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 as his hands steepled beneath his chin in a gesture that betrayed deep concentration. The tension around his mouth hardened with every passing second as his eyes re-read the text again.
“What if it’s not Ashford?” he spoke to no one in particular, his words loaded with significance. “What if Dar got it wrong?”
Exhaling through his nose, Rhys leaned back in his chair. The movement was controlled—everything about him screamed an effort to keep his composure intact despite the storm brewing behind his eyes. If Ashford wasn’t their problem, then someone else was. Someone close. That changed everything—the geometry of their entire operation shifted into something darker and 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, caught off guard by the interruption but quick to recover. His voice dropped lower, instinctively cautious now that he wasn’t alone. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.” he acknowledged Callum’s presence. “And leaks don’t happen by accident.” His fingers drummed on the table—slow, measured taps that mirrored his tone. “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 throbbed with tension since his arrival a week prior, its intensity growing daily. Callum could taste it—anticipation, exhaustion, the metallic bite of adrenaline that never quite dissipated. The atmosphere crackled with anticipation, much like the calm before a storm’s fury. It was familiar.
That second night, after dinner, Logan expressed his satisfaction that Dar possessed someone who comprehended her actions, her findings concerning patterns. Pam watched him with careful eyes but offered fresh pastries almost every morning. Sean was Sean—friendly to everyone, no exceptions. Even Malik’s distance felt impersonal, the same cool reserve he showed the others.
Rhys was different.
Rhys watched him like a threat assessment that never quite resolved.
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, the vibration rattling against the wood as he tugged on his running shirt. He glanced at it. Dar’s text was brief and cryptic: “Office, please.”
Just those two words, devoid of explanation or context. But that was how Dar operated. She didn’t waste time with pleasantries or unnecessary details. She trusted him to follow her lead without question.
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. That’s a mirror. Ashford isn’t receiving intel from inside our network.” Each word precise. Dispelling Rhys’s conjecture of an inside leak. “He’s broadcasting it out. Or someone working with him. That’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 voice his thoughts aloud, another voice interrupted through their secure comms channel—a familiar one laced with sharp precision and enough disdain to remind them all who held seniority here.
“Ashford as lure,” Veyr’s voice crackled faintly before stabilising into clarity, “means someone upstream is feeding just enough intel to dangle at you.” There was a pause; background noise suggested she was on the move—footsteps muted behind her words.
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, drawn by the gravity of her statement, his eyes scanning the scrolling data. The dim light caught the faint crease between his brows—a telltale sign that his mind was already running several moves ahead, piecing together fragments of a puzzle he hadn’t even seen in full yet.
The sharp gleam in her eyes as she glanced at him again spoke of relentless determination. “We could stop running clean,” she contemplated. “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.”
Her words dropped into the quiet like stones into deep water—ripples undulating outward with unspoken implications. 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—a symphony of false panic woven seamlessly into fabricated gaps and noise.
“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—a smirk that didn’t quite reach his eyes.
“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.”
With surprising heft, the words infused the atmosphere, leaving a profound and enduring intensity.
“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.
Meantime there was work to do.
Preparations that couldn’t wait.
Waiting was over.
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