Chapter 15 - The Chase Ended Where Prague Had Begun Three Years Earlier

Markov expected panic.

Evelyn gave him disappointment.

“You still rely on trackers.”

His smile faded slightly.

She had taught Victoria one rule repeatedly since Leander: if an enemy lets you leave too easily, assume the vehicle is compromised.

The video feed showed the car moving along a rural highway.

Then the red marker stopped.

Markov looked down.

The vehicle icon remained still for ten seconds.

Twenty.

The feed switched to a roadside camera.

An empty car sat on the shoulder with its hazard lights blinking.

Victoria and Reznik were gone.

Evelyn smiled.

Markov hit her hard enough to split her lip.

“That was for Prague,” he said.

“No. Prague is going to cost more.”

He ordered two men into the room.

They zip-tied Evelyn’s wrists and prepared to move her.

That told her something important.

Markov no longer felt secure in the building.

Perhaps Shaw had issued new instructions.

Perhaps the Baltimore arrests had begun reaching higher levels.

Evelyn waited until they entered the parking level.

One guard walked ahead. One behind.

Markov was ten feet to her left, speaking on his phone.

“Yes,” he said. “She is contained.”

A pause.

“No. Reznik is not.”

His face tightened.

“I understand.”

Evelyn did too.

He had just received bad news.

She stumbled deliberately.

The rear guard grabbed her shoulder.

Evelyn twisted, trapping the zip tie against a sharp metal bracket she had noticed on the stair rail. The plastic snapped after two violent pulls.

She drove her elbow into the guard’s throat, seized his sidearm, and fired once into the overhead lights.

Darkness swallowed the garage.

Markov shouted.

Evelyn moved toward the sound, not away from it.

She struck his wrist, knocked his phone loose, and kicked it beneath a parked truck.

A bullet passed close enough to burn air beside her cheek.

She fired at the muzzle flash.

Someone screamed.

Then she ran.

Outside, she crossed a construction lot and entered a drainage channel. She changed direction twice before using a stranger’s phone at a gas station to call Ortiz.

Ortiz answered with one sentence.

“Vale is awake.”

Evelyn closed her eyes briefly.

“Victoria?”

“With me.”

“And Reznik?”

“Also here, and he hates federal buildings exactly as much as you predicted.”

Relief almost weakened her knees.

During the drive back, Evelyn replayed Markov’s phone call in her mind. He had sounded less like a commander receiving instructions than an employee learning his usefulness had limits. That mattered. If Shaw had begun cutting operational layers loose, Markov might become more dangerous, but he might also become more talkative. Evelyn wrote down every phrase she could remember before adrenaline blurred the details.

They reunited at a secure evidence facility outside Washington that Ortiz had chosen because it belonged to a financial-crimes task force, not intelligence agencies.

Victoria saw Evelyn’s split lip and hugged her without warning.

Evelyn froze.

Then, awkwardly, hugged back.

Reznik handed over his encrypted drive on one condition: Ortiz would make simultaneous sealed copies for a federal judge, an inspector general, and an external newspaper attorney.

Ortiz agreed.

The drive confirmed Shaw’s identity as R-17.

Ortiz had the decryption session recorded under evidence protocol, with Reznik present on camera and a court clerk logging the file hashes. Evelyn insisted on the procedure even though every extra minute hurt. After what Orpheus had erased, provenance mattered almost as much as content.

It also contained something no one expected: a future operations calendar.

One event was scheduled forty-eight hours away.

PROJECT LYRE.

Target: Senate sanctions vote.

Objective: delay passage through induced emergency.

The operational notes referenced “Hale family leverage,” market disruption, and a staged security incident at the Capitol complex.

Victoria stared at the page.

“They’re planning an attack?”

“Not necessarily a mass-casualty attack,” Ortiz said. “Orpheus works through pressure. It may only need panic.”

Evelyn read the tasking lines carefully.

One instruction stood out.

CONTINGENCY: IF HALE RESISTS, RELEASE SON MATERIAL AND ACTIVATE MEDICAL EVENT.

“Medical event?” Victoria asked.

“Poisoning, engineered collapse, something deniable,” Evelyn said.

Hale was not simply compromised.

He was scheduled to become the next example.

Ortiz tried calling his secure contact.

No answer.

A second number went directly to voicemail.

Then her phone rang from an unknown line.

Senator Hale whispered, “They took my son.”

Ortiz put the call on speaker.

“Where are you?”

“I can’t say. They told me to attend tomorrow’s closed committee session and stop the sanctions package.”

Evelyn said, “Senator, listen carefully. Do they know you spoke to us at the museum?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

A sound came through the line.

A door opening.

Hale’s breathing changed.

Then another voice spoke near him.

Maren Shaw.

“Senator, you were told not to use that phone.”

The line went dead.

Evelyn looked at the future operations calendar again.

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They no longer had forty-eight hours.

Project Lyre had already begun.