Page 5 of Cipher: Lethal Algorithm

I pull it out.

The screen is black. Then, a single line of green text scrolls across it.

FOUND YOU.

I stare at the phone.

He backtraced the power surge. Hopped from the router to the local cell tower. Triangulated the only active device in the room.

He knows I’m in Macau.

Cold survival logic slithers down my spine.

“Okay. Game on.”

I drop the phone into the half-full cup of espresso. It sizzles and dies.

I open the hotel room door.

The hallway at 03:22 is hollow, the specific quality of expensive hotels in the early hours, when the serious gamblers haven’t slept and the recreational ones haven’t conceded. A couple at the far end of the corridor moves slowly. A service cart sits outside 1426. I move through it without hurrying. Running looks like evidence, and evidence is something I’ve been careful about for three years.

I step out into the hallway. I walk fast, head down, blending into the late-night traffic of room service carts and stumbling drunks.

Stairs. Not the elevator. The elevator has a facial record on every floor’s call. I mapped the stairwell access three days ago during a walk under the Mireille Fontaine legend. Two hours, a casino membership card, everything filed under I like walking in the way that every choice I make has a reason that isn’t I’m planning to run.

But fourteen flights of stairs take too long. The trace was fast, and the corridor is quiet. I have to trust the quick change—the new jacket, the hair pinned up—is enough to scramble the facial recognition.

New rig. New face. New burner. All of it already built.

I have always done this.

What I don’t have—what I’ve never had to account for, in forty-seven operations across three years—is any idea who triangulated me.

As I step into the elevator and hit the button for the garage, a smile tugs at the corner of my mouth.

Three years a ghost. No one noticed the strings.

But he caught my signature.

Whoever he is... a Boy Scout with the sharp code... he caught me.

Bare hands. As if I’d let his bare hands anywhere near me. I’d like to see him try.

The elevator is mirrored on three sides. My reflection looks back from three angles—the new jacket, hair up, the go-bag, the specific flatness in my expression cultivated over three years of being somewhere between a ghost and a weapon.

My pulse is still elevated. I’ve been attributing it to the operational pressure.

That’s not the only correct explanation.

The elevator doors close.

I check the magazine in the Glock.

Let him come.

I’m the dragon. If he wants the gold, he’s going to have to fight me for it.

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