Crossed Wires & Hidden Secrets
A data analyst, a baker, and two ex-operatives must turn a quiet cottage into a high-tech fortress, discovering
that the most dangerous crossed wires aren’t in the walls, but in their own complicated pasts.
The safehouse woke like an old dog: slow stretch, reluctant joints, a low electrical groan travelling the bones of the place. Logan had the basement door propped with his boot and his shoulders in the rack, tracing crossed cable runs with the tenderness other men reserved for wedding china. “Whoever mothballed this did it left-handed,” he coaxed a stubborn BNC into place. He wore his ever-present sunglasses even underground, which would have been ridiculous on anyone else. On him, it read as policy. Hide the eyes, hide the tells.
Boots echoed down the basement stairs, each step deliberate—measured. Malik appeared in the doorway, a silhouette against the weak overhead bulb. His dark hoodie’s sleeves pushed up, forearms mapped with faint scars and corded muscle. He carried a small Pelican case in one hand, the other tucked in his pocket like he was out for a stroll. He surveyed the room in a slow arc—ceiling corners, junction boxes, the way Logan’s weight shifted on the concrete. His gaze dropped to the rack. One brow lifted almost amused. “Left-handed and colour-blind, looks like.” He set the case on a workbench, flipped the latches. “Brought you a signal analyzer. Might help you figure out which of these rats’ nests is actually live.” Malik crouched beside the breaker panel, watching the line voltage settle. Calm, compact, patient—one hand braced on his knee, the other testing a fuse with a multimeter like a doctor checking a pulse. The chalk stripe on his knuckle was the only sign he’d nicked himself earlier. He hadn’t bothered with a plaster. Cuts heal. Sloppy wiring cooks you. “Main bus is clean, your ‘left-handed’ saboteur also labelled everything like a grownup. Try Aux Two.”
Logan’s head tilted, the overhead bulb catching a dull glint off the sunglasses as he studied Malik’s reflection in the rack’s faceplate. He didn’t turn—kept one hand on the coax, the other hovered near the crimp tool like it was a sidearm. “Colour-blind I could work with. This? This is sabotage disguised as laziness.” He finally straightened, vertebrae popping, and nudged the Pelican case with his arm. Lid was already open: spectrum analyzer, fresh leads, even a roll of self-fusing tape. Not standard issue—personal kit. He whistled low. “Either you’re house-proud or you’re planning to bug the place yourself.” Logan flicked a toggle.
Somewhere in the walls, a relay clunked. The back porch light coughed to life.
The kitchen upstairs hummed with its own rhythm—flour sifting through sieves, butter hissing against hot pans. Pam had rolled up her sleeves, hair in a makeshift bun already half-escaped. Chocolate had splattered her apron, along with what looked suspiciously like kale puree. She hummed off-key to some forgotten 80s track, hips swaying as she rotated a tray of miniature lemon tarts. A faint thump echoed from the basement. She paused mid-whisk; head cocked like a cat that’s heard the can opener. “Bloody hell, they better not be electrocuting themselves down there.” She wiped her hands on a tea towel. If Logan fries himself, I’m not explaining to Dar why her stepbrother smells like burnt bacon. She padded toward the basement door in stocking feet, heels abandoned somewhere near the mixer. Leaning over the railing, she called down: “Everything still attached, boys? Or do I need to call the fire brigade and explain why two grown men were playing with wires in the basement?”
Logan’s shoulders twitched at Pam’s voice—a reflex from too many ops where basement staircases meant trouble. He flicked the basement light switch twice; the bulb overhead stuttered like it was arguing with him. “Still got all my fingers, Pam”. He glanced at Malik, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial mutter. “She’s already planning how to season us if we trip the breaker. Let’s not give her the excuse.” He raised his tone to carry up the stairwell. “We’re nowhere near your ovens either.” Pre-emptively.
Pam’s laugh drifted down the stairs, rich and smoky as caramelized sugar. She leaned over the banister, red curls tumbling forward like spilled wine. “You say that now,” she sang, footsteps retreating across the kitchen tile. If he shocks himself again, I’m making him wear oven mitts to tea.
The office door—still showing the scars of Logan’s hasty repairs—sat just off the kitchen like a secret. The overcrowded storage room had been cleared out the day before, and Dar claimed it before sunrise, hauling in her new desk while the house slept, cinching cable ties with the quiet click of satisfaction, arranging seven black notebooks in a perfect line like ammunition. She stood surveying it as dawn rose, faint steam from her coffee rising to her chin. The new black device sat on a rubber mat on the desk—matte, dense, heavier than it looked. Next to it, resting in a shallow cradle, was the wafer-thin tablet Veyr had handed her at the meeting. The two weren’t redundant; they were partners. The laptop-shaped core handled the work—secure computations, data analysis—while the tablet acted as a courier, bringing fresh encrypted datasets like a messenger that never spoke. When placed side by side, a soft pulse of light shimmered between them, a brief handshake of mutual recognition before going dark.
Twigs had sniffed the tablet and batted it with her paws; the pulse flared. Dar winced, shooing the cat off the desk. “You set off a state secret, and you’re cleaning it up.”
She pressed her thumb on the biometric pad. The screen opened with a faint glyph—a veiled eye — the word SIBYL breathing once before fading. Her office filled with the low hum of the processor. No Wi-Fi. No ports. Just her and the machine.
Leaning back, Dar stared at the tablet as morning light hit the window. Veyr’s voice lingered: Everything you need is here. Not everything she wanted—but a start.
The intel packet from Veyr lay open on her tablet—encrypted files that had taken forty minutes to decrypt and properly verify.
Three names. Three faces stared back at her from surveillance photos and passport scans.
Dmitri Kozlov. The photo showed him outside a restaurant in Vienna, checking his phone. Mid-fifties, heavy-set, with steel-grey thinning hair combed over a broad Slavic face. Eyes like cold water that never thawed. Former GRU, now private sector. Arms trafficking. Human cargo routes through the Balkans. Financial ties to terrorist cells and parliamentary aides alike.
Six years. Nine countries.
Dar’s mind didn’t read it as pursuit. It read it as expansion.
The second: Dr Natasha Volkov, thirty-eight. Younger than Dar expected. Pharmaceutical researcher turned biological weapons consultant. Cambridge-educated. Five languages. Modified pathogens deployed where accountability went to die.
Casualty estimates ranged from two thousand to five thousand.
The range itself was the point.
The third photograph made her stomach tighten.
Marcus Ashford.
British. Eton. Oxford. Sandhurst. Exemplary service record, past tense. Late fifties, distinguished in that particularly British way, silver hair and expensive suits. MI6 pedigree, supposedly retired. His photo was the most recent, taken at some diplomatic function in Brussels, champagne flute in hand.
Now a broker. Weapons. Conflicts. Children turned into line items.
Connections in Parliament. The Ministry of Defence. A redacted note that made Dar’s pulse spike.
One of ours.
Beneath the photographs sat a single paragraph.
TASK FORCE 983 — OPERATIONAL DIRECTIVE ALPHA.
Immediate interdiction. Suspended protocols. Flexible engagement. Minimal legal constraints. No oversight. Permanent neutralisation.
Collateral considerations secondary.
Dar pulled her hair back into a messy bun and started typing.
A soft noise from the kitchen—Pam’s singing, Logan’s quiet reply from the basement. Living people doing living things. Grounding. Dar rolled her shoulders, cracked her knuckles, and looked at the cold coffee mug she would need to replenish. The matte casing of her new device reflected nothing. Neither did Dar when she first lifted the lid, like breaking a seal. No fieldwork, she reminded herself, pulse kicking as the boot sequence scrolled in a language she wasn’t sure was entirely English. Patterns. People. The map behind the monsters.
Logan’s soldering iron hovered over a stubborn capacitor, the newly installed LED lights throwing long shadows across the comms rack. He didn’t look up when Malik spoke—just exhaled a thin stream of smoke from the cigarette clamped between his teeth. The green LED flickered. Once. Twice. Then steady. “Aux Three’s a tease. Keeps flirting with red like it’s got commitment issues.” He tapped the multimeter against his palm, eyes narrowing at the readout. The basement smelled of ozone and old dust—familiar, almost comforting. Like a foxhole that hadn’t collapsed yet.
Malik’s fingers paused on the stripped wire; knuckles smeared with graphite and dust. He kept his eyes on the junction box, but Pam’s voice caused a small smile. He exhaled slowly. Four count in, four count out. The habit was older than most of his scars. He twisted the final copper strand into position and knocked on the comms rack with the back of his hand. A single green LED blinked alive—shaky but holding. He glanced at Logan, brow raised. “Aux Three.”
From upstairs, Pam’s voice rose in an off-key crescendo. Something about butter and betrayal. Logan smirked, voice low. “She’s making lemon bars. If we trip the breaker, she’ll weaponize the tray.” He glanced toward the stairwell, then back to the rack. His voice dropped further, just for Malik. “Dar’s been quiet. Too quiet. That office of hers—feels like a war room.” She’s not just reading files. She’s building something. Logan toggled.
The rack hummed a note lower. An old fan caught and levelled out. A faint, familiar snow of static whispered through the room, like a radio tuning between storms.
Malik’s spine registered it before his head did. Not the sound exactly—the shape of it. A narrow band hiss buried under a broader wash, a particular cadence of interference you didn’t learn from manuals. Hello, trouble. He swallowed, and the basement dropped away. —
Heat that burned your lungs raw with every gasp. Diesel and dust choking the air, the desperate tin-can screech of failing radios under a sky bleached white as bone. Djibouti, first summer out of the Regiment. They’d called it a “training exchange” in the briefing room. It turned into a bloodbath before anyone could rewrite the orders.
Malik—fresh Corporal stripes still biting into his skin—maps three sniper nests and twelve kill zones in the heartbeat it takes for a sweat bee to drill into the back of his neck. The cheap drone overhead shreds comms to static and visibility to zero. Every time someone keys a handset, that teeth-grinding aluminum static rips through their earpieces like a blade.
Captain Calder stalks through hell like he owns the lease. Bone-dry. Mirrored sunglasses reflecting death. So that’s where Ward stole it. He marks the same rooftops, the same kill zones, then slams the scope into Malik’s palm with three words that save his life: “Hawk. Eyes. Now.”
The call sign brands him before the bullet can. Malik catches the flash—metal glinting, air shimmering wrong—and hurls his team to cover milliseconds before the round tears through where his skull had been, so close he feels its heat kiss his scalp.
Calder glances over, face carved from granite. “You think too fast to die stupid. Keep it.”
Later, when the heat relents and the dead are counted, Calder writes Hawk on a battered Pelican case with a paint pen. Unnecessary. Permanent anyway.
—
Malik’s voice was flat. “Ward. That hiss again. Aux Two’s filtering’s junk. Kill it or we’ll cross-talk into the house net.”
Logan’s gloved thumb hovered over the aux switch, listening to the hiss like a confession. He killed the channel with a soft click, the static dying like breath held too long. “Copy.” He didn’t ask how Malik knew. He rarely asked why with Malik. Man hears electricity like music. Let him conduct. He broke the loop and re-routed the feed. The hiss dulled but didn’t die.
It thinned, edges turning ethereal, while—upstairs—Dar’s device reset like something prodded with a pin. Her screen lit with a bloom of code and a single discreet glyph in the corner: a veiled, stylized eye. For a moment, the word SIBYL appeared on the login banner, faint as breath on glass. Dar froze, the word catching in her throat. “Shit.” She slammed the laptop closed hard enough to rattle the desk. Her pulse hammered in her fingertips.
Twigs let out an indignant screech and stomped across the desk in protest.
Pam’s wooden spoon clattered against the mixing bowl as the electronic squawk drifted up from the basement. She wiped her hands on her apron, leaving streaks of chocolate across the vintage fabric. “Bloody hell, sounds like they’re torturing a fax machine down there.” She knocked and pushed the door open without waiting, carrying a cooling rack like a shield, glancing toward the basement door, then back at Dar. “Christ on a cracker, if they fry the circuits, I’ll be baking by candlelight.”
Dar’s response, “It’s nothing,” came out before she could think. Not nothing. Very much not nothing. “It’s only a…network handshake. The boys are doing a thing.”
Pam’s eyes narrowed, focusing on Dar’s evasive response, and she saw that her friend’s knuckles had become white as she gripped the laptop. “Right. Network handshake.” She drew out the words as if tasting spoiled cream, moving closer until her hip bumped the desk. “Darla Montgomery, you’ve been my best mate since we were fifteen and you lied to Sister Margaret about who put the frog in the holy water. Your ‘nothing’ face looks exactly like your ‘someone’s about to die’ face.”
With a sheepish expression, Dar simply offered a small smile and shrugged her shoulders.
Pam lifted the rack, retreating to the kitchen. “Right then. Network handshakes require carbohydrates. Science.”
In the basement, Logan heard the upstairs yowl and grimaced. “We just spooked the cat.”
Malik’s fingers froze on the signal tracer, the protest from upstairs cutting through the basement’s low hum like a tripwire. He didn’t need to see Dar’s screen to know what just woke up. “We spooked something.” He listened to the harmonics settle as if the house were a violin. “Give it a minute.”
They did. The tone faded into a low, serviceable thrum. Power bars blinked steadily green. The rack breathed.
Logan rolled his shoulders back and climbed the stairs.
Malik followed, wiping his hands on a shop towel, leaving fingerprint traces of dust.
The kitchen smelled like lemon and butter because Pam had decided anxiety needed sugar. She thrust a scone at Logan without breaking eye contact. “If you bleed on the floor I’m making you sign the tile.”
Logan took the scone without looking, eyes already tracking Dar’s posture—shoulders too tight—fingers drumming Morse code against the tabletop. “I’m fine.” He took a bite like compliance was against his religion. Not bad. Infuriating to admit. He angled his head toward Dar’s office. “How’s your… network handshake?” He smirked and wiped crumbs from his mouth with the back of his hand, voice low. He moved to the kitchen doorway, positioning himself where he could see both the laptop screen and the hall. Sunglasses stayed on—habit—but his gaze sharpened.
Pam was already moving before Logan finished speaking. Her heels pounded the tile as she rounded the counter; her fingers grabbed the rolling pin without looking. She planted herself between Dar and the men by her doorway like a red-haired sentinel, arms crossed over her flour-dusted apron. “Christ on a cracker, you’re all wound tighter than my mixer on brioche setting.” Her emerald eyes flicked from Dar’s white knuckles to Logan’s rigid stance, then to Malik’s tactical positioning. She caught the way Malik’s hand hovered near his weapon, and her jaw tightened.
Her voice dropped to a register that made her bakery staff scatter. “Dar, love, your laptop’s making noises my ovens never dreamed of. Either we’re about to have a very expensive paperweight, or someone’s knocking on doors they shouldn’t be.” The rolling pin tapped against her palm in steady rhythm—one, two, three—matching her heartbeat. The lemon-butter scent seemed sharper now, cutting through the voltage. “Right. Ground rules since apparently this charming murder-cottage is back in business.” She pointed at Logan. “No detonations without twenty-four hours’ notice and a permission slip.” A finger at Malik. “If you’re going to string wires through the ceiling, colour-code them like God intended.” A thumb over her shoulder at Dar. “And our resident brain, who is absolutely not doing anything shady in that office, gets first go at the kettle. My scones require precise tannin balance.”
Logan glanced at Dar, noting the tremor she tried to hide. His jaw tightened. “Copy, no grenades, label crayons, tea for Sib—” He coughed into the back of his hand, covering the syllable, turned it into “sister.” Nice save, idiot.
Dar lifted her mug, tilting it to catch the light as if fascinated by some imperfection, then stood and drifted toward the kitchen sink. He heard the ping. Of course he did. The warning from Veyr’s handler blipped across her memory: Speak only on cleared lines. Assume your own kitchen is listening. She set the mug down and found a smile. “Since the house is apparently a submarine again,” she raised an eyebrow, “do I get to paint the office door?” Light tone. Casual. The question underneath was heavy as an anchor. Was any of this ever really mine?
Logan’s eyes flicked to the office door, then back to Dar. The question hung in the air like cordite. He knew what she was really asking—if she still had a place here, if any of them did. Logan took his sunglasses off for the first time all day and laid them on the counter with care. “It’s your office,” he shrugged. “Door locks from the inside. We’ll upgrade the glazing and the line. You tell us what you need. Office stays. You stay. House is still yours, Dar. We’re just… boarding up the windows. And if anyone tries to tell you otherwise, they’ll find out what a 5.56 tastes like.” Deadpan delivery, but the promise is real. I’ve killed for less. I’ll do it again.
There it is. Dar thought. The thing he never says out loud: I couldn’t save you then. I can armour you now.
Pam clapped once; the crisis manager came to life. “Splendid. Ownership settled. Now—someone tell me why the lights dimmed like a haunted brothel five minutes ago.” She wiped her hands on her apron, moving to stand beside Dar—close enough that their shoulders brushed. The scent of butter and herbs clung to her like armour.
“Temporary load, we’re stable.” For the moment. Malik drifted to the doorway of Dar’s office and looked, not at the laptop, but at the desk itself: the tidy stacks, the notebooks labelled in her neat forensic hand. Victimology. Patterns. Noise. One corner held a single photograph of a girl on a bicycle, hair a dark flag behind her. His jaw set and eased. You don’t say the names of ghosts. You make room for their chairs. The tone that had triggered his memory pricked the air again—sofa-soft, nothing to catch unless you’d been listening for years. He touched the door frame with two fingers—a private superstition.
A message bubble flashed and vanished beneath Dar’s closed lid—a system test from nowhere she would admit existed.
Pam sniffed the air like a bloodhound. “Who turned on the drama? Honestly, you lot could melt steel with how hard you’re not saying things.” She slid a plate of scones toward them, a peace offering and a bribe. “Eat. If we’re going to run a clandestine knitting circle out of this kitchen, I’m implementing a pastry tax.”
Logan took another bite because refusing would have been war. “Tax accepted.”
Dar reached for a scone and felt her hands steady around it. “Thank you.” She gave Pam a small smile. For being the unclassified file we all read from.
Pam’s fingers found Dar’s wrist, a pulse-check disguised as affection. The scone crumbled between them like a treaty written in butter. “Obviously.” She rubbed slow circles with her thumb, the way she’d done when her daughters had nightmares. “Now someone tell me what colour we’re painting that door if it’s going to be the Panic Room for Spies. I’m thinking ‘Bureaucratic Beige.’ Or ‘Secrets Grey.'” Her eyes flicked to Logan—still chewing, still pretending he wasn’t cataloguing every tremor in the room. Then to Malik, standing guard over ghosts. The whole bloody lot of them is a recipe for cardiac arrest.
Logan finished the scone in two bites, brushing crumbs from his fingers with the same precision he used clearing a mag. He leaned back against the counter, arms folded, eyes tracking the room like he’s reading grid coordinates. “Paint it whatever colour hides blood spatter best. I’m partial to ‘Tactical Taupe’ myself.” He caught Pam’s look—equal parts maternal and murderous—and raised an eyebrow. She’s defusing with domesticity. Smart.
“Hawk gets veto.” Logan nodded at Malik. “He has to look at it when we drill.”
The tone was gone—again—but the memory lingered like smoke. “Matte. No glare. And not grey.” Malik gave Dar a tiny smile. “Something that reads warm.” He picked up a scone without tasting it. Something to do with his hands.
Dar felt it land and fold into a small, stubborn part of her that hadn’t known it needed shelter. “Terracotta.”
They ate warm scones while the house hummed like a thing pleased to be used. Outside, the Wye made its indifferent way past the trees, and inside—for the first time in weeks—the air didn’t taste like waiting.
Later, after Pam had left, threatening to monogram everyone’s tea towels, the safehouse settled into its new rhythms.
In the basement, Logan labelled one last cable with the focus of a man performing surgery. He peeled the tape straight, pressed it true, and stepped back to admire the clean lines. Everything that could be aligned, was. He touched the breaker panel once—a benediction—and killed the work lights.
Just off the kitchen, behind a door that would soon be terracotta, Dar opened her laptop in the blue-dark. The veiled eye regarded her with impersonal patience as an encrypted tunnel bloomed across her screen like ink in water.
SIBYL: LINK ESTABLISHED.
She exhaled. Typed. The house didn’t flinch.
Upstairs, Malik stood alone in the kitchen and listened to the quiet change shape. There—that little static hair at the edge of the soundscape. The signature he’d been tracking all night. Not dangerous. Just familiar. He closed his eyes and heard Djibouti’s white sky, the aluminum shriek of bad comms, Calder’s dry voice cutting through: ‘You think too much to die stupidly. Keep it.’
“Aye, Captain,” he murmured to the memory. Then, softer, to the house itself: “We’ll keep it.”
The safehouse hummed. The crossed wires—for once, and maybe for good—held.
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