Page 40 of Gabriel

I rolled my eyes. “Inside.”

He stepped aside fast, the deadbolt clattering uselessly against the frame as I walked in.

The place was hot and filled with stale air. Half-eaten food containers and empty cans were strewn across a floor that hadn’t seen a broom in maybe ever. The air conditioner in the windowwheezed like it was dying. Three monitors threw light across a desk cluttered with wires, flash drives, and a tangled mess of mismatched tech.

“You look like hell,” I muttered. “Much like this place.”

He scratched the back of his neck. “It’s a side effect of people wanting you dead.”

Esteban had always been a little paranoid. I assumed it was related to secrets he’d dug up over the years, although I’d never cared enough to find out the details. My sources told me he’d been here for four months, which I knew to be an eternity for a hacker at his level.

“Then solve my problem before someone from your long list of enemies gets lucky.”

He gave a nervous laugh as I pulled the black phone from my jacket and dropped it on the desk.

His brow furrowed. “That’s a military-grade satphone. Where’d you get this?”

“Jungle.”

“Who does it belong to?”

“My sibling.”

His face paled. “Which one…?”

“Not your business.” I stared him down. “You’re going to crack it. And stop asking questions.”

He chewed the inside of his cheek, hesitating. He picked it up and turned it around, typing the barcode into his monitor and plugging it into a portable grid. Finally, he set it down and met my gaze. “Look, this kind of thing takes time. And depending on the layers?—”

“You’re already wasting my time,” I said, stepping close enough to make him flinch. He had a foot on me, easily, but I was the more lethal one and we both knew it. “Just do it.”

Esteban put his hands up in surrender and sat at his desk. “Alright. Alright. Let’s see what secrets it holds.”

I watched him work, fingers flying across his keyboard as he connected the phone to a different set of cables and adapters. Lines of white on black code began scrolling down the monitor faster and faster.

The room buzzed with the low hum of decryption. He muttered under his breath in a twitchy mix of Spanish and code. Minutes passed. Then something shifted.

Esteban leaned forward.

“I’m in. He buried the data under a dummy operating system that looks like a media player on the outside, but inside…”

He trailed off as files began to unfold across the screen.

“Encrypted folders,” he murmured. “GPS log. Here’s one drafted message. Unsent.”

I reached forward and grabbed it, yanking wires off of it, and opened the draft. The message was scrambled, parts of it lost or corrupted, but what remained turned my stomach cold.

To: A. If you get this, follow the coordinates. Snatch Santos. Jet.

My brows knit together. There were no coordinates in the message. No attachment. Just empty air where something important might’ve once been.

Then it clicked.

The server.

Back when we were kids, Jet, Elira, and I had built a Dropbox on the net. It started as a joke of a place to stash dumb messages, fake spy games, and test answers as we got older. It reflected the kind of paranoia kids thought made them clever.

But then we continued using it as we spent extended periods of time apart as a way to stay up to date on each other’s lives.