5 – SIBYL is Live: A New Identity

SIBYL is Live:
A New Identity

SIBYL. A codename. A laptop full of killers.
One rule: survive long enough to predict the next death—even if it’s your own.

Dar froze mid-reach, mug suspended inches from the table. Her pulse kicked up—not fear exactly, but recognition. That knock. Official. Expected. She set the mug down carefully, as if sudden movement might shatter whatever fragile calm she’d built since Pam left.

Her reflection caught in the hallway mirror as she approached the door: messy bun, grey sweater with a coffee stain near the hem, jeans worn soft at the knees. Christ, I look like I’ve been subsisting on takeaway and Netflix. She pressed a palm against her sternum, feeling her heartbeat. Not panic. Anticipation. The same charge she’d felt months ago, standing outside the lecture hall before defending her thesis.

This is it. No more theory. No more safe distance.

She smoothed her sweater and reached for the door handle. Her fingers trembled—just once—before closing around the cold metal. Through the thick oak, a dark silhouette waited.

Dar drew one breath, tasting coffee and butter, and pulled the door open. A courier stood rigid, clipboard pressed against his chest. “Dar Montgomery?”

“Yes,” she answered, voice clipped.

He extended a plain beige envelope. “Delivery for you. Sign here.”

She scrawled her signature, took the envelope. The courier was already turning away, footsteps precise and mechanical.

Dar closed the door, envelope held like something fragile and dangerous. A plain envelope bearing her name in stencilled letters. The slip of paper inside stated that a car and driver were arriving at 11:00, with one instruction in bold: “Bring nothing but yourself.”

The car arrived exactly on time—black sedan, tinted windows, driver who didn’t speak. Dar watched the city slide past in silence, familiar streets rendered strange through darkened glass. Her hands wouldn’t stop fidgeting in her lap, smoothing her trousers, checking her phone, smoothing again. This is real. This is actually happening. By the time they pulled up at an unmarked building, her mouth had gone dry.

Minutes later, Dar sat in a windowless office so sterile it felt designed to be forgotten. No personal effects decorated the glass-and-steel walls, just fluorescent bulbs humming overhead. She perched on the edge of a metal-frame chair, knuckles white against her dark trousers. I couldn’t survive a week in this place.

The door swung open. Veyr entered, tall and severe in an immaculately pressed suit, eyes the grey of flint. She extended neither hand nor smile, merely set a folder on the desk with deliberate precision. Her ring clicked softly against the water glass. Dar recognised her instantly—not from a photograph, but from a reputation that preceded her like a cold draft. Veyr was more imposing in person, a human weapon disguised in tailored wool, radiating an authority that made the sterile room feel suddenly claustrophobic. She’s the woman who doesn’t just enter a room, she claims it, Dar thought, feeling the weight of those steel-grey eyes measuring her worth in milliseconds. A primal instinct whispered: this was someone who could destroy her without hesitation, someone who saw people as assets to be deployed or discarded.

“Ms. Montgomery, I trust the courier didn’t leave you with too many questions. Unmarked envelopes can unsettle civilians.” She angled her head whilst her gaze scanned Dar, searching for weakness.

Dar’s throat tightened, the sensation of invisible fingers pressing against her windpipe, choking back words she couldn’t afford to let slip. Civilians would’ve run screaming, but I’m not one of them anymore.

Veyr continued without waiting for a reply, one manicured fingernail tapping against the metal desk with metronomic precision. “But you’re not entirely civilian now, are you?” She paused, the fluorescent light highlighting strands of silver hair as she straightened. “Ms. Montgomery,” her voice cool and modulated, “someone has given you a broad overview. I’m here to confirm whether you grasp the gravity of what you’ve agreed to.”

Dar sat up straighter, the calm poise of a criminologist overriding her racing pulse. “I’m here to consult on patterns and profiles.” Her fingers unconsciously traced invisible connections on the cold metal table between them. Her voice held steady, but her eyes flicked to the folder. She avoided the question concerning the contents—Veyr didn’t strike her as the sharing type. “And gravity is why I’m here.” She steadied her voice. “My daughter—”

The words escaped before she could stop them, and Dar felt her throat close. She pressed her nails into her palm until they left crescent marks, forcing down the rest—the story of Zoe’s dimpled smile, her scattered ashes, the hollow space that never filled. No, not here, not with this woman, whose eyes catalogue weakness like inventory.

“I know what happens when people look away.”

The tapping stopped. Veyr’s finger hovered above the desk, suspended mid-rhythm, and she leaned forward—just an inch, but enough that Dar felt the shift in the room’s gravity. The woman’s eyes narrowed, not with sympathy but with the focused intensity of someone adjusting calculations in real time.

“Looking away,” Veyr said slowly, her voice dropping half an octave, “is a luxury we can’t afford in this work.” She tilted her head, studying Dar with surgical precision. “But guilt—productive guilt—that’s different. That keeps you sharp. Keeps you from making the same mistake twice.” A pause, deliberate and weighted. “I can work with that.”

Grief as a motivator—volatile but potent.

A hint of a smile touched Veyr’s lips. “In your role, you’d be safe. Certainly. But your distance from danger doesn’t diminish your importance. What they see and flag will shape Task Force 983’s next moves. Soldiers follow orders. You,” she tapped the folder against her palm, “will help write them. Patterns—the kind that don’t show up in police reports or court transcripts.”

She opened the folder, revealing a grainy surveillance photo of a man in a nondescript suit exiting a café in Berlin. No caption, no name. “This one’s been funnelling money through shell companies for a group that funds extracurricular activities. Hostile ones.” She delivered the words with clinical precision. “Your thesis about transnational crime networks impressed us. But academic models lack teeth.” She slid the photo towards Dar. “We need you to find fracture points—where the money bleeds into violence. Is that something you can do, Ms Montgomery?”

Dar’s throat tightened as she opened the folder properly. Three photographs, each clipped to dossiers thick enough to stop a bullet. Her eyes moved across the faces with the same methodical precision she’d once applied to spreadsheets and academic models—except these weren’t theoretical constructs. These were nodes in a living network.

First photograph: Mikhail Kozlov. Mid-fifties, steel-grey hair, eyes like frozen Baltic water. Arms trafficking. Human cargo routes through the Balkans. Financial ties to three terrorist cells and two parliamentary aides. Interpol had chased him for six years across nine countries. Six years, nine countries—he’s not running, he’s operating. The movement pattern isn’t evasion; it’s expansion. Her fingers traced the edge of the photograph. The connections were already forming in her mind, invisible threads linking money to violence to power.

Second photograph: Dr Natasha Volkov. Thirty-eight, younger than Dar expected. Pharmaceutical researcher turned biological weapons consultant. Cambridge-educated, five languages, modified pathogens for regimes the UN somehow never sanctioned. With differing reports from Syrian villages, the estimated body count could be anywhere from two to five thousand. Two to five thousand. The range itself was data—uncertainty meant poor documentation, which meant deliberate obscurity. Someone was protecting her supply chains.

Third photograph made her stomach drop. Marcus Ashford. British. Eton, Oxford, Sandhurst. Distinguished service record—past tense. Now he brokered deals between first-world buyers and third-world conflicts. Surface-to-air missiles. Child soldiers. Connections in Parliament, the Ministry of Defence, and according to one redacted note, possible asset cultivation within domestic security services. One of ours gone bad. Or maybe he was always bad, and we just gave him better tools.

Beneath the photographs, a single typed paragraph: TASK FORCE 983 – OPERATIONAL DIRECTIVE ALPHA. Immediate interdiction. Suspended protocols. Flexible engagement. Minimal legal constraints. No oversight. Permanent neutralisation. Collateral considerations secondary.

The final line was handwritten in Veyr’s precise script: Welcome to the deep end. Try not to drown.

Dar’s hand hovered over the images, her mind already mapping connections—financial flows, geographic overlaps, the spaces where these three networks might intersect. Kozlov moves the hardware. Volkov provides the leverage. Ashford greases the wheels with British legitimacy. It wasn’t three separate targets. It was a system. And systems had pressure points.

She clasped her hands instead, leaning forward, forcing herself to meet Veyr’s gaze rather than disappear into the pattern-space opening up in her mind.

“I don’t bleed easily.” Dar locked eyes with Veyr. “What I do is trace the blade before it strikes. Give me everything—money trails, corporate shells, behavioural outliers—and I’ll map where the knife is heading.”

The words rang hollow even as she spoke them. Trace the blade before it strikes. She’d built a career on that promise, yet she’d never seen the violence in her own kitchen until it was too late—never mapped the escalation, never predicted the night Barry’s hand would find a knife instead of her wrist. Five years analysing threat patterns for governments, and she’d missed the most obvious one sleeping beside her. The scar tissue along her ribs was a permanent reminder: she could predict arms dealers and terrorists, but she’d failed to save the one person who mattered most.

Dar pushed the thought down, compartmentalised it the way she’d learned to compartmentalise everything that threatened to bleed through. She leaned forward. “But I need unrestricted data access. Real data, not sanitised summaries.”

Veyr’s chair creaked as she leaned across the desk, her eyes narrowing to silver slits. “Let me be clear about the single non-negotiable condition. This work exists in a vacuum. Not a whisper to your baker friend. Not a hint to anyone outside Task Force 983. Not even a confession to your own reflection when you’re three glasses deep.”

Dar flinched at the mention of Pam, her shoulders tensing. She already suspects something. Still, she nodded. “Understood.”

Veyr noted the tension around Dar’s eyes at the mention of her friend. Good. Fear keeps secrets better than loyalty. She set another folder on the table. “Inside, you’ll find clearance credentials, encryption protocols, and a list of codenames—yours and theirs.”

Dar’s forehead creased, her fingers tightening around the edge of the chair until her knuckles whitened. “Mine?” The word came out sharply. “I’m the academic, the consultant. The one who stays behind the desk with the data.”

Veyr’s mouth curved upward, but her eyes remained cold. “You’re not filing reports under ‘Darla Montgomery, grieving mother.’ Even those who never leave their desks require shadows to hide behind. You’ll be ‘Sibyl’.”

Dar’s pulse caught. Sibyl. Like stepping into a shadow. She let the name settle, testing its weight. “Sibyl. And the others—Calder, Ward—they know me by this name?”

Veyr’s mouth twitched in what might have been amusement. “Calder adheres to protocol. Ward, however,… he tends to create his own designations based on his peculiar sense of humour.” But the name sticks in the system—in files that don’t officially exist.” Her platinum ring struck the folder with a soft, deliberate tap.

“Everything you need is here.” She pushed a sleek obsidian rectangle towards Dar—a device resembling a laptop stripped of all identifying features, its seamless surface betraying no hint of connectivity or manufacturer. “Biometric lock. Your thumbprint activates it. Inside: financial trails, intercepted communications, satellite imagery—sanitised, deniable. No copies, no notes outside the device. When you spot something out of place, I’m your first and only call. We don’t publish papers here. The data will breathe and change. Miss a heartbeat, and people die. Understood?”

Dar’s thumb hovered over the dark glass. No turning back now. She pressed down, feeling a faint vibration as the device scanned her print. The screen glowed, offering folders labelled only with alphanumeric codes. “How often do you want updates?”

Veyr watched as Dar’s fingers moved across the interface. “Daily briefs, encrypted pulse checks at 0700 and 1900. But if you see blood in the water…” Her ring clicked against the desk. “You scream. Immediately.”

A pause.

“The device requires regular interaction. Miss two consecutive check-ins and the system assumes compromise.” Veyr’s eyes met Dar’s. “Nothing remains. And a visit from people less polite than me.”

Dar looked up sharply. “You mean someone would come to my home?” She thought of Lo, of Pam, of the quiet life she’d tried to rebuild.

Veyr’s expression remained calm, but her eyes grew cold. “The kind that ensures operational security. You’re holding state secrets now, Sibyl—not thesis drafts.” She steepled her fingers. “But let’s focus on the work. That’s your armour.”

Dar met her gaze. “And if I find something that… complicates the mission?”

Veyr’s finger traced a slow circle around the rim of her water glass, leaving no prints. “Complications are inevitable. Your job is to untangle them before they become catastrophes. If you uncover a thread threatening the operation, pull it—but quietly. No alarms until we know what we’re dealing with.” Her voice dropped. “And if that thread leads back to our side… you bring it to me. Alone.”

Dar nodded, swallowing hard. “Understood.”

Veyr retrieved a slim tablet from her briefcase and slid it across the desk, its screen prompting a retinal scan. “Your first dataset: shell corporations, wire transfers, bodies across three countries. Find the thread before it unravels further. Biometric access only. No backups. Financial trails, intercepted communications, asset movements—everything you need is here. Are you certain you want to see how deep the rot spreads?”

Dar’s thumb met the scanner without pause, her heartbeat quickening as the screen bathed her face in emerald confirmation.

Veyr watched the light reflect in Dar’s eyes. “Access granted. Welcome to the fog of war, Sibyl. Patterns hide in noise. Follow the money but trust the bodies. They rarely lie.” She rose, picking up the folder from the table. “The car will take you home now.”

She turned and left.

Dar sat in silence, the tablet heavier than it should be—dense with secrets, with lives reduced to data points. Her shoulders had crept up toward her ears without her noticing, muscles knotted tight beneath her blouse. She forced herself to breathe, slowly and deliberately, but the pressure in her chest wouldn’t ease. The device’s glow illuminated her reflection in its glossy metal cover—pale, hollow-eyed, gripping the edges so hard her knuckles had gone white. Sibyl. Christ. What have I done?

Outside, Veyr paused, her hand dropping from the cold steel handle. She didn’t look back. The hum of the corridor’s HVAC filled the air as she pulled out her phone, thumb hovering over the screen.

That flicker when I mentioned her daughter—raw, unprocessed grief. Exploitable. The way Dar had immediately grasped the network structure, seeing connections rather than isolated targets, confirmed the intelligence assessments. Brilliant, as promised. But that moment of hesitation, the crack in her confidence when she’d pitched herself—trace the blade before it strikes—that was more interesting. Self-doubt wrapped in competence. Someone trying to prove something, perhaps to herself most of all.

Veyr typed a brief message: “Sibyl is live. Monitor data streams closely.”

She pocketed the phone. Controllable for now. The grief keeps her tethered; the guilt keeps her compliant. But that mind… Dar had seen the system in seconds, mapped the pressure points without prompting. Useful. Potentially dangerous if she ever turned that analytical lens on the people controlling her access.

We’ll see whether she breaks or bends. My money’s on the latter—but bent things have a way of snapping when you least expect it.