The report sat on Silas's desk like a unexploded shell.
His investigator a former GCHQ analyst code name Halloway who Silas had used for twelve years and trusted because he had never needed to trust him had delivered it at 6:00 AM London time. A thin folder. Twelve pages. Routing traces, server logs, timestamp analyses. The kind of document that made Silas's heart slow down instead of speed up, because his body knew what his brain was still refusing to process.
Halloway had traced the Luna leak email through three anonymizing relays. São Paulo to Jakarta to a dead node in Romania. Standard obfuscation competent, not exceptional. But the handoff protocols between relays, the signature fragmentation pattern, the error-correction behavior on packet loss... Silas had seen this architecture before.
He had paid for it to be built.
