How fast a person’s loneliness could be weaponized by someone patient enough to aim it.
The thought left a taste I didn’t particularly enjoy.
I pushed it aside. That was not where my focus needed to be.
“Alternative access points,” I said. “Walk me through them.”
Nikos set his glass down. “The security contact, Petrov, head of household. Gambling debts that outpace his salary by a significant margin. Exploitable, but the timeline is the problem.Six to eight weeks minimum to build adequate trust before he’d risk passing anything useful.”
“Too slow.”
“Agreed. The technical approach; there’s a known vulnerability in Ivan’s firewall architecture. Our team could potentially exploit it remotely.”
“Potentially.”
“The financial encryption is military grade. We’d get fragments. Enough to confirm activity, not enough to prosecute.” He turned his glass slowly. “Noise, not signal.”
“Then we keep working the encryption angle. Bring in a second team if necessary.”
Nikos looked at me with the patience of a man who had already had this conversation in his head and knew where it ended. “Jared. Both options are real and both options are slow and both of them leave Ivan operational for months while we chase cleaner solutions. You know that.”
“I know it.”
“Then you know what the fastest path still is.”
The fire shifted. Somewhere across the room a man laughed at something.
“Her father’s study,” I said. “Get into the house, access the network, plant the program. In and out.”
“You have a reason to be in that house. You have a connection she trusts.” His voice was even, professional, entirely unaware of, or unbothered by, the particular irony of the word “trusts” in that sentence. “The other options stay active. But this is the one that works.”
I said nothing.
“Unless,” Nikos added, his tone shifting, barely, but just enough, “there’s a reason you can’t execute.”
I looked at him.
“I’m asking professionally,” he said. “Not personally. If your judgment on this operation has been compromised, it’s better to know now. I can reassign. Find another angle in.”
The offer sat between us like something with edges.
The correct response, the professional one, the one that closed this line of inquiry cleanly, was simple. My judgment is fine. I’ll handle it. Four words followed by an assurance and Nikos would move on and we’d both pretend the question hadn’t been asked.
“My judgment is fine,” I said. “I’ll handle it.”
Nikos nodded slowly, as if filing my answer away for later. He wasn’t convinced, but he wasn’t pushing. Not yet.
Neither of us reached for our drinks.
The phone moved against the table.
I glanced down before I could stop myself. One message. Unknown number. One word.
Tonight?
The calculation I’d been running—variables, timelines, the grinding logic of access and extraction—went completely quiet. Not interrupted. Just… quiet. The way a room goes quiet when something walks in that changes the temperature.
There was only one person who would send exactly that. No name, no preamble, no explanation. Just the question stripped to its bones, trusting I’d know what it meant.
