Page 77 of Rogue Hope
The cell door slid open with a soft hiss. Kenji entered cautiously, medical bag in one hand, the other hovering near his sidearm. He knelt beside Finn.
“Let me check your?—”
Finn snaked out a hand, executing a perfect carotid restraint—applying just enough pressure to cut off blood flow without causing permanent damage. Kenji struggled briefly before slumping sideways.
“I’m sorry about this,” Finn murmured as he carefully lowered Kenji’s unconscious form to the floor. “You’ll understand when you wake up.”
He quickly relieved Kenji of his security card and weapon, then checked his pulse to ensure it remained strong and steady before exiting.
Reynolds would be coming for Zara.
The man had orchestrated this entire scenario—the false intelligence, the team deployment, the isolation of his primary targets.
Seven years hunting Cipher had led to this moment. Reynolds had manipulated them both, playing on their history, their distrust, their mutual pain.
It ended today.
Finn moved through the facility’s corridors with practiced stealth, staying in the blind spots of security cameras. He knew Knight Tactical’s security systems intimately—had studied them during his initial alliance with the team.
His first priority, find Zara before Reynolds or his hired help did.
The facility’s emergency lights blazed red. Security systems were failing systematically—doors opening that should remain locked, cameras going dark in sequence.
The hostiles were inside.
He quickened his pace. Zara would be in the command center, monitoring the team’s extraction. That’s where the enemy would head first.
A distant sound reached his ears—the unmistakable soft thud of a suppressed weapon.
He was out of time.
41
The revelation hitZara like a physical blow. She stared at the data scrolling across her screen, disbelief giving way to cold certainty as patterns emerged from the chaos. Her fingers cramped painfully as she typed, joints swollen and aching from the flare that had steadily worsened throughout the day.
“Not kill us,” she whispered in confirmation of what they’d already suspected as she scanned the forensic report on the Phoenix explosion. “But capture us.”
The bomb placement, the timing, the blast radius—all deliberately calculated. A high-concussion, low-lethality device designed to incapacitate, not eliminate. The shrapnel pattern wasn’t random but designed to funnel targets toward a specific extraction point.
She scrolled through more data, ignoring the fire crawling through her wrists, up her forearms.
The timestamp inconsistencies she’d discovered weren’t minor errors—they were impossible contradictions. Reports supposedly created while Reynolds was “on the run” contained metadata proving they’d been fabricated hours after he claimed to be compromised.
Then there were the server access logs showing activity during scheduled maintenance windows when those systems should have been offline. No random hacker would know those precise vulnerabilities—only someone intimately familiar with the network architecture.
Zara traced the digital breadcrumbs backward, dread freezing her with each new revelation. The mining complex coordinates matched a documented CIA training exercise from three years ago—information only someone with Reynolds’ clearance level would possess.
Who had better access to plant such evidence than her own mentor, the man who’d taught her how to detect digital manipulation in the first place?
Why didn’t I see it before?
Reynolds had masterfully pitted her against Finn, using their history to blind them both. While they’d been locked in their personal standoff, carefully circling each other with suspicion and wounded pride, Reynolds had been implementing his true plan.
The mining complex coordinates matched a documented CIA training exercise from three years ago—information only someone with Reynolds’ clearance level would possess.
Her screen flickered, the security dashboard showing cascading system failures.
Zara froze.
