Strategies for Survival in a Dangerous Game
The team of operatives discovers their enemy isn’t receiving leaked intelligence but is being used as bait by an unknown party
monitoring their operational patterns, forcing them to devise counter-strategies.
Rhys & Callum
The kitchen was quiet, save for the buzz of electronics and the creak of old floorboards under shifting weight. Hunched over his laptop, Rhys’s face was illuminated by the pale blue glow of the screen. The early morning hours clung to him; dawn was still a distant promise outside the window. He scrolled through Dar’s follow-up message, each line tightening the knot in his stomach. His gut reaction wasn’t panic—it was something colder, sharper: recognition.
His elbows rested on the surface, fingers pressed flat against the desk as he read the text a second time, then a third. His jaw shifted slightly to one side.
“What if it’s not Ashford?” he said. “What if Dar got it wrong?”
Rhys leaned back in his chair, a slow, deliberate movement. He stared at the ceiling for a long moment before his gaze dropped. If Ashford wasn’t their problem, then someone else was. Someone close. The thought landed like a stone, shifting the entire geometry of their operation into something darker, more dangerous.
His gaze drifted out the kitchen window, where the shadowed outline of tree branches swayed against the night sky. The house seemed motionless; even Dar had succumbed to sleep an hour earlier—a rare mercy she desperately needed. Good, she needs it.
His thoughts churned. That packet timing—if someone’s feeding Ashford our rhythm… we’re exposed. The realisation settled over him.
“We need to break it” his words were firm, not meant for anyone else—not even Twigs, who had curled up contentedly on his socked feet, unaware of Rhys’ growing unease.
Callum appeared in the doorway—a silhouette carved against the warm glow emanating from the hallway light behind him.
“You’re saying it’s a leak?” Callum spoke finally—not accusatory, but probing.
Rhys glanced up, his focus shifting instantly. His voice dropped, instinctively cautious now that he wasn’t alone. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. And leaks don’t happen by accident.” His fingers began a slow, measured drumbeat on the table. “Someone’s handing him our playbook.”
Callum stepped further in but stopped short of sitting down, remaining upright as his gaze remained fixed on Rhys—not judging, but assessing.
Rhys’s eyes were cold when they met Callum’s. “We change the rhythm. Now. Not tomorrow. We move before he does.”
Callum didn’t flinch under Rhys’s scrutiny; instead, he tilted his head as though considering something unspoken. “Who’s still breathing that shouldn’t be?”
The question hung suspended.
Rhys didn’t hesitate. “Logan’s solid,” he began, ticking off names like pieces on a chessboard being evaluated for their positions. “He’d burn this house down before he’d leak intel.” His tone was cold and precise. “Malik—he’s capable but too honourable for this kind of betrayal… Sean’s still learning our rhythm; his loyalty is to Dar first and foremost.” Another pause followed—a beat longer this time—as Rhys’s jaw tightened. “Pam? She’s outside the wire completely.”
His words slowed now. “That leaves people who’ve seen the packets but don’t carry them.” He looked directly at Callum. “Someone with access—not authority.”
Rhys pushed back from the table, sending Twigs darting toward the stairs indignantly at being so rudely disturbed. The scrape of chair legs against tile echoed in the otherwise silent kitchen.
“Stroud.” Rhys stood and squared himself toward Callum. His expression hardened further as he delivered his next question with deadly seriousness: “Who’s the one person you’d never suspect?”
Callum’s jaw set for only an instant—enough for Rhys to catch it—before he forced himself to respond.
“Me,” Callum had paused momentarily, long enough to feel natural, “or you.”
Rhys stared at him hard before speaking again—and when he did, his voice was low and unyielding.
“If it were you…” He took a step closer so there could be no mistaking his meaning behind those words. “…we’d already be dead.”
Rhys pivoted, heading out into the hallway with purpose radiating from every step.
A couple of hours later, with dawn approaching, Callum was pulling his running shirt on.
The safehouse felt coiled, a spring wound tighter with each day since his arrival. He saw it in the way Logan watched him and Dar trade notes, a look of grudging approval in his eyes. He saw it in Pam’s sharp, assessing glances over the pastries she delivered each morning. Only Sean’s easy humor seemed unchanged, a thin veneer over the hum of anticipation.
But Rhys was different. He watched Callum with the unwavering focus of a threat assessment that never seemed to resolve, his gaze a constant, low-grade pressure.
Every morning, he and Dar ran together at dawn, a routine that had become their anchor prior to this uneasy arrangement. Rhys had extended an invitation on that first day—casual on the surface, but with an edge Callum couldn’t quite name—suggesting they all run together, him and Logan included. Callum had declined, as did Dar. After they’d declined again on the second day, Rhys had stopped asking.
But the resentment hung in the air whenever Rhys looked at him, unspoken but impossible to ignore. Probably didn’t help that Callum wasn’t interested in proving himself to someone who’d already decided not to trust him. His job brought him here, though truthfully, he felt a sense of contentment again, nearer Dar, nearer the rest of them. He hadn’t realized he had missed those early days being on a team. That was it.
But Rhys didn’t see it that way—Rhys saw an outsider who’d claimed Dar’s loyalty, who kept his distance, who disrupted something Rhys thought he understood.
He wasn’t wrong.
Callum’s phone buzzed on the dresser. He glanced at the screen as he pulled on his shirt. The text was from Dar, brief and to the point: “Office, please.”
It was all she needed to say. He knew better than to waste time with questions.
Without replying, he pocketed the phone, grabbed his trainers, and headed downstairs.
As he entered the kitchen, he spotted Rhys at the counter, stirring a mug of something steaming. The tension in Rhys’s shoulders was subtle but noticeable—an alertness that hadn’t been there moments ago.
Rhys jerked his chin toward the short hallway leading to the office. “Office. Now.” He didn’t wait for acknowledgement or questions; he turned on his heel and strode toward the office door.
Strategy
The office was dimly lit when they entered, the only illumination coming from Dar’s laptop screen. Its pale glow cast long shadows across the room, highlighting the tiredness on her face. She sat at the desk in her running clothes—a pair of fitted leggings and an oversized hoodie that hung loosely on her frame. Her hair was pulled back into a messy knot that looked hastily done.
She didn’t acknowledge them right away. Her focus was locked on her screen, fingers tapping at the keyboard with precision born of familiarity.
“A new packet came in.” She gestured toward the monitor without looking up. “I stripped its metadata first thing—standard procedure—but something about it felt… wrong. So I went back to check it against the others we’ve received.”
Dar glanced up at them now, her gaze sharp and assessing. “Look at this.” She swiped across her touchpad, zooming in on a digital map filled with nodes and pathways glowing faintly green against black. Her finger traced one particular route—a subtle detour through an unfamiliar server cluster. “That—right there—”
Rhys moved nearer, examining the anomaly, his eyes scanning it, uncertain of the exact detail he aimed to uncover.
Dar tapped the screen again for emphasis. “That’s not a leak. It’s a mirror. Ashford isn’t receiving intel from inside our network.” Her voice was low and certain. “He’s broadcasting it out. Or someone working with him is. It’s a lure.”
Rhys stiffened at that revelation, staring down at the monitor with renewed intensity as though it might betray a human source. “Broadcasting out…” he repeated before looking back at Dar. “So it’s—it’s bait.”
“Bait,” Dar confirmed. Her gaze darted back to Callum, who looked at the same monitor, accessing the pattern. Before he could speak, their secure comms channel crackled to life.
“Ashford as a lure,” Veyr’s voice cut in, sharp and toneless, “means someone upstream is feeding them just enough intel to dangle at you.”
Her tone shifted—colder now: “Which makes them dangerously close to the architecture.”
“Whoever built this,” Dar paused, her volume lowered but remained resolute, “didn’t leave footprints. They left breadcrumbs.”
As Rhys exhaled—a sound more akin to restrained anger than anything else—he stepped away from where he’d been leaning over Dar’s shoulder moments ago. “Clever.”
Dar resumed typing—her fingers flying across keys faster than Callum could track visually—but moments later, there was an unmistakable edge beneath her measured calm: “They’re not watching us move—they’re watching us not move.”
Dar pulled up a secondary log; the screen glowed dimly as lines of data cascaded down. Each piece of information was a thread in a web she was determined to unravel. Her eyes narrowed as she caught a pattern nestled within the chaos—subtle but unmistakable. She let out a calm exhale.
“If Ashford’s the lure,” her voice, despite steady, had an edge, “they’re not feeding him intel.” She paused, her gaze flicking to Callum. “They’re feeding him us. Our patterns. Our gaps.” Her words were heavy with implication.
Callum’s only response was to step closer, eyes tracking the scrolling data. A crease formed between his brows—shallow at first, then deeper—as the numbers settled into whatever shape his mind was making of them. She watched him work through it, then said, “We could stop running clean. We could run wrong.”
They held each other’s gaze as pretence vanished, leaving only clarity and trust.
His fingers skimmed the desk’s edge as he faced the screen, preparing his words. The timestamps scrolled past with mechanical precision—the idle moments they’d thought were theirs alone now seemed like open wounds exposed under scrutiny. He saw it now: every pause in communication, every lull in activity. The silence hadn’t been theirs alone; it had been observed.
“Run wrong,” he restated, testing the phrase. But then his tone shifted, solidifying into something sharper. “How wrong? Enough to flush them out? Or enough to lead them to believe we’ve broken?”
Dar’s fingers stilled above the keys mid-keystroke. The cursor blinked at her from where it hovered over a phantom server route—a reminder of how much still hung in limbo. She tilted her head back, letting her eyes meet his again as the room’s atmosphere brimmed with coiled tension, ready for sudden release.
“Wrong enough,” her voice carried a dangerous certainty, “that they think we’ve cracked. Enough that they’ll move to fix it.”
Nobody spoke after she said it. She loaded a dummy protocol with practised ease. Her fingers moved fast now—decisive and confident—as an intricate decoy transmission materialised under her hands.
“If they’re tracking our gaps,” her tone paired her razor-sharp focus as she worked, “then we provide them with more than a fissure. We give them a canyon—something so loud it drowns out anything else.” She gave the ghost of a smile over her shoulder to Callum. “Give Ashford something irresistible so he’ll be forced to adapt, allowing us to track the echo.”
Callum stepped closer without realising it, drawn in by the sheer force of her conviction. He leaned forward to watch as the decoy took shape—false panic layered over fabricated gaps and noise, each piece calibrated to mislead.
“You ever run a play where you’re the bait?” Dar didn’t lift her gaze from her tasks as her words took on a teasing challenge wrapped in an invitation.
Callum’s lips curved into what might’ve been called a grin if not for the grim resolve behind it. “Not often,” he lowered his voice. “But I know this much—the fish that bites fastest is always the one that thinks it’s stealing.”
He reached out then, his hand brushing hers as he took control of the trackpad to make an adjustment on the grid she’d pulled up. “Should we be the bait,” he concluded, firm, “we should devise an imperceptible lure.”
He pointed at one particular node on the map she’d built—a phantom point glowing vaguely amidst dozens of others—and tapped it with one finger. “Let them believe we’re hunting Ashford instead of watching their mirror. They’ll tighten their grip on their own reflection—and when they do…” He trailed off before finishing with quiet finality: “…they’ll show us which hand is squeezing.”
Dar granted a single nod, pausing briefly to look at him in confirmation—softer, but no less intense than previously — then returned to her tasks.
Before either could say more, though, Veyr’s input cut through their shared focus—a crisp blend of authority and dispassion snapping through their comms channel.
“That’s the right instinct,” Veyr began after what felt like an eternity of silence on her end. “You’re thinking tactically—but you’re still thinking like civilians.”
A rustle of paper, her fingers flipping through a leather folio. “You don’t tempt a ghost. You starve it. Cut the phantom load at the source. Ashford doesn’t need false panic—he needs to succeed. Let him.”
She paused. A match struck. She exhaled. “Feed him one genuine piece of intel. Something small, verifiable, and utterly useless. He’ll run to his source. The source will run to their handler. And the mirror will flicker—just once—trying to reflect what it thinks you’ve lost.”
“That flicker is your thread. Pull it quietly, and the whole web comes with it. But move now. The longer you wait, the more they adjust. And they’re adjusting faster than you are.”
His arms folded, Rhys had stayed quiet, leaning against the windowsill, catching not just the conversation but the unspoken signals between Dar and Callum. The distant streetlamp from outside painted him in stark shadows, his face unreadable except for the faintest curl at the corner of his mouth—there and gone, like he’d thought of something he had no intention of sharing.
“Veyr’s right.” His words carried an edge of grudging respect, but also something sharper—doubt? Disagreement? It was hard to tell beneath his stoic exterior. He nodded toward Dar without moving from his spot.
“But you’re building a snare when you need a chokepoint.”
Pushing off the sill, he moved forward, space constricting. The floorboards creaked faintly beneath his weight—not enough to be loud, but enough to remind everyone just how close they all were in this cramped space.
“Provide Ashford with something actionable,” Rhys stated, his assurance palpable as he neared Dar.
“A compromised location—something he thinks we’re evacuating.” He stood at the side of her desk, opposite Callum, and planted both hands flat on its surface as he bent forward.
“Then watch who moves first.” His piercing gaze darted between Callum and Dar, as if he were daring either of them to argue. “The source… or the handler.”
“You don’t bait it,” he stated, this time for emphasis. “You burn its fucking house down.”
The words landed with the force of a slammed door, silencing any potential argument. The air in the small office grew thick with the brutal simplicity of his plan.
“You want to burn it down” Dar’s speech, steady, delivered a firm decree. “I want to know who built it first.”
She opened a new window, fingers moving swift and precise. “We feed them something small, something they think we’re protecting. Then we watch their response—see how they scramble to contain it.”
Her eyes landed on Rhys. “They think they’re watching our gaps. Let’s show them a crack worth filling.”
The room held its breath.
Then Rhys nodded—once—and Callum moved toward the door.
There was work to do, preparations that couldn’t wait for morning.
The time for waiting was over.