Mercer did not ask whether I was coming. He simply started walking toward the transport corridor, and I followed with my father’s nine-second voicemail still open on my phone.
Ryan is on the team they lost.
The words kept replaying in my head.
For fifteen years, my father had treated Ryan as the child built for service and me as the daughter who belonged safely behind a desk. He had erased my Air Force acceptance letter from our kitchen counter, dismissed my scores, and laughed whenever the subject of my career came up. Even after my assignments became classified, I let him believe his version of me was true.
That had always been useful.
Now it was suddenly dangerous.
Mercer stopped beside the transport vehicle and looked at me.
“You heard the message?”
I nodded.
“Then you understand why I didn’t tell you before.”
“No,” I said. “I understand why my father called thirty times. I don’t understand why you knew Ryan was on the team.”
Mercer held my gaze for a moment.
“Because I put him on it.”
The corridor seemed to narrow around us.
Ryan wasn’t just somewhere inside a missing unit. He had been assigned to Mercer’s operation. And Mercer had come into that briefing room specifically looking for Ghost-Thirteen without knowing, at least publicly, that Ghost-Thirteen was standing in front of him.
Or perhaps he had known all along.
I stepped closer.
“What happened?”
“Communications went dark twenty-seven minutes ago. Six personnel were supposed to check in after crossing the extraction point. They didn’t.”
“How many confirmed?”
“None.”
“Casualties?”
“We don’t know.”
That answer was worse than a number.
Mercer opened the rear door of the transport. Inside, two operators were checking equipment while another studied a tablet filled with maps and rapidly changing markers. Nobody looked surprised to see me.
That was the first thing that bothered me.
They had expected Ghost-Thirteen.
They had not expected Avery Cole.
I climbed inside.
Mercer followed and pulled the door shut behind us.
The map showed the team’s last known position, a narrow corridor between two pieces of elevated terrain. The route looked simple until I noticed the communications dead zone marked across it.
“Why did they lose contact?” I asked.
“We thought interference.”
“And now?”
Mercer tapped the screen.
“Now I think someone wanted them blind.”
The operator beside him rotated the tablet toward me.
A short burst of transmission data appeared on the screen. Most of it was meaningless static. One fragment had been isolated.
Three seconds of audio.
Then nothing.
I listened once.
Again.
The third time, I heard it.
Not the words.
The timing.
There was a click before the transmission ended. Two short tones followed by a pause and one longer tone.
My pulse changed.
Mercer noticed.
“You recognize it.”
“I recognize the pattern.”
“From where?”
I didn’t answer immediately.
Because the pattern wasn’t from the team.
It was from a protocol I had seen years earlier in a completely different operation. A protocol that was never supposed to be used by an ordinary field unit.
Someone had been sending a signal through the team’s communications channel.
Someone who knew the channel existed.
Someone who knew the team would be listening.
I looked at Ryan’s identifier on the screen.
“What was his role?”
Mercer hesitated.
“Communications specialist.”
My stomach tightened.
Of course.
Ryan had always been good with systems. My father had called it temperament. Discipline. Instinct. The qualities I supposedly didn’t have.
But there was something else.
Ryan had spent his entire career close to communications architecture.
And if someone had manipulated the team’s channel, he was one of the people who might have recognized it.
“Was Ryan the first one to report the interference?” I asked.
Mercer didn’t answer.
That silence told me enough.
“Mercer.”
“He was the last voice we received.”
“What did he say?”
Mercer looked at the other operators.
Then he played the recording.
Static filled the compartment.
A breath.
Ryan’s voice.
“Do not send the recovery team.”
The recording ended.
Nobody moved.
I stared at Mercer.
“That’s it?”
“That was the final transmission.”
“Why would he tell you not to send us?”
“We don’t know.”
I replayed it.
This time I listened beneath the words.
Ryan sounded controlled. Too controlled.
He wasn’t panicking.
He wasn’t injured.
He was warning someone.
But the question was who.
I looked again at the three-second fragment.
The same tones appeared immediately after his voice.
Two short.
Pause.
One long.
I felt the answer before I could prove it.
“He wasn’t warning you,” I said.
Mercer’s eyes narrowed.
“He was warning me.”
Nobody spoke.
I reached for the tablet.
“Run the transmission backward.”
The operator frowned.
“That’s not going to—”
“Backward.”
He obeyed.
The audio played in reverse.
At first, it sounded like noise.
Then I heard a faint mechanical click buried beneath the static.
I pointed at the screen.
“Stop.”
The waveform froze.
“There.”
Mercer leaned closer.
“That signal was embedded before Ryan spoke.”
The operator adjusted the filter.
A second waveform appeared.
This one was cleaner.
Not a voice.
A short digital handshake.
My hands went cold.
Because I knew that handshake too.
It wasn’t military issue.
It wasn’t part of Mercer’s unit.
And it wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near Ryan’s team.
It belonged to a compartmented system I had encountered during an operation so restricted that even my father’s office had never received the complete report.
I looked at Mercer.
“Where did you get this channel?”
“We didn’t.”
“Then who did?”
“That is what we’re trying to find out.”
I stared at Ryan’s identifier.
The old family story began rearranging itself in my head.
Dad had always said Ryan was the one built for service.
Maybe he had been proud of Ryan.
Maybe he had also been afraid of what Ryan knew.
And maybe that was why his reaction to Ghost-Thirteen had been so strange.
Not because he had discovered that his daughter was secretly capable.
Because he had recognized the asset he had been trying not to know existed.
The transport engine started.
Mercer took the seat across from me.
“One question,” he said.
“What?”
“When your father told you to sit down, did he know your call sign?”
I thought about the briefing room.
His laugh.
The way his hand had fallen after Mercer said Ghost-Thirteen.
The color leaving his face.
“No,” I said. “Not then.”
Mercer watched me carefully.
“And when you left?”
“He knew.”
Mercer nodded once.
“Then we’re dealing with two separate problems.”
I waited.
“Your brother is missing.”
He raised one finger.
“And your father knows something about why.”
The transport moved.
I looked through the small window as the briefing facility disappeared behind us.
My phone vibrated again.
For a moment I thought it was my father.
It wasn’t.
It was an incoming secure message from an address I hadn’t seen in years.
No name.
No signature.
Just four words.
DON’T TRUST YOUR FATHER.
I stared at the screen.
Mercer saw my expression.
“What is it?”
I turned the phone toward him.
He read the message once.
Then again.
“Who sent it?”
“I don’t know.”
He reached for the device but stopped before touching it.
“Don’t open anything else.”
“Why?”
“Because whoever sent that message knows you’re already moving.”
The transport went silent.
I looked down at the screen again.
A second message appeared.
This one contained a location.
Then a final line.
RYAN ASKED ME TO KEEP YOU OUT OF THIS.
I closed my eyes.
For the first time since leaving the briefing room, I understood why my father’s thirty missed calls mattered.
They were not the beginning of the mystery.
They were the moment the mystery had finally reached him.
And if Ryan had asked someone to keep me away, then my brother had known something before the team disappeared.
Something he had deliberately hidden from me.
I opened my eyes.
“Mercer.”
“Yes?”
“I need the full personnel file.”
“You already have access.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I need the version nobody expected me to ask for.”
He studied me.
Then he reached beneath his seat and pulled out a sealed folder.
He placed it on the table between us.
There was no label on the outside.
No rank.
No operation name.
Just one handwritten word.
COLE.
I looked at it for several seconds.
“Who gave you this?”
Mercer didn’t answer.
I looked up.
“Who gave you the file?”
His jaw tightened.
“Your father.”
The engine noise seemed to disappear.
I put my hand on the folder.
Mercer caught my wrist.
“Before you open it,” he said, “understand something.”
“What?”
“Your father didn’t give me this file to protect Ryan.”
I stared at him.
“Then why?”
Mercer released my wrist.
“Because three weeks ago, Ryan asked for the same file.”
My fingers froze against the cover.
Three weeks.
Before the missing team.
Before the briefing.
Before the thirty calls.
Before my father stood in front of two hundred officers and told me I was a zero.
I opened the folder.
The first page was almost completely blacked out.
The second page contained a photograph.
Not of Ryan.
Not of me.
It was a photograph of my father standing beside someone I had never seen before.
At the bottom of the page was a date from fifteen years earlier.
The same year my Air Force acceptance letter disappeared.
I looked at Mercer.
He said nothing.
I turned the page.
And finally understood why my father had spent fifteen years making sure I believed I had never mattered to the decisions that shaped our family.
He hadn’t been keeping me out because he thought I was weak.
He had been keeping me out because someone had already been watching what I could become.
And Ryan had just disappeared while trying to find out who that someone was.
