Chapter 16 - The Voice on the Shortwave
The air inside the concrete bunker smelled of ozone, rust, and damp mountain earth. Brooke immediately set up her laptop, plugging an encrypted federal flash drive into Vance's communication console to bypass the state department firewall.
"If the Directorate intercepted that beacon," Brooke said, her fingers flying across the keys, "they won't keep her at that black site for long. They'll either relocate her deeper into an unmonitored jurisdiction or terminate the asset."
"They can't terminate her yet," Vance said, adjusting the frequency dials of an old analog military shortwave receiver. "Sarah buried the master financial ledger before she was captured. For twenty-four years, the Directorate kept her alive in solitary confinement, attempting to break her psyche to find the encryption key. But Sarah Cross was trained by the best. She endured torture that would have broken an entire battalion."
I walked toward the receiver, staring at the glowing amber display. "Can we contact her?"
"We can listen," Vance answered quietly. "The Azores facility—code-named Site Obsidian—uses an old subterranean communications conduit tied into the transatlantic fiber cables. If she managed to tap into the maintenance terminal, she has precisely a two-minute transmission window every twelve hours."
Static filled the room, harsh and abrasive, echoing against the concrete walls. Hannah sat beside Brooke, biting her lip in sheer terror, while I stood frozen, my breath trapped in my throat.
For endless seconds, there was only the hiss of white noise. Then, amidst the crackle of oceanic interference, a rhythmic clicking sound emerged.
*Tap. Tap-tap. Tap.*
"Morse code," Vance murmured, reaching for a pen. "Delta... Uniform... Romeo..."
"No," I whispered suddenly, a strange, forgotten memory rising from the dark recesses of my early childhood. "That's not Morse code. That’s a rhythm."
Hannah looked up at me. "What do you mean, Rebecca?"
"When I was three years old," I said, my voice shaking as tears welled in my eyes, "before Daniel Cole brought me to Cedar Ridge... someone used to tap on the wooden headboard of my crib every night before turning off the light. Three short taps, two long taps, one soft tap."
I stepped up to the microphone, pushed Vance’s hand aside, and keyed the transmit switch. Without thinking, I tapped the metal casing of the microphone with my ring in the exact sequence: *Tap-tap-tap. Tap... Tap... Tap.*
Silence hung heavy across the Atlantic. For five agonizing seconds, nothing returned but the roar of ocean static.
Then, through the speaker, came a voice.
It was raspy, stripped raw by decades of disuse, hoarse with dehydration and pain, but filled with an unyielding, unbreakable iron core.
*"...Little Sparrow?"* the woman whispered, the English words trembling over the static. *"If... if that is you... do not come for me. The cage is rigged to burn. Arthur Hunt... Director Hunt controls the perimeter. Save yourself... run..."*
The audio cut out violently with the sound of steel splintering and distant shouting, followed by the cold, flat drone of a disconnected frequency.
I stood there, gripping the edge of the console until my knuckles turned white.
"She called me Little Sparrow," I whispered, the final missing piece of my childhood slamming into place. "Daniel told me Eleanor gave me that nickname. He lied about that, too."
Brooke stood up, her legal composure replaced by sheer, righteous fury. "We aren't running. Where is this Arthur Hunt?"
May you like
"Hunt is the Chairman of the National Homeland Oversight Committee," Vance said darkly. "And the man who signed the order to place Daniel Cole under Eleanor’s supervision in Cedar Ridge."
---