Page 15 of Cipher: Lethal Algorithm

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” His voice is silky smooth.

It doesn’t match the way he looks. Not even close. His face is a roadmap of exhaustion, sleepless nights, bad coffee, too much stress, and not enough reward for it. A poster boy for moral injury. Yet his eyes are clear.

Alert. Assessing.

“Whatever you were about to say.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“You were going to say the left turn was correct.”

“That seems redundant. You already turned.”

It’s a good answer. It goes on the list—the fourteen bytes, the four-point-seven seconds, the weapon presented grip-first. Everything this morning that landed exactly where I didn’t expect.

The Macau streets are quiet at this hour. Casino workers cycling out. Delivery routes beginning. I drive without a destination. He doesn’t ask where we’re going. He sits, eighteen inches away, patient as a man who has been patient for eleven weeks and sees no reason to change now.

I don’t know whether that’s a gift or a tactic.

4

The Passenger Problem

JULIAN

She drivesthe way she codes—without asking the system’s permission.

The Macau street grid is a study in structural chaos: the southern casino strip is gaudy neon and glass, bleeding into the western Pearl River waterfront, which finally chokes down into the narrow, humid capillaries of the old town.

I give more directions before the silence can solidify into a body.

“Left at the roundabout. Avoid the Lisboa frontage. It’s crawling with facial recognition nodes this time of morning, and your current facial geometry is a high-priority flag. Even with those glasses, you’re glowing like a signal flare.”

She ignores the instructions. She takes a hard right, the tires chirping a sharp, rhythmic protest against the pavement as she guns the engine.

The right is technically better. It bypasses a fixed camera cluster on the casino access road and vents onto the waterfront esplanade—cleaner sightlines at dawn, harder to surveil from a stationary position. She’s running the same geometry as me, arriving at the same tactical conclusion three seconds faster.

I lean back, crossing one leg over the other, making myself entirely too comfortable in the passenger seat of a car she definitely didn’t pay for. My gaze traces the sharp line of her jaw, the way her pulse thrums in the hollow of her throat.

“Impressive. You mapped the blind spots. Most solo operators get blinded by the neon and miss the lens behind the glass. You’ve always had a flair for the dramatic, haven’t you?”

“I’m not ‘most operators,’ Rhodes.” Her voice is pure ice. “If I wanted a partner, I would’ve looked for one in a place that didn’t smell like a Singapore server room.”

“The third left after the bridge. It cuts three minutes off the egress.”

She ignores me and takes the second left instead.

She guns the engine, the roar of the stolen SUV echoing off the concrete walls as she cuts through a narrow delivery lane—a slit between two massive warehouses—and emerges forty seconds ahead of my projected arrival time.

I put my phone face down on my knee. My internal map is rewriting itself in real time.

“You studied the delivery manifests. That lane hasn’t been open to civilian traffic since the 2024 typhoon. You’re resourceful. I’ll give you that. But you’re also incredibly cocky.”

“How did you find me?”

The question is a diagnostic. She isn’t confused; she’s probing to see if I’m willing to show my hand. She wants to find the leak in her hull.