Crossed Wires & Hidden Secrets
Setting up a new safehouse should be simple for a team of seasoned operatives. But when a mysterious piece of tech awakens something it shouldn’t,
they find the greatest threat might be the ghosts in their own machine, and the only defense is warm scones and unwavering trust.
Hereford
A low electrical groan travelled through the walls, a sound Logan felt in his teeth. He had the basement door propped with his boot, his shoulders crammed into the comms rack as he traced crossed cable runs with the tenderness other men reserved for wedding china. “Whoever mothballed this did it backwards,” he muttered, coaxing a stubborn BNC into place. He wore his sunglasses even underground—ridiculous on anyone else. On him, it was 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 staircase lighting. His dark hoodie’s sleeves pushed up, one forearm pale at the wrist where an old burn had taken the colour out of the skin. He carried a small Pelican case in one hand, the other tucked into his pocket. 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. “Backwards and colour-blind, looks like.” He set the case on a workbench and flipped the latches. “Brought you a signal analyser. Might help you sort out which of these rats’ nests is actually live.” He tilted his head toward the ceiling. “Smells like Pam’s already started something in the kitchen. Lemon, maybe.”
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. 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 backwards saboteur also labelled everything properly. 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. “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 analyser, 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.
Upstairs, just off the kitchen in what previously had been storage, a soft pulse of light shimmered across the new desk—brief, almost imperceptible—as the black device and its tablet companion exchanged a whisper of recognition before going dark again. Dar, who’d been reviewing her notebooks, froze. Her eyes snapped to the device. That wasn’t scheduled.
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 purée. She hummed off-key to some forgotten 80s track, hips swaying as she filled a tray of miniature tart shells. 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 and padded toward the basement door, heels abandoned somewhere near the mixer. The last time Logan had ‘fixed’ the wiring at her bakery, he’d blown three circuits and half a batch of croissants. Leaning over the railing, she called down, “Everything still attached, boys? Or do I need to ring 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 hallway 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. “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 the oven either.” Pre-emptively.
Pam’s laugh drifted down the stairs, rich and smoky as caramelised sugar. She leaned over the banister, red curls tumbling forward. “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 scarred from Logan’s repairs, was closed. Inside, Dar had already arranged seven black notebooks in a perfect line beside the new device Veyr had given her. Earlier, when Twigs had sniffed the tablet and batted it with her paws; the pulse flared. Dar had shooed the cat off the desk. “You set off a state secret, and you’re cleaning it up.”
She pressed her thumb to the laptop’s biometric pad. The screen woke with a veiled eye, the word SIBYL breathing once before fading. No Wi-Fi, no ports—just the low hum of the processor filling the small room. She placed the wafer-thin tablet beside it. A soft pulse of light shimmered between them as the device confirmed the new intel packet. Veyr’s voice lingered in her memory: Everything you need is here. She took a steadying breath. It wasn’t everything she wanted, but it was a start.
The intel packet Veyr provided took forty minutes to decrypt. Forty minutes of watching a progress bar crawl whilst her coffee went cold. Finally, a face materialised from the pixels.
The first face was Mikhail Kozlov, former GRU. Arms trafficking. Human cargo. His network spanned nine countries. A spiderweb of shell corporations and shipping manifests she began to map instinctively. The next file was Dr. Natasha Volkov, a biochemist. Her work had casualty estimates in the thousands, a number so vast it was an abstraction—until Dar cross-referenced a shipping route from Kozlov’s file that ended near a refugee camp Volkov had visited. The abstract number gained faces. Her jaw tightened. The third was Marcus Ashford, photographed at a Brussels function, looking like half the men at her father’s golf club. A broker, turning conflict into profit. She found a payment from one of Ashford’s accounts to a holding company linked to Volkov. It wasn’t just three monsters; it was a machine.
Beneath the files lay the directive. Words that felt like chipped ice:
Immediate interdiction. Permanent neutralisation. Collateral considerations secondary.
Dar’s fingers froze above the keyboard. She read it again. Then a third time. Her hand moved to close the laptop, hesitated, and returned to the keys. This is what you signed up for, she told herself. This is the work. But her throat had gone dry in a way no amount of swallowing would fix, and for a long moment she simply sat there, staring at words that made her complicit.
Finally, she pulled her hair into a tight knot and typed.
Eventually, a soft noise from the kitchen broke through her concentration—Pam’s singing, Logan’s quiet reply from the basement. Living people doing living things. The contrast hit her like cold water: warm voices in a warm kitchen, while she sat here cataloguing death. Grounding, yes—but also jarring. She was part of both worlds now, and the line between them felt thinner than ever.
Dar rolled her shoulders and looked at the cold coffee she’d need to replenish. The matte casing of her new device reflected nothing. Her own expression was equally blank as she lifted the lid. 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.
Hours later, the basement smelled of ozone and solder. Newly installed LEDs threw long shadows across the comms rack, where Logan was replacing a faulty capacitor. A green light flickered, then faded. “AUX Three is a tease,” he said, tapping a multimeter against his palm. “It keeps flirting with red.”
Across from him, Malik’s fingers paused on the stripped wire before he twisted the final copper strand into a junction box and knocked on the rack with the back of his hand. A single green LED blinked alive—shaky but holding. He glanced at Logan, brow raised. “AUX Three.” He returned his eyes to his work, but the sound of Pam’s off-key singing from upstairs caused a small smile.
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 weaponise the tray.” He glanced towards 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 snow of static whispered through the room, like a radio tuning between stations.
Malik’s spine registered it before his head did. His hand tightened on the wire stripper as he touched his temple with two fingers—an old reflex—and his breathing changed, shortening. The basement’s concrete floor seemed to tilt beneath him. Not the sound exactly—the shape of it. A narrow band of hiss buried under a broader wash, a particular cadence of interference you didn’t learn from manuals.
His other hand found the workbench edge, gripping hard while the present thinned like gauze, and the past bled through.
Mali – 2018
Heat that burned your lungs with every gasp. Diesel and dust choking the air, the desperate screech of failing radios under a sky bleached white.
Captain Calder stalks through the chaos as if he owns the lease. Bone-dry. Mirrored sunglasses reflecting death. He slams the scope into Malik’s palm with three words: “Hawk. Eyes. Now.”
Mali, 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 before the sweat bee drilling into the back of his neck finishes its first pass. The cheap drone overhead shreds comms to static and visibility to zero. Every time someone keys a handset, that aluminium static rips through their earpieces.
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, expressionless. “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.
Hereford
Malik’s voice was flat when he surfaced. “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. He killed the channel with a soft click, the static dying. “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, stylised eye. For a moment, the word SIBYL appeared on the login banner, faint as breath on glass. Dar stared at it, her mind going briefly, completely blank. “Shit.” She slammed the laptop closed as her pulse hammered in her fingertips.
Pam’s wooden spoon clattered as an electronic squawk drifted up from the basement. Her protective instincts flared. Wiping her hands on her apron, she went to Dar’s office first, knocking once before pushing the door open. “Bloody hell,” she said, glancing from Dar towards the basement stairs. “Sounds like they’re torturing a fax machine down there. If they fry the circuits, I’ll be baking by candlelight.”
Dar’s response came out before she could think. “It’s nothing.” Not nothing. Very much not nothing. “It’s only a…network handshake. The boys are doing a thing.”
Narrowing her eyes, Pam focused on Dar’s evasive response. Her friend had pulled the laptop toward her with lightning speed, arms curled around it protectively. “Right. Network handshake.” She drew out the words as if tasting spoiled cream, moving closer until her hip bumped the desk. “Darla Montgomery, I’ve known you since we were fifteen. I know your ‘I definitely returned that library book’ face. This is your ‘someone’s about to die’ face. What’s wrong?”
Dar met her gaze, the analyst in her searching for a logical deflection, but found none. She offered a weary smile that didn’t reach her eyes.
Pam lifted the rack, retreating to the kitchen. “Right then. Network handshakes require carbohydrates. Science.”
In the basement, Malik’s fingers froze on the signal tracer, Pam’s voice from upstairs cutting through the basement’s low hum. He didn’t need to see Dar’s screen to know what just woke up. “We spooked something.” He listened to the harmonics settle. “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. At the top of the stairs, Logan paused, glancing back. Their eyes met—a brief exchange that said everything. Pam knows something’s wrong. Dar’s hiding something. We play along. Malik gave the smallest nod.
The kitchen smelled of lemon and butter because Pam had decided anxiety needed sugar. She offered Logan a warm scone, her gaze fixed on a shallow cut on his finger. “If you bleed on the floor I’m making you sign the tile.”
Logan took the scone without looking, eyes already tracking to the open office door and Dar’s posture—shoulders too tight. “I’m fine.” He bit into it, chewing slowly. It was good. “Not bad,” he admitted, taking another bite and locking eyes briefly with Pam. For a moment, the kitchen settled, the simple act of eating easing the tension by degrees.
Then Logan’s gaze drifted toward Dar’s office, and his jaw tightened. “How’s your… network handshake?” He smirked and wiped crumbs from his mouth with the back of his hand as he moved to the kitchen archway, positioning himself where he could see both Dar and the hall. Sunglasses stayed on—habit—but his gaze sharpened.
Pam was already moving before Logan finished speaking. Her feet slapped the tile as she rounded the counter; her fingers grabbed the rolling pin without looking. She pushed by Logan and planted herself between Dar and the men by her doorway, arms crossed over her flour-dusted apron. “You’re all wound tighter than my mixer on brioche setting.” Her emerald eyes flicked from Dar’s tensed posture to Logan’s rigid stance, then to Malik’s tactical positioning. She caught the way Malik’s hand hovered near his sidearm, and her jaw tightened.
Her voice dropped to a register that made her bakery staff scatter. “Dar, love, your laptop’s making noises the oven 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—one, two, three—matching her heartbeat. The lemon-butter scent seemed sharper now, cutting through the tension. “Right. Ground rules since apparently this 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.”
Dar lifted her mug, stood and drifted past everyone towards 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 hung in the air, heavier than the scent of lemons. Was any of this ever really mine?
Logan’s eyes flicked to the office door, then back to Dar. He knew what she was really asking—if she still had a place here, if any of them did. He took his sunglasses off, setting them down carefully on the island. “It’s your office,” he shrugged. “Door locks from both sides. 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.” The promise was real.
Dar’s breath caught—just for a second—and she didn’t look at Logan, but her shoulders dropped half an inch, the tension bleeding out in a way words couldn’t capture. She felt the unspoken words settle in the space between them. I couldn’t save you then. I can armour you now.
Pam clapped once, her tone shifting. “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.
“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 large, framed photograph of a girl on a bicycle, hair streaming 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 laptop’s closed lid—a system test from nowhere she would admit existed.
Pam studied them. “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 towards them. “Eat. If we’re going to run a clandestine knitting circle out of this kitchen, I’m implementing a pastry tax.”
Refusal constituted war, so Logan chose another pastry. “Tax accepted.”
Dar reached for a scone, giving Pam a small smile. “Thank you.” For being the unclassified file we all read from.
Pam’s fingers found Dar’s wrist, checking her pulse beneath the guise of affection. The scone crumbled between them. “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 ‘Flour Dust White.’ Or maybe something that hides fingerprints. ‘Sticky Bun Amber,’ perhaps?” Her eyes flicked to Logan—still chewing, still 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. “Paint it a colour that doesn’t show dirt. 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. “Matte. No glare. And not grey.” Malik gave Dar a small 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. Outside, the Wye made its indifferent way past the trees. Inside, for the first time in weeks, no one was holding their breath.
As the landscape was swallowed by darkness, long after Pam had gone, the safehouse settled into its new rhythm.
In the basement, Logan labelled one last cable with surgical focus. 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—palm flat against the cool metal, feeling the hum of current beneath—and murmured, “Good enough.” Then he 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.
SIBYL: LINK ESTABLISHED.
She exhaled. Typed. The house didn’t flinch.
Malik stood alone in the kitchen, listening. The house had settled, but a faint static remained at the edge of the soundscape. Not the old wiring, not his tinnitus—it was the ghost of what they’d woken in the basement. The signature was faint, no longer a threat, but familiar. He closed his eyes, and for a moment, saw Mali’s white sky. Calder’s voice echoed in his memory, a reminder to trust the instincts that had kept him alive. He opened his eyes, the kitchen solid around him. The ghost was part of the house now. Part of them.
Logan’s footsteps ascended the basement stairs, pausing at the top, noting the sliver of light showing beneath Dar’s office door. He met Malik’s gaze across the dark kitchen. A quiet nod passed between them before Logan headed for the back hall, leaving Malik listening to the house breathe.