Page 67 of Wraith: Lethal Impact

A workbench glows blue in the dim warehouse. Three laptops are open, their screens casting angular shadows across stacked armory crates and rusted logging equipment. A portable generator hums from somewhere behind the far wall, its rhythm steady.

Ivy sits on a folding chair in front of the center screen, her legs crossed, a steaming tin cup balanced on her knee. Her hair is pulled into a tight bun. Her sidearm—a compact 9mm—rests on the table beside the keyboard, within arm's reach.

She doesn't look up when I approach, but her voice carries across the quiet space.

"They left thirty-two minutes ago. Two vehicles. Fourteen klicks to the outer perimeter."

I pull up a second chair and sit beside her. The screen shows a satellite overlay of dense jungle, two blinking GPS icons moving along a winding road toward a mountain ridgeline. The icons are labeled WRAITH and BRONCO.

"He didn't say goodbye." The words come out flatter than I intend.

"He stood outside the door for three seconds." Ivy takes a sip from the tin cup, her gaze never leaving the GPS tracks. "Then he turned around and walked to the vehicles."

Three seconds. A sniper who measures distance in windage, elevation, and the patience of a held breath gave me three seconds of standing outside a closed door.

The gesture lands harder than any farewell.

"He'll come back." Ivy's voice is quiet, matter-of-fact, free of sentiment. "He's got reasons to come back that he didn't have before."

The heat rises in my cheeks. Ivy doesn't elaborate. She doesn't need to.

I watch the twin GPS icons crawl across the satellite image, climbing the ridgeline switchbacks in tandem. Fourteen kilometers between us. Fourteen kilometers of jungle road, pre-dawn darkness, and every horror the Consortium has waiting.

The distance feels infinite.

This is what he lives with. Distance. His scope. Watching from twelve hundred yards while the world burns and praying the bullet lands before the scream.

"Something's wrong." Ivy's voice cuts through the spiral.

I look at her. The casual posture is gone. She's leaning forward, both hands on the keyboard, scrolling through a wall of data I can't read.

"What is it?"

"The comms relay." Her fingers move fast, pulling up a spectral analysis window. "There's latency on the encrypted channel. Milliseconds. It shouldn't be there on a direct peer-to-peer frequency."

I don't understand the technical language, but I understand the tension in her shoulders—the way her center of gravity shifts forward, the sudden economy of her breathing. The same biomechanics a dancer displays in the heartbeat before a grand allegro.

Focus. Commitment.

"English, Ivy."

"Someone hijacked our frequency." The words come out clipped, furious. "There's a phantom signal riding our encrypted channel—a mirror copy siphoning every transmission we send and receive. They're listening to everything. Every comms check, every tactical update, every GPS coordinate."

"Do they know where the team is?" The blood drains from my face.

"Not only where the team is, but where we are." Ivy's jaw sets hard. "It's a signal intercept. Someone cracked the encryption or physically tapped the relay hardware. They've been listening since⁠—"

She stops. The color leaches from her skin.

"Since Bangkok." The whisper is barely audible. "The compromised safehouse. Fallback Point Echo. Hutch thought it might be a man inside Task Force 9. There's no mole. They have our comms."

The weight of it crushes the air from the room. Every tactical advantage the team built—the compass data, the infiltration routes, the vendor delivery blind spots—has been transmitted in real time to the people they're trying to destroy.

"We have to warn them." I'm on my feet. "Switch frequencies. Call Wraith."

Ivy is already moving, her fingers flying across the keyboard. "I'm switching to the emergency fallback channel. It's a different encryption protocol—if they only tapped the primary, the fallback should be clean⁠—"

The generator dies.