The two faces on Helen's laptop screen stared back at her, oblivious to what was coming.
She sat cross-legged on the hotel bed, the Nevada heat seeping through the window despite the rattling air conditioner that shuddered in its casing like something dying. The room smelled of recycled air and carpet cleaner, with an undertone of stale cigarette smoke that no amount of industrial deodorizer could fully kill. Through the thin walls she could hear the hum of the ice machine, the muffled thump of bass from the casino floor below, and the occasional bright bark of someone winning at slots—a sound that carried through concrete like a gunshot. Two days since Lahore. Two days since she'd watched Victor's team pull Imran Hyderi from a convoy at gunpoint. The bruises on her wrists from the extraction harness had faded to yellow, but the image of Hyderi's face—the terror in his eyes when the black bag came down—stayed sharp as a blade.
Now Victor wanted two more.
Jack Wallis. Twenty-eight. Married to a woman named Zoe, father to an infant daughter named Dillon. Air Force commissioned officer, assigned to a drone control facility in the Nevada desert. His service record was unremarkable—average reviews, no disciplinary issues, no commendations. The kind of man who showed up, did his job, and went home to his family.
Steven Beck. Twenty-six. Single. Kentucky native. Also commissioned, but tracking toward Captain. A master's in computer science from MIT, completed during his enlistment. His file was thicker—not because of commendations, but because of three separate incident reports documenting "unauthorized but non-malicious system modifications."
Helen pulled up the details on each incident. In one, Beck had rerouted a base-wide diagnostic alert to his personal terminal because the standard monitoring was "too slow." In another, he'd written a script that automated forty hours of monthly maintenance reporting. His commanding officer had recommended the Air Force adopt it officially rather than punish him. The third was redacted, but the summary mentioned the Markwell contractor software platform.
Markwell. Everything came back to Markwell.
A detail caught her eye in Beck's financial records—his military pay was split between two accounts, nearly half routed to a long-term care facility in Louisville. His emergency contact listed a sister there, same last name, different address. Helen stared at the entry for a long moment. A twenty-six-year-old albino genius sitting in a desert trailer, hacking leave systems so he could blow off steam in Vegas, sending half his paycheck home to take care of someone. She minimized the file. She didn't want to know any more about the people Victor was going to destroy.
Helen opened Victor's briefing document. The drone base sat in what had been Olde Pine Trailer City—a decommissioned retirement community the military had converted into a remote operations center thirty miles northwest of the Strip, off US-95 past Indian Springs. The base photos showed sun-bleached trailers baking on a flat expanse of cracked alkali, ringed by creosote scrub and distant brown mountains. The kind of place where the silence was so deep you could hear power lines buzzing a mile away. Two pilots per shift, running twelve-hour rotations in a double-wide trailer. They operated Predator drones flying missions across the Middle East, all through Markwell's autonomous navigation suite—software so advanced it handled everything from flight paths to weapons targeting. The pilots were glorified babysitters with joysticks, isolated from civilization. The nearest town, Dover, was twenty miles down a two-lane road that wavered in the heat. So close to Vegas, yet it might as well have been on the moon.
But the navigation suite was just the surface. Markwell's software didn't stop at drone operations. It ran the entire base infrastructure—leave scheduling, personnel records, maintenance logs, security authorizations. Everything piped through a single contractor layer that sat between the military's internal systems and the operational network. A convenience arrangement designed so Markwell could handle logistics while the military focused on flying.
What it actually meant was that the security boundary between "operate a military drone" and "approve a leave request" was razor thin. The same diagnostic ports that Markwell engineers used for routine troubleshooting could reach the adjacent systems without CAC authentication—just a software token that rotated monthly but was never properly invalidated.
That was why Victor needed Hyderi. The engineer had built a hidden access layer into Markwell's drone control software—a backdoor that could theoretically allow someone to hijack active drone feeds. But accessing it required someone who already understood the system from the inside. Someone who'd spent months learning its vulnerabilities, mapping its diagnostic pathways, testing its boundaries out of sheer boredom.
Someone like Beck.
Helen enlarged Beck's personnel photo. Scrawny. Pale—an albino, according to his medical records. Barely a hundred pounds. The kind of person most people underestimated. The kind of person who'd spend ten months in a desert trailer with nothing but code and silence, and emerge knowing more about the Markwell architecture than the engineers who'd built it.
Victor didn't need Beck for generic hacking skills. He needed Beck because Beck had already done the reconnaissance without knowing it. Every "unauthorized modification" in his service file was proof that he could navigate the exact systems Hyderi's backdoor was designed to exploit.
Hyderi had built the door. Beck could walk through it.
And Wallis was the leverage.
Helen's stomach clenched. A married man with a wife and infant daughter—the kind of person who could be used to make Beck cooperate if persuasion failed. Victor didn't leave things to chance. He would threaten what mattered most, and for Beck, that meant threatening the friend sitting next to him. The friend with a family.
She closed the laptop and walked to the window. The desert shimmered in the afternoon sun, flat and merciless, heat rising off the parking lot below in visible waves that made the rental cars ripple like reflections in disturbed water. The dry air carried the faint metallic tang of alkali and sun-scorched asphalt, and in the distance the Las Vegas Strip shimmered like a mirage—gaudy neon towers rising from nothing, absurd against the brown emptiness surrounding them. A dust devil spun lazily across the vacant lot next door, gathering fast-food wrappers and dead creosote branches before collapsing into nothing. Somewhere out there, Jack Wallis and Steven Beck sat in their trailer running drones over countries they'd never visit, watching missile strikes on screens and going home to eat pizza. According to the operational logs Victor had intercepted, their last mission had included a missile authorization on a suspected cave network. The strike had been handed off to a replacement crew before missiles were fired—but the authorization itself told Helen everything about what these men lived with. Every shift, they sat at their screens knowing that at any moment, the order might come to kill people they couldn't see and would never meet.
The drone strike that had destroyed Victor's sister's family—it never left her. A wedding in a village that someone in a trailer like this one had designated a target. Collateral damage. A clean phrase for dead children.
These two pilots weren't the ones who'd fired that missile. But they sat in the same chairs, stared at the same screens, and pulled the same triggers when ordered. And now they were caught between Victor's revenge and the system that had made them instruments of it.
Kate's face surfaced unbidden—her sister's sharp jawline, those dark eyes that always seemed to be measuring every angle. Kate had been dead for six months. A car bomb that Helen was almost certain Victor had ordered. And here she stood, doing Victor's bidding, because the alternative was joining Kate in the ground.
Kate would have found a way out. Kate always found a way out.
Helen wasn't Kate.
***
Francis's surveillance report arrived at nine that evening.
The staging area near the MGM Grand was secured. Francis had spent a week studying the two pilots' off-duty patterns—the routes they drove into the city, the bars they hit, the hours they kept. Jack and Beck had visited Vegas twice before on short passes. They always went together. Always hit the gaming floor. Always stayed until the money ran out or dawn broke, whichever came first.
The plan was straightforward. Wait for their next leave window. Intercept them at the casino. Francis would engineer Beck's separation—a manufactured confrontation near the restrooms, quick and decisive. Helen would handle Jack.
Handle. Victor's word. Clean and professional, scrubbed of meaning.
Helen reviewed the sedative protocol. The tranquilizer dart gun was built into what looked like a vape pen—Francis's design, reliable to within three seconds. One shot to the neck or shoulder while the target was distracted. Unconsciousness within ten seconds. Anyone watching would assume the man had passed out from too much bourbon.
She memorized the casino floor plans. Three entry points, eight exit routes. A hundred and seventy thousand square feet of gaming floor. She'd approach Jack as a civilian—a young woman looking for company, maybe a sorority girl visiting from out of state. Harmless. Forgettable.
Until she wasn't.
Her phone buzzed. A message from Victor.
Timeline moved up. They'll be at the MGM Grand tomorrow night. Beck fabricated leave orders through the Markwell scheduling module—used the diagnostic port to access the personnel system. Created a fake visiting officer to authorize their leave. Our team caught it. Sloppy work, but it confirms he can navigate the architecture. He's exactly what we need.
Helen read it twice. Beck had hacked the Markwell leave system to sneak off to Vegas. Of course he had. A bored genius with unfettered access to a contractor software platform—the only surprise was that it had taken him this long. What Beck didn't know was that Victor's surveillance team had been monitoring the base's network traffic for weeks, waiting for precisely this kind of activity.
Every keystroke logged. Every diagnostic port access recorded. Every fabricated authorization traced.
Beck had auditioned for his own kidnapping.
Helen typed back: Understood. Ready.
She set the phone on the nightstand and lay on the bed, staring at the water-stained ceiling where a brown ring mapped some ancient leak. The air conditioner cycled off, and for a moment the room was utterly still—just the dry hiss of desert air against the window, the tick of the building's metal frame contracting as the desert night pulled the temperature down thirty degrees, and the distant wail of a siren on the Strip. Tomorrow night she would walk into a casino and smile and play the part Victor had written for her. She would touch Jack Wallis's arm and laugh at something he said and then press the dart gun to his neck and watch his eyes go glassy.
Jack Wallis, who had a wife named Zoe and a daughter named Dillon and an average service record and a normal, decent life that had intersected with Victor's plans through nothing more than bad luck and geography.
The faces waited on the laptop screen. Two men who didn't know what was coming.
Helen closed her eyes and began rehearsing.
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