Chapter 30: The Untraceable Call
The boathouse leaned against the twilight like a drunk old man, its gray-weathered boards silvered by the rising moon. Frankie paused at the tree line, letting the stillness of the place settle over him. Three days of bus transfers, of sleeping in fitful jerks with his back to wallpapered motel walls, of watching every reflection in every dusty window, had led here. To the smell of cold water and rotting pine.
The dock was just as she’d described: warped planks leading out into the dark mirror of the lake, the final piling wearing a faded red ribbon. He watched for ten full minutes, listening to the lap of water and the distant cry of a loon. No movement. No shadows that didn’t belong. He moved from the trees to the side of the boathouse, his steps silent on the damp earth.
The door was ajar. Inside, the moonlight through broken windows cut the space into slices of sharp light and deep shadow. And there she was.
Cynna stood with her back to him, near a window overlooking the water. She was speaking, her voice a low, clear murmur. Not into a burner phone. The object in her hand was sleek, matte black, angular—a military-grade satphone with a dedicated encryption chip. The kind that left no trace.
His step on a creaking floorboard was deliberate. A warning.
Her sentence cut off. She didn’t startle. She simply finished, her tone final. “The coordinates are live. Burn everything but the evidence.” A pause. “Understood.”
She thumbed the call ended, and the small device emitted a soft, definitive click. Then she turned.
Moonlight caught the lenses of her glasses, turning them opaque for a moment. When she shifted, he could see her green eyes, wide and fixed on him. The weight in them was immense, a boulder of unspoken decisions.
“You made it,” she said. Her voice was normal. Too normal.
“Looks like I did,” Frankie replied, leaning against the doorjamb. He let his backpack slide to the floor with a thump. “Trail clean?”
“Clean enough. You?”
“Boring. Which is good.” He nodded toward the satphone now hanging loosely at her side. “Upgrading your service plan?”
A faint, almost imperceptible smile touched her lips. It didn’t reach her eyes. “Something like that. Had to check in. With someone who isn’t on any ledger.”
“Nicolas Thorne,” Frankie said.
Her gaze sharpened. “You heard.”
“Enough. ‘Burn everything but the evidence.’ Sounds dire. Also sounds like you’re not planning on a long vacation.”
Cynna looked down at the phone, turning it over in her hand. “Thorne was one of my handlers. Back in the day. Before the psychology degree, before the consulting. He’s… off the books. Has been for years. He’s the one who flagged the anomaly in the Dubai after-action reports. The discrepancy no one else wanted to see.”
Frankie pushed off the doorframe and walked into the room, the old floorboards groaning under his weight. “What discrepancy?”
“The extraction team leader, the one you handed the drive to. His bank records showed a deposit six weeks after he was officially declared MIA. A large one. From a shell corporation that later funneled money to a private security firm called Ares Divisional.”
The name hung in the cold air. Jax’s team. The men in the storm drain.
“So he didn’t go missing. He sold it,” Frankie said, the puzzle pieces grinding into a harsh, ugly picture.
“He tried to. Thorne’s theory is the transfer was a trap. The buyer double-crossed him, took the drive, and buried the evidence—which included the entire extraction team. And you.” She finally looked up at him. “You were the loose end that got away. Until Sam brought you back into the open.”
The mention of Sam’s name was a cold spike. “And ‘burn everything’?”
“My old life. My apartment was sanitized before I left. My professional accounts, my research, my affiliations—all being digitally scrubbed as we speak. By morning, Dr. Cynna Xander will be a ghost. A closed file.” She said it with clinical detachment, but her knuckles were white where she gripped the satphone. “The evidence is the only thing that survives. The only thing that matters now.”
Frankie moved closer, until he could see the fine lines of fatigue around her eyes, the smudge of dirt on her temple she’d missed. “What evidence, Cynna?”
She held his gaze for a long moment, then bent and retrieved a slim, waterproof case from the shadows near her feet. She placed it on a rickety table beside them, flicked the latches, and opened it.
Inside, nestled in foam, was a standard external hard drive. Jet black. Unmarked.
But beside it, connected by a short cable, was something else. A palm-sized, scorched-looking rectangle of melted plastic and fused circuitry. It was barely recognizable.
Frankie’s breath caught. “Is that…”
“The Dubai drive,” she said softly. “Or what’s left of it. Thorne retrieved it from the site where the extraction team was eliminated. It was fired on. Torched. They thought they destroyed it.” She tapped the intact, newer drive. “This contains the last partial data pull Thorne’s forensic team managed to salvage before the drive physically failed. It’s corrupted. Fragmentary. But it’s the only copy that exists outside of whoever has the original.”
Frankie stared at the scorched artifact. The cause of all of it. The deaths. The betrayal. The water rising to his chest. “What’s on it?”
“We don’t know yet. Not fully. Thorne’s people are good, but the encryption is… bespoke. Weird. It’s not government. It’s something else.” She closed the case softly. “But the metadata they recovered showed one repeated access point in the weeks before it was stolen. A server cluster registered to a biomedical research foundation based in Geneva. Krey-Schultz Holdings.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Almost no one has. They do esoteric, deep-funded research. Longevity. Cognitive enhancement. Boundary-pushing stuff.” She took off her glasses and cleaned them slowly on the hem of her shirt, a deliberate, calming ritual. “The kind of research that has very quiet, very powerful investors who prefer their affairs to remain private.”
Frankie understood. The drive wasn’t about state secrets. It was about money. The kind of money that moved in absolute darkness. The kind that hired Ares Divisional to clean up messes.
“So we have a broken key to a box we can’t open, for people who will definitely kill us for having it,” he summarized, his voice dry.
“We have the only leverage left,” Cynna corrected. “And they know we have it. Thorne’s ‘burn’ protocol means he’s activating a distraction. A series of calculated leaks about Ares Divisional’s other, messier operations. It should draw their security apparatus into a firefight on a dozen fronts. It’ll create noise. And a narrow window.”
“For what?”
“For us to do what they least expect.” She finally slipped her glasses back on. “We stop running. We go to the source.”
Frankie raised an eyebrow. “Geneva?”
“Not yet. First, we find the interpreter.” She leaned forward. “The encryption on this isn’t just digital. It’s algorithmic, based on a proprietary biological model. Krey-Schultz’s pet project. We need someone who understands the architecture, who can help us force the decryption. Find the names inside.”
“And you know such a person.”
“I know of her. Dr. Elara Vance. She was the lead programmer on the encryption project. She had a… moral disagreement with the direction of the research. She disappeared two years ago. Thorne has a possible location. A small town in the Rockies. She’s living off-grid, under another name. I've not forgotten Will's girlfriend or the cure."
Frankie looked from her determined face to the case holding the dead drive and its damaged twin. The peace of the silent lake outside felt like a taunt now. A beautiful, fragile illusion. “You want us to go ask a reclusive ex-programmer to hack her own life’s work, with a pack of corporate mercs hunting us.”
“Basically.”
He let out a long, slow breath, a cloud in the chilly boathouse air. He thought of Sam’s face in the firelight. I’m sorry. He thought of the rising water. The laser dots on his chest. The weight of the lie that had almost sunk him.
Running had only brought the water higher.
He met Cynna’s watchful, waiting eyes. A smile, the first real one in days, touched his lips. It felt strange on his face. “Well,” he said, his voice a low rumble in the quiet. “I’ve always wanted to see the mountains.”
The air in the boathouse shifted, the weight of planning giving way to the pull of motion. Cynna’s posture straightened, that psychologist’s assessment in her eyes replaced by the old, cold calculation of an agent moving to exfil. “Then we go now,” she said, snapping the latches on the case. “Thorne’s distraction won’t last forever.”
She handed him a set of keys, cold and unfamiliar. “Green Subaru Forester. Two-year old plates, registered to a retired schoolteacher in Peterborough. Parked half a click north in a trailhead lot. It’s clean.”
Frankie caught the keys, his fingers closing around the metal. “You just have those lying around?”
“Thorne had it prepositioned. I asked for resources, not a chat.” She shouldered a worn, nondescript backpack, identical to his own generic model. They were becoming ghosts, their edges blurring into a shared, anonymous silhouette. “We drive straight through. Twenty-four hours if we switch off. Less if we push it.”
“And if Ares is watching the highways?”
“They’ll be looking for a man and a woman traveling together, yes.” A faint, grim smile touched her lips. “They’ll be looking for people hiding. We’re going to be people on a very long, very boring road trip to see my eccentric aunt in Canmore.” She pulled a baseball cap from her pack, tucking her silver-blonde hair up into it, and swapped her glasses for a pair of plain sunglasses despite the deepening night. “You’re good at being boring, right Fish?”
He let the old call sign hang there for a second, a fragment of a simpler past. “I’m a champion at boring,” he said, hefting his pack. “Let’s hit the road.”
The forest exhaled damp, pine-scented darkness as they left the boathouse, their footsteps swallowed by the soft loam. No words passed between them until they saw the vehicle, a dark shape under a flickering sodium light at the empty trailhead. It was utterly ordinary, a perfect chameleon.
Frankie tossed his bag into the backseat, beside a worn cooler and a rumpled blanket. He slid into the driver’s seat, the upholstery cool and smelling faintly of pine air freshener and coffee. Cynna took the passenger side, placing the hard drive case carefully at her feet.
The engine turned over with a quiet, reliable hum. He pulled onto the two-lane blacktop, the headlights cutting a tunnel through the inky Canadian night. For the first twenty minutes, the only sounds were the tires on asphalt and the low rush of the wind.
“So,” Frankie said, his voice relaxed in the cockpit dark. “Your eccentric aunt.”
“Aunt Beatrice,” Cynna supplied without missing a beat, staring out at the dashed center line. “Loves ceramic owls, thinks WiFi gives her arthritis, makes a lethal raspberry cordial. We’re helping her prepare the garden for winter.”
“Sounds rustic.”
“It’s deeply dull. Which is the point.” She shifted, pulling her legs up under her. “We have cover identities in the glove box. Passports, driver’s licenses, a loyalty card for a Calgary organic market. Study them.”
He popped the glove compartment. The documents were good, not perfect but serviceable. The faces in the photos were theirs, but softer, older. “Martin and Claire Fowler,” he read.
“Married ten years. No kids. He’s in forestry consulting. She does medical transcription from home.”
“The thrilling lives of Claire and Martin Fowler,” Frankie mused, flipping through a grocery receipt. “They buy a lot of almond milk.”
“We’re lactose intolerant and environmentally conscious,” Cynna deadpanned. Then her tone softened, the professional edge sanding down to something more personal. “You should get some sleep. I’ll take first watch.”
“I’m good for a while.” The adrenaline was still a low hum in his veins. The memory of the storm drain chamber was too close, the chill of the water somehow still clinging to his bones. “You trust Thorne? With the burn?”
Cynna was silent for a long moment. “I trust that his interests are currently aligned with ours. He wants Ares Divisional folded. This drive is the pin to pull.” She glanced at him. “It’s not about trust. It’s about usable leverage.”
“Cold.”
“Practical.” She turned her head to look at him. “You’re the one who taught me that, you know. Back when you were giving me pointers on situational awareness in Kandahar. ‘Sentiment gets you killed, Doc. Assess, act, move.’”
Frankie winced, remembering a younger, sharper version of himself handing out crude survival advice to a surprisingly tough intelligence analyst. “I was an idiot.”
“You were twenty-four. And you weren’t wrong.” She looked back out the windshield. “It just feels different when the sentiment is yours.”
The truth of it filled the car. He focused on the road, the yellow lines streaming toward them. They passed a lone truck, its lights flaring and then fading away into the vast, star-dusted darkness. The world felt enormous and empty.
“We’ll figure it out,” he said, more to himself than to her.
“We don’t have a choice,” she replied, her voice barely above the road noise. “Sam made sure of that.”
The name was a splinter in the quiet. Frankie’s hands tightened on the wheel, just for a second. He saw the transmission again, the grainy night-vision image of Sam’s hand slipping into his pocket, her lips forming the words. I’m sorry. Was it apology for the betrayal, or for what was coming?
“Why’d she do it, Cynna?” The question was out before he could stop it, raw and stripped of his usual easygoing armor. “The money? Pressure?”
“I don’t know.” Cynna’s answer was quiet, considered. “The psychology of a double is complicated. It could be ideology, or duress, or a pathology we’d never see. The bubbly personality, the affection… it could have been real. And the betrayal could have been real, too. They’re not mutually exclusive.” She let that hang. “The ‘why’ doesn’t change the ‘what.’ It just makes it harder to look at.”
He nodded, accepting the non-answer. Some knots couldn’t be untied on a dark highway. They could only be carried.
The sign for the Trans-Canada Highway appeared, a green rectangle promising west. Frankie merged into the sparse stream of transport trucks and night drivers, the Subaru becoming another anonymous set of taillights in the endless flow.
Cynna eventually leaned her head against the window, her breathing deepening into a slow, controlled rhythm. Not quite sleep, but a tactical rest. Frankie drove on, the mountains still hundreds of kilometers ahead but pulling at him now with a gravitational force. He was done swimming against the current. Now, he was driving straight into the teeth of whatever was waiting.