Page 45 of Cipher: Lethal Algorithm

If you’re reading this, something went wrong, or something went right.

Either way, use it well.

I read it twice.

Then I read it a third time, which isn’t a habit I have. I don’t read things three times. I read things once, process them, file them. Three readings is an anomaly.

She wrote this three days before she knew my name. Three days before I sat in the passenger seat of her rental car and handed her a weapon back butt-first. She wrote this in a hotelroom at the Venetian Macao with the full awareness that she might not be the one to carry this thing out of that building. That she might fail. That she might be gone.

And she wrote use it well in the handwriting of someone who still thought it was worth doing.

The weight of what three years alone looks like from the inside shifts in my hands. She prepared for every contingency. She was prepared to hand off everything she built to a stranger, whoever that stranger turned out to be, and trust them to finish it. Not because she thought she’d fail. Because she had the intellectual honesty to plan for the possibility.

I’ve managed assets since Task Force 9 stood up. I protected people who were terrified, people who were angry, people who were tactical liabilities from the first moment of contact. I have never once protected someone who simultaneously prepared a succession plan with the quiet, competent assumption that someone capable enough to be holding this already knows what to do.

She trusted the stranger before she trusted me.

Something in my chest that operates at a low, comfortable level of arrogant satisfaction shifts register entirely.

I fold the note back the way it was and put it in my jacket pocket.

The cab crosses back onto the island. The sea appears on both sides of the narrow road. I straighten my jacket, reset my focus to the next three moves—brief Hutch, secure the device, work out the Luxembourg question—and do not think about how her handwriting goes slightly different on the word well. Like she paused there. Like she felt the weight of it too.

File it away, the operational half of my brain tries one more time.

I don’t file it away. I can’t.

She’s at the portable rig when I push through the door, two systems running parallel and an empty coffee cup at her elbow. She doesn’t turn around immediately, which means she heard me come in and chose not to turn around. That’s Ivy.

I set the sealed bag on the table in front of her rig.

She stops typing.

The bag sits between us with that same compressed, outsized weight it had in the cab. She looks at it for three seconds without touching it—the look of someone recognizing an object that has been theoretical for eighteen months but is suddenly, undeniably real.

Then I put the note on the table next to it.

The shift in her posture is immediate and involuntary. A slight contraction across her shoulders, a tightening in the line of her jaw, the specific stillness of someone ambushed by something they forgot existed.

She picks it up. Reads it. Sets it down.

For a long moment, neither of us says anything. The sea does its continuous thing outside the window. A new day comes in sideways off the water, pale and slightly sharp.

“Three days ago.” Her voice goes flat in the particular way it goes flat when she operates at maximum honesty. “I thought I was doing this alone forever.”

“You planned for the contingency of needing help.” I wait a beat. “But you were going to try not to need it.”

She doesn’t answer. Her finger traces the edge of the folded note, but she doesn’t open it again.

I pick it up. Fold it back precisely as she had it. Put it back inside the bag, next to the device.

“I do that too.”

It’s the most honest thing I’ve said since we met. We both know it.

She looks at me. The morning light still tries to work itself out through the slanted window, landing in pieces across the rig, the table, the side of her face. The circles under her eyes are significant, and she is going to be running on insufficient sleep for the day ahead.

She’s the most specific, irreplaceable person in the entire scope of this operation. And she operated alone for so long that she wrote herself a contingency note before she knew there was a contingency to plan for.