Countdown to Chaos: A Game of Strategy and Secrets
With impending chaos, calculations sharpen, alliances fracture, and the line between player and pawn in the game of strategy blurs.
Callum saw no need to look back. The silent house behind him felt taut with unspoken tension, the same hush he’d seen a dozen times when an operation unravelled for reasons beyond skill or secrecy.
He thought of Rhys and Dar.
In the briefing room, their silence had been intentional, measured, a quiet charged with every unspoken boundary two people erect when they know exactly where the tripwires lie. He inhaled, the fog swirling around his exhale like a wisp of memory.
He’d watched it play out in other circumstances, with other faces. Proximity turning to friction. Trust erodes not from betrayal but from that unspoken need to stake a claim, to mark territory. Rhys never glanced his way once during the meeting. Intentionally. Dar’s neutral tone was so careful, even her attention fixed on the screens as though afraid to let her eyes wander toward him.
Callum ran as he hit the river path. He knew exactly what had happened when he crouched beside her this morning to tend her ankle: the rush of heat that had nothing to do with exertion, the slight catch in her breath as his thumb pressed just above the bone. He knew too what Rhys had seen when he descended those stairs—not proof, but possibility. The danger lay not in past events, but in future possibilities, a realisation shared silently between them.
At the bridge, Callum stopped, checked his phone without really seeing it, then slipped it back into his pocket. The smarter play would be distance: keep it clean, keep it strictly professional, avoid becoming the wedge driving their operation apart. But distance offered no solution. Dar had let him close enough to see her fatigue, her quiet pain, to see the woman behind the analyst’s mask. And Rhys had noticed. He’d noticed she’d stopped inviting him into that space.
He turned and walked back toward his flat, footsteps muffled on the pavement. He didn’t know whether what lay between Dar and Rhys was unfinished business or simply unspoken. All he knew was that when two people who’ve circled each other realise someone else shares their orbit, someone always gets burned. He only prayed it wouldn’t be her.
Veyr leaned back from her holoscreen, fingertips still hovering over the authorisation terminal. The call with Dar had just ended, but she wasted no time. She flicked open the first file: personnel. A concise profile of the GCHQ liaison officer assigned to the Ashford monitoring detail—a signals analyst named Porter, cleared for lateral access to restricted feeds without raising audit flags. Veyr tagged Porter to receive a briefing on the Volkov signature patterns alone: minimal context, maximum focus. Her directive was two sentences at most, explicit enough to get the job done. Porter would have it within the hour.
Next, she pulled up the logistics roster. They’d need people ready to move fast if the intercept proved Ashford was coordinating things. Her screen showed the Brussels surveillance team was available—two field agents with solid cover stories who could get to London quickly, or wherever Ashford might show up. She marked them as on standby. She didn’t need to explain why. They’d get it.
The third file was about keeping their operation secret. Ashford had connections everywhere—banks, shipping, major companies. One wrong move would tip him off. Veyr’s solution? A backup plan that could activate separately from their main investigation into Volkov. She put Calder in charge of this shadow operation. He wouldn’t like being kept in the dark about the bigger picture, but he’d follow orders without complaint.
She lingered for a moment over the draft message, then hit send. Seventy-two hours—maybe less—was all they had before Volkov made her next move. Veyr closed the files and rose, crossing to the window. Below, the city lights bled into the low clouds. Somewhere, Volkov was deciding whether to grasp a lifeline or let it slip away. Twenty years of practice told Veyr she sat on the edge of a breakpoint. She tapped open her next contingency list and got back to work.
Volkov felt it before she could name it.
Not a breach. Not a failure. Minimal opposition occurred where zero should exist. A delay in confirmation. A query that took half a second longer to resolve than it should have.
Most people would have missed it.
Volkov did not.
She sat alone in her hotel room, laptop open but untouched, the city beyond the window still dark enough to pretend it was sleeping. She had reduced her footprint to the minimum viable surface. Cut discretionary exposure. Locked down couriers she no longer trusted. The system was stable.
Too stable.
She reviewed the overnight reports again, not looking for errors but for absence. No alerts. No irregularities. No friction she could point to.
And yet.
The pressure hadn’t vanished.
It had redistributed.
Volkov shut her laptop, rose, walked the room once, then paused by the window. Years ago, she would have reached for a burner phone. For a cutout. For one of the men who specialised in making problems violent.
She did none of that now.
Violence was crude. Temporary. It attracted attention.
This required something else.
THURSDAY
Unable to sleep, Dar finally rose at 02:17 to review the contingency file she’d crafted. Her model predicted with 92 percent confidence that Volkov would use Ashford’s secure channel—but that eight-percent gap was lethal. If Volkov bypassed digital routes, she’d fall back on proximity: those unrecorded walks Ashford took between meetings, thirty minutes of quiet conversation through London’s din. Dar had mapped seventeen such walks; four had correlated with shifts in Volkov’s tempo. Volkov would seek him out in the next seventy-two hours.
Dar had two of Veyr’s Brussels operatives in London now. They would follow Ashford along his usual routes, watching and ready with cameras to catch any meetings. They wouldn’t step in—just gather proof. She’d also set up facial recognition, flagged license plates, and tracked credit cards around these areas. If Volkov showed up, they’d spot her. If not, the entire system would disappear without a trace, leaving no evidence of Dar’s careful planning.
However, Dar understood reliance solely on intercepts was unwise. She opened another workspace and built a simpler trap. People changed their habits when they were about to meet. They cancelled appointments. They booked last-minute travel. They switched to burner phones. They took different routes. They shifted their regular schedules. Dar programmed the system to watch for these tells. Any three changes within six hours would trigger an alert. Not proof of contact—just a strong hunch. But enough to force Ashford’s hand and expose his connection to Volkov.
Finally, Dar opened the file she dreaded most: Contingency C. This last-resort plan was simple but brutal. If they lost track of Volkov and couldn’t get to Ashford, they’d leak sensitive information to Kozlov’s enemies. Kozlov would then cut ties with anyone who might be a liability—including Volkov. This action defied Dar’s beliefs regarding source safeguarding; however, it generated sufficient disorder for the team to infiltrate.
Dar saved the protocol under a bland header, encrypted with a key only she held, then closed every window. Three layers of defence, three failure modes covered, three levels of acceptable loss. She sat in the dark, heart steady, waiting to see which thread Volkov would pull first.
Dar glanced at the clock. Callum would get up for their run. Upon hearing Rhys go downstairs, she closed the laptop and left.
Rhys stood in the equipment room, his hands atop the steel bench, making no contact.
The room smelled faintly of oil and canvas, a scent so familiar it barely registered anymore. The racks were arranged as they habitually were. Packs squared away. Weapons locked. Everything where it belonged.
Which meant there was nothing to do.
That, more than anything, set his teeth on edge.
He’d been awake since before dawn, moving through the house without noise, habit guiding him through coffee, through a quiet circuit of rooms that didn’t need checking. This location, where readiness felt real, drew him downward. Where control lived.
Today it didn’t.
He picked up a rifle, checked it without really looking, then set it back as he’d found it. No call had come down. No tasking. No green light or red line. Just a waiting posture that felt like holding breath with a full pack on.
This phase always was the worst.
Not the planning. Not the execution. The space before, when instinct screamed prepare and discipline said not yet.
Footsteps sounded at the basement bedroom doorway. He didn’t turn.
“Everything good?” Malik was casual, careful.
“Routine,” it came out too easily. “Just checking the rotation.” There was a pause. Rhys sensed the unspoken question. When do we spin up? What aren’t you telling us?
Malik nodded and moved on to go upstairs. Rhys waited until the sound faded before exhaling.
He wasn’t lying. That was the problem. He just wasn’t telling the whole truth.
Because the truth wasn’t operational yet.
The truth was a woman in an office off the kitchen watching a system decide whether to protect itself or expose its architect. The truth was a seventy-two-hour window that hadn’t been written anywhere official. When this escalated, it would kill people discreetly, without asking permission.
One hand swept Rhys’s face; he then reclined upon the bench.
This wasn’t muscle. He’d said it yesterday, and it had lodged like a stone in his chest. This was ballast. Structural mass. The threat you didn’t charge. You mapped it. You waited for it to move first.
Waiting kept individuals outside the blast zone until firm ground existed.
He hated that part.
He returned up the stairs to the kitchen, his gaze drifting, unbidden, toward the door that led to Dar’s office. He hadn’t gone in. Not since the briefing. He spoke his piece clearly, then departed, preventing the quiet from compounding distress.
I’m standing.
He’d meant it.
But standing still while someone else carried the weight felt dangerously close to the mistake he’d just apologised for.
Rhys straightened, rolling his shoulders once, then again. He ran through contingencies in his head, not because they were needed yet, but because they anchored him. If this went active, he knew who he’d pull first. Who he’d keep blind. Who could be trusted with partial truth and who needed the whole ugly picture to function.
None of that had happened yet.
His task, for the moment, involved maintaining stillness.
He glanced at the clock.
Still no call.
Still no movement.
Rhys pushed off the counter, his steps measured, expression already locked down. Whatever came next would come fast. He knew that. He could feel it in the way the day refused to settle.
Until then, he would hold the line.
Even if holding it meant trusting someone else to pull the trigger, he couldn’t yet see.
He paused outside Dar’s door, hand lifting as if to knock, then stopping short.
Not yet.
He let it fall and walked on; the house closing behind him as the waiting continued.
Callum woke before his alarm and lay still, not asleep, not awake. Just waiting. He thought about Dar, despite himself.
Not sentimentally. Practically. The way she’d clocked the anomaly earlier and gone utterly still, like a hunting dog locking onto scent. The way she minimised her own pain because acknowledging it felt inefficient. The way she carried weight because she assumed no one else should have to.
He didn’t like that she was alone with it.
He disliked even more that mending this required disrupting Rhys’s delicate balance, maintained through his willpower.
He rolled out of bed and crossed to the window. Across the street, the running trail cut a dark line through the trees, damp from overnight mist. No one on it yet. Too early for the regulars. Perfect.
Callum dressed and checked his phone. Nothing.
She’d be waiting for him. He was sure of that.
He began a jog to their meeting point; needing relief from the persistent restlessness that returned with him from Berlin.
Waiting always did this to him.
Not waiting for orders. That was familiar. Comfortable, even. It was waiting for someone else to decide, and that set his teeth on edge. In Berlin, everything had been bounded. There had been a threat, a plan, a window to act inside.
Here, the window was invisible.
A woman he’d never met was deciding whether to reach upward for protection. A man he’d never seen was sitting inside systems designed to absorb pressure without changing shape. And everyone who understood the implications was standing still, by necessity, pretending the ground wasn’t already shifting.
Callum ran contingencies anyway because that was what he did when he couldn’t act. If Ashford moved. If Volkov bolted. Should the intercept arrive during the worst possible hour. He stopped himself halfway through planning an operation that didn’t exist and forced the thoughts down.
That way lay mistakes.
This was the part they never taught you to talk about. The stretch where discipline meant restraint instead of motion. When readiness was internal and unapparent, the worst action involved manufacturing an event to end the waiting period.
Callum exhaled and headed over the bridge.
Whatever came next would move fast. He was certain of that.
Until then, his job was simple.
Be ready.
Don’t force it.
And don’t cross the street until it mattered.
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