Page 80 of Peak’s Code

His phone vibrated with a text from a nearby Bluetooth signal. Peak frowned. Somebody was broadcasting. He opened his scanner and found one unidentified device, about eight feet from his current location. He slowly looked around the room but found nothing. He noticed that an old metal bookcase was out of place. He looked it over and reached underneath it. That was where he found a cheap prepaid cellphone taped to the bottom. He picked it up, and the screen lit immediately with just one message.

KEEP DIGGING

Peak stared at it. "Wren," Maeve whispered the same word at exactly the same time.

He smiled despite everything. "She's helping us." The realization hit harder than expected. Wren wasn't waiting, and she wasn't hiding. She was actively sabotaging the Director from inside. Every clue, every message, and every breadcrumb—she'd been leading Maeve here.

Peak looked toward the floor again and then slowly stood. "Warden,” he called over the comms.

"What?"

"Bring the truck,” he ordered.

"Why?" Warden asked.

Peak holstered his pistol. "Because we're going underground.”

Within twenty minutes, the three of them stood around the tower while Peak unloaded equipment from the truck. Portable ground-penetrating radar, battery packs, and a fiber inspection scope. Maeve raised an eyebrow. "You just carry this stuff around?"

Peak shrugged. "I told you, I like to have options."

She laughed. "I bet you've been waiting all morning to say it."

"I really have been,” he agreed. Her smile lingered longer this time, and Peak caught himself staring at her again. He was getting bad at hiding it.

Warden cleared his throat loudly. "If you two are done flirting⁠—”

Peak looked at him and sighed. "We're working."

"Sure, we are,” Warden smirked. "That's what the motel owner probably thought too." Maeve's cheeks turned bright red, and Peak threw a wrench at him. Warden caught it. "Missed."

"I wasn't aiming for your hands,” Peak said.

“When you boys are finished, can we please get back to the mission?” Maeve asked.

“Yeah,” Peak said. He rolled the radar slowly across the cracked concrete floor. Peak watched the display. Layer after layer of earth scrolled past. There were old utility pipes, bedrock, groundwater, and then he saw a perfectly square void about twenty feet below.

He stopped moving. "There."

Maeve stepped beside him. "That's too symmetrical to be natural."

Peak nodded. "Eighty by forty."

Warden whistled. "That's a bunker."

"No.” Peak zoomed in. "It's bigger." He followed another line extending east, and his stomach dropped. "This isn't one room."

Maeve looked at the screen. "It's an entire underground facility." The realization settled over all three of them. The Director hadn't hidden beneath an abandoned warehouse. He'd built an underground headquarters beneath the entire marsh.

Peak looked toward the old navigation tower. Now it made perfect sense. The tower had never been important. It was simply the marker hiding the real entrance. Maeve slowly folded Wren's coded strip and slipped it safely back into her pocket.

She looked at Peak. "We found it."

Peak nodded. "Yeah." Then his expression hardened. "Now we bring it down."

The marsh swallowed sound. That was the first thing Peak noticed as he crouched beneath the skeletal remains of the old navigation tower. The wind still pushed through the reeds, but down here, twenty feet below the surface, everything felt muffled. The only sounds came from boots shifting against damp concrete and the quiet mechanical hum vibrating through the walls.

There were thousands of servers. The Director had built an entire digital empire beneath the Eastern Shore. Peak rested one hand against the concrete wall. He could feel it. The vibration wasn't random—it pulsed. Wren had been right. This wasn't a prison. It was the heart of the operation.