Page 259 of Silent Target

Not the entire conversation. Just those eleven words.

Someone had erased them while I was reading.

“Too late,” I murmured.

I’d already captured it.

I pulled the message into an isolated file and began tracing the path it had taken. I didn’t expect to find a name or location. People operating at this level didn’t make careless mistakes.

But every message left something behind.

A timing pattern. A repeated phrase. A choice of punctuation. The smallest habits could become fingerprints if you knew where to look.

And I knew where to look.

A door opened behind me.

“You ever sleep?”

Rook’s voice was quiet, but I heard the warning beneath it.

I didn’t turn. “Sometimes.”

“Last week doesn’t count.”

James “Rook” Callahan crossed the command center and stopped beside my chair. He held a mug of black coffee in one hand. His dark hair was still damp, and he wore a gray T-shirt and tactical pants, which meant he’d either gotten up early or hadn’t been to bed.

Considering everything we’d recovered from the listening station in West Virginia, I suspected the latter.

Shadow Division had brought home more than evidence.

We had names. Accounts. Locations.

Proof that Project Black Banner stretched farther into the government than any of us had imagined.

We’d broken one circle.

The others were already closing ranks.

Rook set the coffee beside my hand. “What did you find?”

I enlarged the captured message.

His expression changed as he read it.

“‘The innocent will choose their own deaths,’” he repeated. “That doesn’t sound like an assassination.”

“No.”

“A bombing?”

“Maybe. But the wording is wrong.”

Rook looked at me.

I tapped the final phrase. “People don’t choose to be caught in an explosion. This sounds like they’re planning to make the victims do something themselves.”

“Coercion?”