Chapter 4 - The Coded Flour"You're insane," Nora said, though her voice shook just enough to betray her. "He was freezing. He could barely walk. His knee was injured."
"An act," Vance said smoothly, pulling a sleek tablet from his coat. He tapped the screen and slid it across the counter toward her. "Julian Sterling is a former Olympic-class gymnast and a trained survivalist. That limp? Pure theater designed to lower your defenses. When a man like Sterling wants to hide in plain sight, he doesn't hide in a bunker. He hides in the empathy of someone who can't turn away a stray."
Nora looked down at the tablet. It displayed a detailed security schematic of her neighborhood, with a red glowing node pulsing directly beneath the Lantern House Café.
"The basement," Vance murmured. "Our sensors picked up a localized encrypted server pulse originating from beneath your kitchen floorboards. The exact spot where your guest spent an hour 'fixing a loose floorboard'."
Nora’s blood ran cold.
He hadn't been fixing a squeak.
He had been installing a rogue relay node directly into the historical foundation of her father’s building.
"You have ten seconds, Miss Bellamy," Vance said, his hand sliding toward the holster beneath his left armpit. "Either you hand over the hardware he left behind, or I red-tag this entire building as a national security hazard, seize your assets under the Patriot Act, and put you away in a federal black site for aiding a fugitive of the state."
Arthur Pendelton whimpered, dropping his briefcase as his knees finally gave out beneath him.
Nora looked from the terrifying federal agent to the framed portrait of her father smiling behind the counter. Her father had built this place with calloused hands and honest work. She wasn't going to let them tear it down over a ghost’s war.
"Search it," Nora said, her chin lifting defiantly. "Tear up the floorboards. Smash the ovens. There’s nothing down there except old flour sacks and rusted pipes."
Vance stared at her for a long, tense moment, trying to read every micro-expression on her face. Then he nodded to his partner. "Rip it apart."
The second agent drew a heavy tactical crowbar from his duffel bag and marched straight toward the kitchen door.
As the sound of splitting wood and shattering tiles echoed from the back room, Nora’s phone buzzed sharply in her apron pocket. She pulled it out beneath the cover of the counter.
It was an incoming text from an unknown, heavily encrypted international number.
Don't look at the floor, Nora. Look at the flour.
Nora froze.
Her eyes darted to the wooden shelving unit against the kitchen wall, where six massive, fifty-pound burlap sacks of unbleached baker’s flour sat in a row—sacks that her father had ordered five years ago, the exact year Julian Sterling vanished, and which she had never used because they were too coarse for her delicate pastries.
Vance was distracted by the crashing sounds coming from the back room.
With a silent breath, Nora slipped away from the counter and backed toward the kitchen shelf. Her fingers brushed against the rough burlap of the third sack. It felt unusually rigid in the middle, like a heavy book encased in plastic.
She sliced her thumb along the seam.
May you like
Inside, buried deep within the white powder, her fingers brushed against a cold, metallic edges: a solid titanium data-drive stamped with a single word.
Sterling.
