit. He doesn’t know she has Zodiac behind her.” Isaac gestured at the room, the compound, everything beyond the walls. “That advantage has a shelf life. Every day we sit here, he gets closer. And if he can’t find Fallon or Cassandra, he starts hurting anyone connected to them.”
“So we don’t wait,” Ryder said. “We strike while he still thinks he’s the predator.”
Ian looked between the two of them. Isaac could see the calculation running behind his gaze. Options weighed against risk, timelines measured against threat.
“We need to draw him out,” Isaac said. “Set a trap. Make it look like Fallon has surfaced somewhere. Give him a breadcrumb trail he can’t resist following.”
“Do it,” Ian said. “Build the trap.”
Cassandra leaned toward her camera. “A breadcrumb trail. That’s my wheelhouse.” She actually sounded excited. “If we want Kessler to believe Fallon has surfaced, we need to build a digital footprint that looks organic. Not a single ping. A pattern. Alias activity on a utilities account. A lease application that gets partially processed before it stalls. A credit inquiry from abureau that pulls from the same databases Kessler’s people have access to.”
Peter’s energy shifted on the other half of the screen. The grim intensity he’d carried through the Kessler briefing fell away, and what replaced it was something electric. He adjusted his glasses and both keyboards started going.
“The timing has to be staggered,” he said. “If everything shows up at once, it reads as planted. You need a natural accumulation. A utility deposit three days before a lease inquiry. A forwarded mail request that hits the postal system forty-eight hours later. Each data point individually unremarkable.”
“And we layer in imperfections,” Cassandra continued. “A misspelled street name on the utility form. A phone number that rings twice before going to a generic voicemail. The kind of small errors a real person makes when they’re setting up a new life in a hurry. A perfect trail looks manufactured. A messy one looks human.”
Peter jumped back in without missing a beat. “We seed the ISP records. Route partial traffic through a residential node in whatever city we choose. It won’t hold up under deep forensic analysis, but it doesn’t have to. It just has to hold long enough for Kessler to commit resources to the location. Once his team is on the ground, they’re exposed.”
“And we build in a decay pattern,” Cassandra said. “The alias starts generating activity, then goes quiet for thirty-six hours, then picks back up. Intermittent, not constant. It tells Kessler that his target is trying to stay hidden but slipping. That’s irresistible to a hunter.”
They were finishing each other’s thoughts. Two technical minds locked into the same frequency, building something in real time that nobody else in the room could fully follow. Peter’s hands flew across his keyboards. Cassandra’s glasses reflectedthe glow of her monitors as she pulled up tools and databases on her end.
Ryder tilted his chair back. “I’m going to need subtitles.”
The weight on Fallon’s face broke. Not a smile, not quite, but the tension around her mouth released, and her eyes softened as she watched Cassandra work. For one unguarded second, the hit and the mercenary and the three targets who wanted her dead fell away, and all that was left was a woman watching her best friend be extraordinary.
Isaac looked at her. She looked at him. The corner of her mouth curved, barely there, and the warmth behind it was real.
They had a plan. It was going to work.
