Page 23 of Avenging Jessie (Black Swan Division Thrillers #3)

Twenty-Three

Jessie

The safehouse crackled with tension, even in silence.

The team had spread out again. Tommy stood by the kitchen island, arms folded and brow furrowed.

Tessa was seated near the window, scrolling through intercepts on her tablet.

Spence paced behind the dining table, his boots thudding softly on the hardwood, his injured wrist cradled against his chest.

On the screen in front of her, Jessie scanned the Cyclone schematics, a digital autopsy of every spec, every payload chamber, every line of Spence’s stolen code now potentially a weapon in Brewer’s hands.

“No official Agency channels are gonna believe us in time if we try to warn them about the attack,” Tommy said. “Even if they did, the minute they trace a call or ping back to us—”

“They’ll think we’re the ones planning something,” Tessa finished grimly. “The Black Swan Division will be blamed for everything.”

Jessie looked at Spence, who had stopped pacing. His expression was carved in stone, his eyes locked on his glowing screen, as if he were trying to rewrite reality by sheer will.

Her heart pinched. He looked devastated. Haunted. Like this betrayal was branded now into his DNA.

She knew what they felt like. How disempowered it made you feel. “Take them back,” she said quietly.

Spence didn’t move or even glance her way. “What?”

She set aside her tablet. “The drones. Brewer’s only a threat if he has control of them. So take it back. Take control away from him.”

Spence let out a rough sound—half scoff, half groan—and raked his good hand through his hair.

“Once a system’s been hijacked by someone like Brewer, it’s not as simple as yanking out the batteries.

Hastings’ hackers probably already overwrote the operating parameters. Locked the original firmware out.”

Jessie crossed her arms. “You’re telling me there’s nothing left? You didn’t build in a backdoor? A failsafe? Something only you would know about?”

Spence’s mouth opened to argue—then snapped shut. A flicker passed across his face.

Tessa and Tommy both stopped what they were doing to watch him.

Jessie felt a rush of hope. “You did, didn’t you?”

Spence blinked, eyes narrowing as if mentally zooming in on some dusty part of code he hadn’t thought about in years.

“During the prototype phase, I embedded a security override in the source kernel—a ghost protocol. It was never meant for production, just something I cooked up to test response thresholds in the field if we ever got to that phase.”

Tessa scooted forward on the seat. “And Brewer doesn’t know about it?”

“No one did. Not even Flynn or Del.” Del was Flynn’s favorite tech guru. “I encrypted it behind a misnamed string. Buried the trigger command in a fake boot error log.”

Hackers and their signatures.

Tommy let out a breath. “Please tell me that’s English for we can use it now to stop this fucker.”

“I don’t know,” Spence said, frowning. “Maybe. The Pentagon likely cloned the firmware before building anything. If the ghost protocol was in that version, and Brewer didn’t spot it when he breached their security, then yeah.

I might be able to force a reset. Trigger a kill switch that reverts the drones back to their original operating mode. ”

“And that will sever Brewer’s control over them?” Jessie asked.

For the first time in the past twenty-four hours, he smiled. “It will revert control to me.”

They all let out a collective breath.

She hated to ask, but had to. “And if it’s not there?”

The flickering hope behind his exhaustion dulled. “Then we’re screwed.”

Jessie watched as Spence fully locked into figuring it out—fingers pecking one-handed while Tommy hovered over his shoulder, watching in awe.

The screen was split four ways, decrypting firmware logs and tunneling through secure backdoors Spence had once built for himself and never shared with anyone.

God, he was brilliant. And clearly, this wasn’t something she could help with. Not without slowing them down.

Perfect time for a covert Rat Trap errand.

She stood and stretched, making a show of wincing and cracking her neck. “I don’t know about you all, but I’m starving. We passed a pub three blocks away—something McCallister’s? I’m gonna run down and grab food.”

Tessa’s gaze flicked up from her tablet. She immediately caught the subtext. “I’ll come,” she said casually, standing and slipping on her jacket. “I need air.”

Jessie slanted a look at Spence. “Want anything?”

He barely looked up. “Surprise me.”

Tommy didn’t even bother answering, which meant he trusted her to know what he’d eat. That, or he’d fully surrendered to caffeine and code.

Outside, the air was cool and damp—classic Virginia in early fall.

The pub sat on a sleepy block that looked like Main Street USA, all brick facades and flower boxes in the windows.

The sign over the door read McCallister’s Public House – Est. 1939, and the scent of fries, burgers, and whiskey-soaked wood hit Jessie the moment they stepped inside.

She really was hungry. After they placed four orders of the special to go, she and Tessa slid into a booth near the back, far from the early lunch crowd arguing about sports on the giant screen TVs all over the place.

“So,” Tessa said, voice low. “What’s our first move?”

Jessie glanced around, ducked her chin. “You ever seen Brewer panic?”

“Only twice. The night he killed Mom and realized the Agency wasn’t going to cover for him, and then when we arrested him six months ago.”

Jessie nodded. “Third time’s a charm. Time to make him panic again.”

“If he loses control of the drones, that should do it.”

A waitress stopped and asked if they needed drinks while they waited for their order. Jessie thanked her but said no and waited for her to move on. “We need to up the pressure. Put a target on his back so big he can’t move in public without setting off alarm bells.”

Tessa frowned. “How?”

Jessie discreetly pointed at the nearest TV screen, where a news channel was on mute. A red ticker ran along the bottom with the day’s highlights. “We go to the press.”

Tessa smirked. “I like it.”

“Our government has been trying to hide and cover up everything Brewer’s been doing, so we flip the script. We expose him to every media outlet we can find. Makes it a hell of a lot harder for him to hide.”

“Damn, girl. Talk about breaking the rules.” She interlaced her fingers on the top of the table. “Where do we start?”

“We leak a falsified wanted bulletin with a Homeland or CIA logo on it. Make it appear as if it was extracted from an internal message and leaked to a whistleblower. It clearly states that Brewer is planning a domestic terrorist attack using drone warfare, that he was last spotted where Meg saw him, and it includes the most recent photos of him. The report hints at a connection to recent cyber breaches. We toss in buzzwords like EMP attack, nano-viruses, biochemical agents, whatever.”

“Fear sells.”

Jessie tapped the top of the table, keeping an eye on the nearby patrons, all absorbed in their food and beer. “Brewer will freak. He’ll realize he’s lost his precious drones and he’s been outed as an imminent threat to the country.”

Tessa expanded on it. “Best-case scenario, he gets arrested or ID’d before he can launch any plan against Langley, even if he has a backup outside of the drones.

Law enforcement will be hunting him, throwing off his timeline and routes.

Worst case, he has to scramble and pivot entirely.

Either way, he’ll be distracted and panic, which is where we come in and take him down. ”

Jessie pulled out her phone and began editing a memo from an old template she’d saved years ago for infiltration practice. Tessa typed notes into hers as they continued to chat—buzzwords, fear triggers, headlines she knew would get traction.

By the time their order was packed and they’d paid, they had finalized the text.

On the walk back, Tessa was already mocking up a thumbnail for a video. “I’m fabricating a CIA-style classified video using media footage, internal jargon, and doctored images of Brewer’s Pentagon breach. Want me to use his real face or the last alias we confirmed?”

Jessie thought about it. “Both. Split screen. Tag it with one of his old code names—Wraith. He used to say that a lot when I was with him and he was dealing with black market dealers. That’ll make the dark web take notice.

Throw in phrases he hates, triggers that will infuriate him.

Include an AI-generated voiceover, deepfake style, from a ‘government insider’ saying they fear the CIA is covering it up. ”

Within minutes, Rat Trap was ready to launch. Back at the safehouse, Spence was still glued to his laptop, and Tommy had traded coffee for beef jerky.

Jessie dropped a greasy paper sack in front of each of them. “Eat.”

Neither looked up, but both dived in. Jessie helped Spence with his order of fish and chips, removing the lid from the tartar sauce. Finally, he glanced up at her and smiled. It was tired, but it was real.

She leaned in and kissed his forehead.

Across the room, Tessa slid into her spot with a soda and a grin. When Jessie sat at the dining table across from Spence, she read a message from her.

The trap is set. Phase Two drops in ten.

Jessie downed her food, picking at her fries as Spence muttered lines of code under his breath like incantations.

Tommy sat beside him, tracking progress on a parallel system, tapping in real-time intel from the black-market forums the CIA had been monitoring since Brewer had ghosted them six months ago.

Spence muttered more under his breath. “I buried the failsafe in the original Cyclone OS. It was designed to trigger if the drones were ever overridden by an external source—government or foreign. I hardwired a priority conflict line. If I activate it, every drone in the system flags its current controller as a hostile interface and drops into a fallback protocol.”

Jessie muched on her last fry. She was still hungry. For food and for revenge. “And Brewer won’t notice?”

“Oh, he’ll notice. That’s the point.” Spence shot her a dry look. “He needs to realize he’s no longer in control—believe someone else has wrested the drones from him. That’s the bait. This way, he has to come to the site to try and take them back.”

Tessa’s brows hit her hairline. “A Pentagon site? Surely he wouldn’t be stupid enough to take on a military compound.”

Tommy grinned. “That’s the beauty of it. The drones are being held at a private contractor site. Easier to hack into.”

Spence pecked at more keys. “BIA Solutions. They’ve been on the government’s payroll for years, and the warehouse is only ten miles from here.”

Tommy’s head snapped up. “Wait, I know that name.” He tapped a fist against his head. “How do I know that name?”

Holy shit. The blood in Jessie’s system froze. “Brothers In Arms—BIA—it’s one of Brewer’s shell companies.”

“Yes!” Tommy pointed at her. “I did that deep dive on him back in London and dug up dozens of shell companies he hid behind.” His fingers scrambled over the keys. “Why didn’t this place get tagged when I turned in that report after he escaped?”

Her insides crawled like they did every time she thought about how many of those shell companies she’d helped set up.

“The place must have already passed inspection before you turned in your report and been greenlighted for the private contractor lists. Those lists are classified, so general analysts and Langley’s computer bots don’t have access to them.

It didn’t get tagged because it doesn’t show up in any of the main databases. ”

Tommy threw up his hands and sat back. “That’s why I do all of my own stuff. I should have followed up on it myself.”

Spence waved a fry in the air before jamming it into his mouth and speaking around it. “Water under the bridge. We need to stay focused. Put our bait out there. The fact that he owns the warehouse actually helps us.”

“How?” Jesse asked.

“He has more to lose, and he’ll feel more confident, since he’s in control of the security. We use that to our advantage.”

Jessie wanted those words to reassure her. They didn’t. “How are you making it look like the takeover is coming from the dark web?”

“Using one of his favorite haunts—Orchid Obsidian.” He nodded toward a terminal window. “It’s one of his preferred hunting grounds. Shadow contracts. Illegal tech forums. Sometimes mercenaries post surveillance footage and tag code samples to flex.”

Tap, tap, tap. Spence’s concentration was locked in. “I’m uploading a forged command line breach right now, timestamped to show that someone using a handle called GhostKnife is cracking his control feed.”

“Is that your alias?” Tessa asked from across the room.

He smirked. “Was. In my MI6 days. No one’s used it in years, but enough old dogs remember it. Either way, the wanker’s going to freak.”

Tommy leaned in. “What if he thinks it’s you?”

Spence’s smile dropped. “Then he shows up extra pissed, which is exactly what I want.”

Jessie watched the cursor flash, her nerves winding tighter. This was the equivalent of poking a dragon in the eye and hoping it flew into your trap instead of torching the village.

Spence hit Enter.

A soft tone chimed. The system had updated. Tommy tapped keys and watched the readouts flutter on his screen. “Looks good,” he said. “Should see this on the forums in minutes.”

Spence leaned back, exhaling hard. He grabbed Jessie’s hand and squeezed.

From her perch across in the living room, Tessa gave Jessie a thumbs-up. Rat Trap had also just been executed.

She forced a smile at both of them. Please, God, let this work.