The Puppeteer's Game

Chapter 21

Mask of the Traitor

The bunker had never felt this cold.

Not temperature-wise—it was still the same recycled air, the same low hum of generators behind reinforced concrete. But something beneath it had shifted. The walls no longer felt secure—just close. Watching.

Emily sat hunched over the terminal in the diagnostics wing, fingers tapping steadily on the analog keys. No AI. No live feeds. No automated decrypts. Everything was manual—deliberately so.

Ever since the ambush, trust in their systems had cratered. And with the Phantom's reach evolving past mere infiltration, no one dared let the shard near a networked machine.

The data crawled in. The analog reader spat it out in bursts—glitchy green script, fragmented video frames. She'd been at it for hours, refusing caffeine, ignoring her reflection in the side panel.

The moment the shard slotted into the terminal, something coiled in her chest. Instinct, maybe. Or dread.

Then it came.

A sequence of encrypted metadata tags blinked onto the screen. Familiar structure. Familiar cadence.

Her stomach dropped.

Cordova-J.145b-TSK.AUTHCHAIN.14

She froze.

James.

She hadn't seen that encryption key in five years. Not since the Phantom sweep through Sector K left thirteen dead and one missing. The official report had James Cordova listed as presumed KIA—killed in action during an extraction op, trying to pull a triple-encoded uplink node from a Phantom lab. Nobody recovered. No signal traced. Nothing.

Until now.

Emily leaned back, blinking hard. The pressure behind her eyes pulsed. She tried to ground herself—counted her breaths, listened to the mechanical whir of the bunker. But it felt like breathing underwater.

Because if this shard carried James's encryption—genuine, unspoofed—it meant one of two things.

Either James hadn't died that day.

Or someone was using his identity as part of the Phantom's next move.

She pulled up the archived logs. Cross-referenced timestamps, authentication ladders, and burn trace levels. Everything matched. The coding was precise. Personal.

Not mimicry. Not a copy.

James's hand. His code.

But that was impossible.

Wasn't it?

Down the corridor, she heard Ramos's footsteps. Slow. Unhurried. Casual.

She didn't turn. Didn't call out.

The shard kept running.

And deep in her gut, something colder than fear began to settle.

If James had really turned—

If he'd been the one to crack open the Phantom's inner circle all those years ago—

Then Miguel had been walking with a ghost.

And none of them had seen it coming.

***

Emily's hurried scrawl covered printouts and decoded strings. Her cluttered desk brimmed with logs, transcripts, and waveforms—all pointing to an impossible pattern.

Some of James Cordova's mission files matched old Phantom markers too cleanly. His voiceprints were spot-on, down to the cadence of his breath. But when she lined them up against thermal baselines and security pings, the timelines splintered.