Denver, Colorado
1
The coffee shop's facial recognition scanner pulsed green as Malcolm Caldwell stepped through the entrance, logging his identity to DataCorp's central database with a soft chime. Above the door, a small LED indicator glowed steady blue—MONITORED ZONE—one of thousands scattered across Denver's "smart city" grid.
He sat with his back to the wall, running the room—loss-prevention sweep, automatic by now—three exits, twelve occupants, two with direct sight lines to the entrance, one barista moving in patterns that suggested a new hire still learning the layout. Six months since Houston and the threat-mapping hadn't stopped. Probably never would. The security cameras tracked his movement from the door to his seat, their lenses catching the light like watchful eyes.
Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the Front Range stretched along the western horizon—the snow-capped peaks of Mount Evans and Longs Peak catching the morning sun while the brown haze of Denver's winter inversion layer pooled in the urban basin below. Malcolm had chosen this coffee shop on Colfax Avenue specifically because the old brick building predated the smart city retrofit, leaving gaps in sensor coverage near the back.
"You're doing it again," Kate Allison said from across the table.
"Doing what?"
"The thing where you catalog everyone in the room like they might pull a gun."
"Old habits."
"It's been six months, Malcolm. We're meeting a client, not running from corporate assassins."
His attention caught on Kate—not tactical assessment, but an awareness he kept trying to file under professional concern. She'd changed since Texas. Still kept her auburn hair pulled back in a practical ponytail, still moved with the controlled grace of someone trained to hurt people efficiently, but the guarded edges around her eyes had softened. Or maybe it had always been there, and six months of trying to look away had only sharpened his awareness.
The old instinct cataloged reasons to keep his distance: she was his partner; they worked together; getting closer meant risking the only functional relationship he had. His marriage had ended because he'd treated intimacy like a tactical vulnerability—something to be managed rather than felt. Laura had delivered her assessment across a kitchen table with divorce papers between them, each word cutting with surgical precision: *You'll always choose the mission over the person standing in front of you.* She'd nailed it. The lesson had cost him a marriage. He wasn't going to unlearn it now.
He turned back to the room before she could read his expression. Kate read too much for his own good.
"Says the woman sitting where she can see the door," he said.
Kate's mouth twitched. Almost a smile. "Touché."
On the wall behind her, a digital billboard cycled through personalized advertisements—KATE, YOUR VITAMIN D LEVELS SEEM LOW. TRY SUNBRIGHT SUPPLEMENTS—the AI having pulled her biometric data from the entry scanner. She ignored it with practiced ease.
Lyle Goldman appeared from the restroom, dropping into the seat beside Malcolm with his laptop bag. "Both bathrooms have windows. Fire exits marked. Also, their WiFi security is garbage—I'm already in their system." He paused, glancing at the array of sensors embedded in the ceiling. "Want me to loop the security feed?"
"No," Kate and Malcolm said in unison.
"It's just a client meeting," Kate added.
"That's what you said in Houston," Lyle muttered, opening his laptop anyway. "And Delaware. And that thing in Portland last month."
"Portland was different," Malcolm said.
"Portland was supposed to be a milk run. So was Delaware. So was—"
"We get it, Lyle."
The hacker shrugged, fingers already flying across the keyboard. At twenty-seven, he looked more like a college student than someone who'd helped take down a genetic engineering conspiracy. His perpetual t-shirt-and-jeans uniform didn't help. Today's shirt read "There's no place like 127.0.0.1."
A woman at the counter paid for her latte with a palm scan, the transaction logging her purchase, location, and social credit score in one seamless motion. She glanced at the receipt—probably checking if the coffee had dinged her health rating.
Malcolm's phone buzzed. Unknown number, text message: "I'm here. Booth in the back by the window."
A woman sat alone three tables away, hands wrapped around a coffee cup like she was trying to draw warmth from it. Mid-thirties, Asian features, dark circles under her eyes. She wore a blazer over a professional blouse, but her shoulders hunched forward in a way that suggested exhaustion rather than confidence.
"That's her," Malcolm said.
They stood as a unit—Kate taking point, Malcolm following, Lyle bringing up the rear with his laptop. The woman's hands tightened around her cup as they approached, her eyes darting between the three of them.
"Dr. Chen?" Kate asked.
"Sarah, please." She gestured to the empty seats. "Thank you for meeting me. I wasn't sure you'd come."
"Your email was intriguing," Kate said, sliding into the booth. "Not many people can afford our rates and know how to route communication through that many proxies."
Sarah managed a weak smile. "I work with privacy advocates. Operational security is part of the job." Her eyes flicked to the blinking sensor above their booth. "Though it gets harder every year. My social credit dropped three points last month just for attending a privacy conference." She said it flatly, but her fingers tightened around the cup. "Three points triggered an automatic cascade. My rental car privileges were revoked—flagged as a high-risk behavioral profile. My bank froze my direct deposits for nine days under 'enhanced review.' My landlord received an automated tenant risk notification, and two days later my lease renewal was denied." She glanced at the palm-scan register where the woman had just paid. "I had to take three separate rideshares to get here because no rental agency in the state will approve me."
"What kind of privacy advocacy?" Malcolm asked.
"The kind that makes powerful people nervous." She pulled a tablet from her bag, keeping it below the table line, away from the ceiling cameras. "Before we go further, I need to know—can I trust you?"
Kate exchanged a glance with Malcolm. They'd refined this routine over the past six months. She handled the client relations; he assessed the threat level.
"That depends," Kate said. "Can we trust you?"
"Fair question." Sarah slid the tablet across the table. "This is why I need your help."
The screen showed not a single message but a timeline. Three months of escalating attacks, annotated with clinical precision.
"It started with lawyers," Sarah said. "Right after I published a report on DataCorp's biometric harvesting. Defamation suit—four separate claims, forty million in damages. Within a week, every major donor to the Privacy Rights Coalition got letters from DataCorp's attorneys warning about 'tortious interference.' Two foundations pulled funding overnight."
"SLAPP suit and donor intimidation," Kate said. "Corporate playbook."
"Then the op-eds. Think pieces in the Post, the Journal, calling me a conspiracy theorist, a technophobe stifling innovation. All by authors with undisclosed DataCorp consulting contracts. My university received a formal complaint about my research methods. My landlord tried to break my lease—his mortgage was held by a DataCorp subsidiary." Sarah's voice stayed level, but her hands tightened around the coffee cup. "I kept going anyway. Testified before the Senate subcommittee on data privacy six weeks ago. That's when things changed."
She swiped to a new screen. The tone shifted from legal language to something rawer:
*Stop talking or we'll stop you.*
*You've been warned.*
*Dead women tell no tales.*
*Your address is 2847 Ashford Street, Apartment 4B. We know where you sleep.*
"Once the lawsuits and smear campaigns failed to silence me, they escalated," Sarah said. "Death threats started three weeks ago."
"You go to the police?"
"Of course. They took a report. Said they'd look into it. That was two weeks ago." Sarah's hands trembled. "Yesterday, someone followed me home. Black sedan, no plates. Waited outside my building for two hours. When I called the police, they said they'd send a patrol car. By the time it arrived, the sedan was gone."
Lyle had his laptop open, screen angled away from the other customers. "What's your full name and date of birth?"
"Sarah Chen. April fifteenth, 1989. Why?"
"Just checking something." His fingers flew across the keyboard. "Okay, you're who you say you are. PhD in Computer Science from MIT, worked at Google for three years, left to found the Privacy Rights Coalition." He paused, frowning at his screen. "The astroturf campaign she mentioned—I can see it. Coordinated bot networks, same hosting clusters. And the donor intimidation letters trace back to three different law firms, all on DataCorp retainer."
"Marcus Hale," Kate said. "He's been methodical about this."
"Methodical is the word," Sarah said, leaning forward as a server walked past, her employee badge pulsing with real-time location tracking. "Three months of lawfare, economic pressure, reputation attacks—all designed to silence me without leaving fingerprints. When none of it worked, they dropped the pretense."
The precision of Sarah's timeline caught him—legal to economic to physical, each step methodical, calibrated. Not random intimidation. A structured campaign. "What makes you think the physical threats aren't just intimidation?"
Sarah hesitated, then pulled out her phone. She opened a photo—her car, parked in a garage. Someone had written on the windshield in what looked like blood:
*FINAL WARNING*
"That was this morning." Sarah's hands tightened around the coffee mug. "I didn't call the police this time. I called you."
Kate studied the photo, her expression carefully neutral. "Why us specifically?"
"Because you stopped Andrew Carmichael. Because you took on a man with unlimited resources and walked away alive." Sarah met Kate's eyes. "Because I need people who aren't afraid to fight companies that think they're above the law."
"We weren't fighting a company," Malcolm said. "We were fighting a man."
"Is there a difference anymore?"
Silence settled over the table. On the digital billboard, an ad for DataCorp's new "CitySafe" monitoring system played silently—happy families, secure neighborhoods, the tagline "Nothing to Hide, Nothing to Fear" pulsing in cheerful blue.
Kate was running the same calculation—he could read it—her eyes sweeping the exits, posture shifting from relaxed to operational. Threat vectors, resource requirements, probability of success versus cost of engagement. They'd gotten good at reading each other's strategic assessments over the past six months. Too good, maybe. The kind of good that made maintaining professional distance feel like a performance they'd both stopped believing in.
"Our rates are—" Kate started.
"I'll pay double," Sarah interrupted. "Triple if you can start immediately. I have funding from privacy rights groups, civil liberties organizations. Money isn't the issue."
"What is the issue?" Malcolm asked.
Sarah's voice dropped to barely above a whisper. "I think someone wants to kill me. And I think they're going to do it soon."
Lyle's face went pale as he raised his head from the laptop. "Uh, guys? We might have a problem."
"What kind of problem?" Kate asked.
"The encrypted kind." He turned his screen around. "Someone just tried to breach my system. Military-grade intrusion. I shut it down, but..." He studied Sarah. "Did you tell anyone you were meeting us?"
"No. No one. I took three different rideshares to get here, left my phone at home, paid cash for everything."
"Then how did they find you?" Malcolm asked.
Lyle's eyes went to the facial recognition scanner at the entrance, the cameras above every table, the sensors embedded in every surface. "The same way they find everyone these days. The city's watching. Always."
Kate rose, hand moving to the concealed holster at her hip. Malcolm rose beside her, scanning the coffee shop. Nothing wrong. Nobody paying attention. No obvious threats.
That was the problem. In a city where everything was monitored, the threats didn't need to be obvious. They already knew exactly where their targets were.
"Dr. Chen," Kate said. "Come with us. We'll get you somewhere safe and—"
The window behind Sarah exploded.
Malcolm moved on pure instinct, throwing himself across the table and taking Sarah down as glass showered over them. Screams erupted throughout the coffee shop. Kate had her weapon out, covering their position.
"Sniper!" she shouted.
"Back exit!" Malcolm pulled Sarah up, keeping her low. Blood ran down her arm from a glass cut, but she was mobile. "Lyle, move!"
They ran for the kitchen, customers scattering in panic. The facial recognition system tracked their movement, logging their flight path to DataCorp's central servers in real-time. Somewhere in a control room, an alert was already pinging.
The barista stood frozen behind the counter. Kate vaulted over it, Malcolm and Sarah right behind her, Lyle bringing up the rear.
The kitchen staff had already fled through the back door. Sirens wailed in the distance—someone had called the police. But police wouldn't help against a professional shooter with a rifle. And in a city where the police had real-time access to every camera, every sensor, every data point, "help" was a relative term.
They burst into the alley. Malcolm's car sat thirty feet away, a nondescript Honda sedan he'd bought specifically because it blended in. He'd been paranoid about having a getaway vehicle ready.
Turned out paranoia paid dividends.
"Get her to the car!" he told Kate.
She grabbed Sarah and ran. Malcolm stayed with Lyle, covering their retreat. No shots. No pursuit. The sniper had either packed up or—
The black sedan Sarah had described pulled into the alley's far end, blocking their exit.
"Shit," Lyle said.
Two men got out, both wearing dark suits and sunglasses. They moved with military precision. Not civilians. Not cops.
Professional.
"Kate!" Malcolm called. "We have company!"
She had Sarah at the Honda, getting her into the back seat. She assessed the situation and made the call.
"Ram them!"
Malcolm would have laughed if they weren't about to die. Instead, he shoved Lyle toward the car and drew his own weapon—a Glock 19 he'd carried every day since Houston. Kate started the engine.
The men in suits drew weapons of their own. High-end, tactical. Definitely military.
"In the car!" Kate shouted. "Now!"
Malcolm fired twice, not to hit but to make them take cover. It worked. Lyle dove into the back seat with Sarah. Malcolm threw himself into the passenger seat.
Kate punched the accelerator.
The Honda wasn't built for ramming, but desperation made up for engineering. They hit the black sedan at forty miles per hour. The impact threw Malcolm forward against his seatbelt. Airbags exploded. The windshield cracked but held.
The black sedan's front end crumpled. Not enough to disable it completely, but enough to give them a gap.
Kate backed up, tires screaming, then accelerated forward again. This time they slipped past the damaged sedan, scraping paint but clearing the obstruction. The Honda fishtailed as Kate took the corner hard, but she controlled it.
Behind them, the men in suits were back in their vehicle, probably calling for backup.
"Everyone okay?" Kate asked, eyes on the road.
"Define okay," Lyle said. His fingers cramped against the laptop he'd clutched through the entire escape, muscles locked from typing adrenaline into stillness. "Someone just tried to kill us. Again. I thought we were done with this."
"Are you hit?" Malcolm asked Sarah.
She pulled back her sleeve to check the bleeding arm. "Just glass. I'm fine. I'm sorry. I didn't think they'd—I shouldn't have involved you."
"Too late now," Malcolm said. He turned to Kate. "Where are we going?"
"Safe house. The one in Aurora." She took another turn, heading for I-225. "We'll regroup there, figure out who's after her."
They merged onto the highway, Denver's glass-and-steel downtown receding in the rearview mirror. The Rockies loomed to the west, their peaks dusted white against the winter sky. Traffic thinned as they headed east toward Aurora, past Buckley Space Force Base where military surveillance drones circled in lazy holding patterns, their sensors sweeping everything below.
Sarah stared at the highway ahead, her reflection ghosting across the windshield. "I know who's after me. DataCorp. Marcus Hale. Three months of lawyers and smear campaigns didn't stop me. A sniper is where his escalation ladder ends."
"Hell of a jump," Lyle said. "From lawsuits to bullets."
"Not if you understand what I'm threatening to expose. The corporate warfare—that's how Hale handles ordinary problems. When those tools fail, it means you've become an extraordinary one."
Malcolm twisted in his seat to study her. "What do you mean?"
Sarah met his eyes. Blood trickled down her arm, her voice level despite the fine tremor running through her jaw—sheer academic discipline holding the cracks together.
"I mean Marcus Hale isn't just collecting data. He's weaponizing it. And if someone doesn't stop him, privacy won't be the only thing we lose."
Kate merged onto the highway, checking mirrors for pursuit. Overhead, traffic drones tracked their movement, feeding data to the city's AI management system. The Honda's front end was battered but functional. They'd need a new vehicle soon. New identities, probably. New everything.
And in a world where every camera, every sensor, every device reported to a central system, staying hidden was getting harder by the day.
Sarah. Kate. Lyle's terrified face in the back seat.
Six months. They'd had six months of relative peace. Consulting jobs, reasonable clients, nothing that required running from professional killers.
Should have known it wouldn't last.
"Okay, Dr. Chen," he said. "Start from the beginning. Tell us everything."
Sarah nodded, clutching her bleeding arm.
And as Denver's skyline receded behind them—glass towers bristling with sensors, digital billboards tracking their escape route, drones banking overhead to follow their trajectory—she began to explain exactly how deep the rabbit hole went.
2
The safe house was a rental property Lyle had secured under a shell company three months ago. "In case of emergency," he'd said. Malcolm had thought it was overkill at the time.
He made a mental note to never doubt Lyle's paranoia again.
It was a single-story ranch house in a quiet Aurora suburb east of the Highline Canal, the kind of place where neighbors minded their own business and cameras were sparse—one of the few remaining "dark zones" where DataCorp's smart city grid hadn't fully penetrated. The thin Colorado air carried the faint chemical tang from the nearby refineries, mixing with the dry prairie wind that swept down from the plains.
Kate pulled the battered Honda into the attached garage and killed the engine.
"Inside," Malcolm said. "We're exposed out here."
They hurried through the garage door into the house. Standard layout—living room, kitchen, two bedrooms, one bath. Lyle had stocked it with basics: food, water, first aid kit, ammunition. And enough computer equipment to run a small data center.
"I'll sweep for bugs," Lyle said, pulling out a portable RF detector.
"You think they tracked us here?" Kate asked.
"I think someone breached my security during a client meeting in a random coffee shop. I'm not taking chances." He paused, eyeing the walls. "Also, I disabled the smart meter when I set this place up. We're running on manual utilities—no data reporting to the grid."
Kate guided Sarah to the couch while Malcolm checked windows and sight lines. The house backed onto other houses—no clear sniper positions. Street access limited. No visible cameras on nearby poles. Not perfect, but defensible. And dark. Invisible to the all-seeing eye of the surveillance network.
"Let me see that arm," Kate said to Sarah.
Sarah pulled off her blazer. The cut wasn't deep, just bloody. Kate cleaned it with supplies from the first aid kit, her movements precise and professional.
"You've done this before," Sarah observed.
"Part of the job." Kate applied butterfly bandages. "Malcolm, check in with our network. See if anyone's hearing chatter about a hit on a privacy activist."
Malcolm pulled out one of the burner phones they kept for situations like this. He had contacts—former military, private security, people who heard things. If someone had put out a contract on Sarah Chen, word would have spread.
While he made calls, Sarah sat on the couch, staring at nothing. Her hands trembled in her lap, breathing coming in shallow, uneven pulls. She stared at the far wall without seeing it, jaw working against nothing. Malcolm had watched it happen before—civilians after crossfire, the body running ahead of the mind. The shaking would last an hour. The rest would take longer.
"Clear," Lyle announced, returning from his sweep. "No bugs, no trackers. We're secure for now."
"For now," Kate echoed. She sat across from Sarah. "Okay. You said Marcus Hale is weaponizing data. Explain."
Sarah took a breath, organizing her thoughts. "You know what DataCorp does?"
"Tech company," Malcolm said, returning from his calls. "Social media, cloud services, AI development. Basically, they collect data on billions of people and sell targeted advertising."
"That's the public face. But Hale's been quietly acquiring companies—surveillance firms, AI startups, data brokers, security contractors. Billions in acquisitions over the past five years, all hidden behind shell corporations and proxy purchases." She hesitated, fingers tightening on the tablet. "But here's the part I can't explain. The political protection around DataCorp—the friendly judges, the senators who kill oversight bills, the intelligence agencies that look the other way—that infrastructure goes back twenty years. DataCorp is only twelve years old. Hale was still in graduate school when the first surveillance-friendly legislation started passing."
"So someone else laid the groundwork," Malcolm said.
Sarah nodded slowly. "Someone with deep political connections and very long patience. I've been trying to trace the money behind the lobbying campaigns, but it disappears into trusts and holding companies I can't penetrate. Whoever it is, they were building the political architecture for mass surveillance long before Hale built the technology to make it work."
She hesitated, glancing at the dark windows. "My source—the engineer who died—told me something before the end. She said Hale takes calls in his private office. Encrypted line, no logs. She walked in once by accident and heard him say 'Yes, sir.' Marcus Hale doesn't say 'sir' to anyone." Sarah's voice dropped. "She said he looked shaken afterward—the only time she ever saw him shaken."
"Did she get a name?" Malcolm asked.
"No. But Hale's calendar had blocked time labeled 'RT consultation.' Weekly, going back years. She couldn't find anyone with those initials at DataCorp or any of its subsidiaries."
Malcolm filed that away—not as speculation but as an operational variable. RT. Weekly encrypted calls that a billionaire CEO kept hidden. A deference pattern inconsistent with Hale's known personality profile. Two data points that suggested a command hierarchy above the visible structure.
"Why?" Kate asked.
"He's building something. A system. He calls it 'predictive social management.'" Sarah pulled out her tablet—miraculously undamaged—and opened encrypted files. "I got these from a source inside DataCorp. They show what the AI can do."
She turned the tablet around. Malcolm leaned in.
The screen showed what looked like a social network map—thousands of nodes connected by lines, clusters forming around key individuals. But it wasn't just connections. Each node had data attached: location history, purchase records, social media activity, search history, biometric data, medical records.
Everything.
"This is one city," Sarah said. "Seattle. Six million people. The AI tracks all of them in real-time. It knows where they go, what they buy, who they talk to, what they care about. Every time they walk past a camera, swipe a card, make a call—it logs and correlates."
"That's creepy but not illegal," Lyle said. "Most of this is data people voluntarily give to apps and services."
"You're right. The collection is legal. It's what Hale does with it that crosses the line." Sarah swiped to another screen. "The AI doesn't just track. It predicts. Behavior, political views, likelihood of resistance, probability of public influence. And it recommends countermeasures."
The new screen was different—a ranked array of individual profiles, each tagged with a dynamic threat score that shifted in real time. No names circled in red, no targets marked for death. Just numbers. Clean, clinical numbers that rose and fell based on dozens of behavioral indicators. Malcolm recognized several of the profiles—journalists, activists, politicians who'd spoken out against surveillance.
"The system assigns automated response protocols based on threat score," Sarah said. "Below thirty: legal pressure—lawsuits, regulatory complaints, licensing challenges. Thirty to sixty: economic warfare—donor intimidation, employer pressure, credit manipulation, tax audits. Sixty to ninety: social destruction—coordinated disinformation, reputation attacks, personal life exposure." She paused. "Most threats get neutralized before they ever score above ninety. People's lives fall apart and they stop fighting."
"And the ones who don't stop?" Kate asked, though her voice suggested she already knew.
"That's what took me months to piece together." Sarah swiped to another screen—not a hit list, nothing so crude. A dashboard of dynamic threat scores, each person reduced to a number that climbed or fell based on the AI's predictions. Malcolm's blood ran cold at Sarah's name pulsing near the top: 94.7. "The system never explicitly says 'eliminate.' It's too sophisticated for that. When someone's score crosses a critical threshold, the AI generates what it calls 'comprehensive risk mitigation protocols'—behavioral predictions, vulnerability windows, optimal intervention timing. All wrapped in sanitized corporate language." She pointed to three entries highlighted in gray, their scores flatlined. "These people crossed ninety-five. They died in the past six months. Car accidents, muggings, apparent suicides. The police investigated, found nothing suspicious." Sarah's grip on the tablet tightened until her knuckles went white, the academic composure cracking around the edges. "The algorithm never orders a killing. It just makes one inevitable—mapping every weakness, every pattern, every moment someone is most vulnerable. What happens next is technically someone else's decision. No document, no paper trail, no evidence. Just math."
His shoulders tightened, the muscles along his spine locking into the tension of a briefing that had crossed from problematic to dangerous. The pattern was already mapping itself—data points connecting, consequences branching outward, none of the outcomes clean.
"You think Hale is having them killed," he said.
"I think Hale believes he's saving the world. He's given speeches about how privacy enables crime, terrorism, inefficiency. He genuinely believes that if everyone's data is collected and analyzed, society will be safer, more prosperous, better. And for most opponents, the corporate machinery is enough."
"But some people don't break," Kate finished.
Sarah nodded. "Most never get there. The legal pressure alone stops ninety percent of critics. Economic warfare handles most of the rest. But the ones who keep fighting—the system escalates until there's only one option left. The AI predicts behavior patterns, identifies vulnerabilities, creates opportunities. And then his people make it look natural."
Lyle had his laptop open, cross-referencing. "If this threat model is real... I'm seeing hundreds of people who hit sudden legal or financial roadblocks right after criticizing DataCorp. Most gave up. But seventeen who kept pushing—whose scores must have kept climbing—died in the past year. Car accidents, muggings, apparent suicides. All ruled accidental."
Sarah lurched forward on the couch. "Seventeen. Give me names."
Lyle scrolled through his data. "James Okafor. Elena Vasquez. Rachel Kim. David Holl—"
"James." Sarah's voice splintered on the word. "James Okafor ran a digital rights nonprofit in Atlanta. He had twin daughters—Amara and Zoe, six years old. His wife Maya called me the week he died. Said he'd driven into a bridge abutment at three in the morning. No alcohol, no drugs, no history of reckless driving. Maya told me he'd been getting threats for months, but the police wrote it off as driver fatigue." She pressed her palms flat against her knees, steadying herself. "Elena Vasquez was a grad student at Columbia. Twenty-six years old. She'd written a paper on DataCorp's facial recognition bias that went viral. They found her in her apartment—apparent suicide, pills and a typed note. Except Elena had never filled a prescription for those pills, and her sister said the note's phrasing was wrong. Elena wrote in Spanish when she was emotional. The note was in English."
Her eyes glistened, her jaw working against words that wouldn't come. These weren't data points. These were people she'd known, worked alongside, mourned one by one while the world shrugged.
"Rachel Kim," Sarah said, quieter now. "Privacy attorney—filed a class action against DataCorp's biometric harvesting. Single mother, eight-year-old son named Ethan. She drowned at a public beach in broad daylight. Twenty other swimmers in the water and somehow not one of them saw her go under." Sarah's gaze held Malcolm's. "I went to her memorial. Ethan kept tugging his grandmother's sleeve, asking when his mom was coming home."
The room fell silent.
Malcolm's eyes met Kate's. They'd been through this before—uncovering a conspiracy, realizing the scale of what they were facing, knowing that walking away meant innocent people would die.
That choice had been made in Houston. Apparently, it was about to repeat itself.
"Who's your source?" Malcolm asked Sarah. "The one who gave you this data."
"A DataCorp engineer. She worked on the AI's targeting algorithms, realized what Hale was using them for. She was going to go public, but..." Sarah's voice cracked. "She died four days ago. Carbon monoxide leak in her apartment."
"Accident?" Kate asked.
"That's what the police said."
"Of course they did." Malcolm stood, pacing to the window. The street outside was dark—no streetlights with embedded cameras, no traffic drones overhead. One of the last places in America where you could think without being monitored. His calls had come back with nothing—no chatter about a hit, no contracts, no warnings. Which meant either this was too quiet for his network, or the people hunting Sarah weren't the usual hired killers.
They were something else entirely.
"There's more," Sarah said. "The attacks you've been hearing about—the 'terrorist' incidents in Portland, Chicago, Atlanta. I think Hale's orchestrating those too."
"Wait, what?" Lyle raised his head from the laptop. "Those killed hundreds of people. You're saying a tech billionaire is staging terrorist attacks?"
"I'm saying that every time there's an attack, public opinion shifts toward accepting more surveillance. Politicians call for expanded security measures, biometric data collection, AI monitoring. And every time, DataCorp is right there with the solution." Sarah pulled up another file. "Look at the pattern. Attack happens. Public outcry. Legislation proposed. DataCorp's stock jumps. They get new government contracts, new data access, new power."
"Cui bono," Kate said softly. "Who benefits?"
"Hale benefits. His company benefits. And he gets to build his surveillance state one tragedy at a time, all while convincing people they're choosing safety."
Malcolm's instinct caught on the gap—years of studying command structures had taught him to recognize the shape of missing hierarchy. Hale was brilliant, ruthless, driven. But the political machinery Sarah described—the decades of legislative groundwork, the intelligence agencies that conveniently looked the other way—had the fingerprints of someone older, someone who'd spent a career building networks of influence before Hale had written his first line of code. Two different skill sets. Two different timelines. RT consultation. A tech billionaire who said "sir" to someone.
Hale wasn't the top of the food chain. Malcolm was certain of it.
He filed the thought away—not as speculation but as an operational assumption. Somewhere behind the algorithm, behind the shell companies and the political cover, someone else was pulling strings. And until they found that person, taking down Hale alone would be like cutting one head off a hydra.
Malcolm turned from the window. "If this is true—if any of this is true—we're not talking about corporate espionage or even conspiracy. We're talking about terrorism, mass murder, crimes against—"
His phone buzzed. One of his contacts, former NSA. The message was short:
*DataCorp security flagged your name two hours ago. You're in their system now. All of you. The facial recognition at that coffee shop—they know who you are. One more thing—the political cover around DataCorp goes higher than Hale. Way higher. Be careful who you trust. Get out.*
He showed the message to Kate. Her expression hardened.
"They know we're helping her," she said.
"Which means we just jumped up the priority list," Malcolm finished. He turned to Sarah. "Congratulations, Dr. Chen. You just made us targets too."
Sarah's face went white. "I'm sorry. God, I'm so sorry. I didn't think—"
"Too late for sorry," Kate said, but not unkindly. "The question is what we do now."
Lyle's fingers were already hammering the keyboard. "I'm scrubbing our digital footprints, but if they tagged us two hours ago, they've already backed up the data. We're in their system. They know who we are, where we've been, everyone we've talked to. The moment we step into any monitored zone, they'll find us."
He paused, his face going slack. "They've already started." His fingers flew across the keys. "Kate, your personal credit just dropped forty-one points. Your Visa's been declined for a pending gas station charge, your car insurance is flagged for cancellation, and your gym membership was terminated for 'policy violations.' Malcolm, your VA benefits portal is locked—identity verification required, in person, two forms of government ID. And our firm's operating account—" He swallowed. "Frozen. Bank says routine anti-fraud hold, but the freeze was placed ninety seconds after we were flagged."
Kate's jaw tightened. "Two hours. They've already gutted our ability to function."
"This is how it works for most people," Sarah said from the couch, something hollow in her voice. "The system doesn't need assassins. It makes your life impossible—no credit, no travel, no banking. Most targets give up within a week. The ones who don't are the ones who end up with threat scores above ninety."
"Then we're compromised," Malcolm said. "This safe house, our identities, everything."
"Not everything." Kate stood, moving to the duffel bag she kept in the closet. She pulled out three passports—their emergency identities, the ones they'd prepared but never used. "We can disappear. New names, new lives. Let the authorities handle Sarah's information."
"The authorities who are in Hale's pocket?" Sarah asked. "The ones who've been covering up murders for six months? Those authorities?"
Kate didn't have an answer for that.
Three people in the room—Kate, who'd saved his life more times than he could count. Lyle, who'd become the little brother he'd never had. Sarah, who'd done nothing wrong except tell the truth.
And beyond them, the hundreds of others caught in that algorithm's web. People whose threat scores climbed a little higher each day, who'd be ground down and silenced because they dared to question Marcus Hale's vision of the future.
"We can't run from this," he said finally.
"Malcolm—" Kate started.
"I know. I know it's suicide. I know we're outmatched. But if we run, Sarah dies. And then the next person whose score crosses the threshold dies. And the one after that." He met Kate's eyes. "We've been down this road before. We know how it ends."
"Yeah," Kate said. "We almost died."
"Almost." Malcolm smiled without humor. "But we didn't. And we won."
"That was different. Andrew Carmichael was one man."
"So is Marcus Hale."
"With the resources of a tech empire, AI that can predict our movements, and a private army at his disposal." Kate crossed her arms. "I'm just being realistic."
The math was straightforward. Walk away: preserve the team, accept statistical certainty that Sarah died within the week, and every other name above the threshold followed. The rational assessment pointed to one conclusion. But the math broke down when he factored in the faces—Sarah's, the dead engineer's, the seventeen others reduced to flatlined scores on Hale's dashboard.
"I'm being realistic too. Realistically, if we run, we spend the rest of our lives looking over our shoulders, waiting for Hale's AI to find us. Every camera, every sensor, every device would be hunting us. We'd never be safe again. Or we can fight. Maybe we lose. Probably we lose. But at least we go down swinging."
Silence. Kate studied his face, looking for something. Whatever she found must have satisfied her because she sighed and uncrossed her arms.
"You're going to get us killed one day with this hero complex."
"Probably."
"And you're sure about this? Taking on a tech billionaire with unlimited resources?"
His pulse steadied, his breathing slowed—the opposite of what most people expected from a decision to charge headlong into danger. It was the calm that settled in when commitment replaced deliberation, the same stillness he'd found in Afghanistan when extraction was denied, in the Houston tower when the walls closed in. "Yeah," he said. "I'm sure."
Kate turned to Lyle. "You?"
The hacker's hands had stopped shaking. He closed his laptop with a decisive snap. "Someone hacked my system. That's personal. I'm in."
"Sarah?" Kate asked.
Sarah Chen studied the three of them—these strangers who'd saved her life, who were now offering to risk everything to help her fight.
"Thank you," she whispered. "I don't know how to—thank you."
"Thank us if we survive." Kate pulled out her phone, already planning. "We need resources. Intelligence. We need to know everything about Hale, his operation, his security. And we need to stay ahead of an AI that can predict behavior patterns."
"I can help with that," Lyle said. "The AI works off patterns and data. If we're unpredictable, if we go analog, stay random, we might stay off its radar long enough to—"
"To what?" Kate asked. "We can't fight an AI. We can't take down a billion-dollar corporation. What's the win condition here?"
Malcolm had been thinking about that. "We expose him. Get proof of the murders, the orchestrated attacks, everything. Make it public. Force an investigation he can't bury."
"He'll have backups, contingencies, legal protections—"
"Then we keep digging until we find something he can't protect." His jaw set, the decision locked in with the finality of an operational order. "Hale thinks he's untouchable. Let's prove him wrong."
Kate studied him for a long moment. Then, slowly, she smiled. Her first real smile in months.
"Okay," she said. "Let's burn down a tech empire."
Lyle pulled out his laptop. "I'll start mapping DataCorp's infrastructure. Security vulnerabilities, personnel, facilities."
"My contacts need to know," Sarah said. "Other activists, journalists investigating DataCorp. We're not alone in this."
"Malcolm?" Kate asked.
"Some calls are overdue. We need backup. Real backup. People who know how to fight dirty against impossible odds."
"Your old unit?"
"Some of them. The ones who'll take a call from a dead man." He picked up a burner phone. "We're going to need all the help we can get."
As the sun set over Aurora—painting the prairie sky in bands of orange and purple, the distant mountains turning to silhouettes against the fading light—the four of them worked, planning an operation that would either expose one of the most powerful men in America or get them all killed.
Probably both.
His eyes found Kate across the room, holding for just a moment before he forced them away. The rule was simple: break contact before it becomes something else. Laura had been right about him, and the lesson had cost him a marriage. Better to keep Kate at arm's length than risk destroying the only partnership that still worked.
Kate was talking to Sarah about extraction protocols, her voice calm and competent. Malcolm pulled out a burner phone, scrolled through contacts. Operational. Focused. Compartmentalized.
They had a conspiracy to uncover. A war to fight.
Everything else was noise.
---
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