Chapter Three: Ghost Online

The screen went silent. In the New York maintenance room, Ethan stared at the words. For the first time that night, his breathing changed. Mason Briggs had been his second-in-command. In Operation Nightglass, Mason had been the last to fall. Ethan remembered the blood on his chest and the final words in his earpiece: Do not trust the recovery signal. For six years, Ethan had believed Mason left nothing behind. "What did she say?" Marcus asked. Ethan did not answer. He routed the connection through a jump chain, splitting the signal into sixteen fragments and sending them across dead servers in Iceland, Chile, Johannesburg, and Mumbai. Then he typed one word. PROOF. Sophia was ready. She sent an audio file twenty-seven seconds long.