Read Chapter 27: Radio Dead Zone

The cold woke him. Not the ache in his ribs or the scream of his shoulder—the cold, seeping up through the barn’s packed dirt floor like groundwater. Étienne’s eyes snapped open to grey pre-dawn light filtering through warped boards. His breath plumed.

He was still alive. That was something.

The radio equipment sat in the corner where he’d left it, a tangle of wire and scavenged battery packs he'd spent the night assembling. He crawled over, joints protesting, and flipped the main switch.

Nothing.

He checked the connection. Then the power cell. Then the antenna feed. All intact. He pressed the transmit key and listened to the dead hiss of a spectrum that should have been alive with European emergency chatter, amateur relays, even pirate broadcasters riding out the apocalypse.

Silence. Flat, total silence.

Étienne sat back on his heels. A jammer didn’t kill everything. A jammer created noise. What he was hearing was a vacuum—the absence of every signal he’d tracked for the past three days. That took power. That took coordination.

They knew where he was. Not precisely—the barn was too remote for a ground team. But they knew his general corridor, and they’d thrown up a mobile suppression net around it.

He pulled the dead receiver from his pocket, the one the foreign agents had given him in Frankfurt. He’d checked it twice already. Fake. A prop. But a prop designed to make him trust them, to push him toward Geneva. He turned it over in his fingers, then set it down.

No time for paranoia. He needed to reach Claire.

He found the hand-cranked beacon in his pack—a relic from RTE’s cold-war contingency drills, meant to punch through EMP fallout with brute-force wattage. He cranked it until his arm burned, then synced it to a low-orbit amateur satellite channel he knew still had transponder life. The encryption was dated, almost a joke. But it was something.

He keyed the mic. “Lakeport to Shorebird. Lakeport to Shorebird. Status check. Over.”

Static. Then, impossibly, a voice. Thin, broken, like it was being dragged through gravel—but a voice.

“. . . receive you. Ident . . . confirm . . . ely compromised. Repeat: safehouse burned. Moving to—”

The signal cut. Not faded—cut. Instant. Surgical.

Étienne stared at the beacon. The satellite channel had been live for nine seconds. Nine seconds was enough to triangulate. He threw the beacon into his pack, heart hammering.

Claire was compromised. Or she was about to be. Or she’d just gone dark to keep him safe. He didn’t know which, and not knowing was the worst part.

He checked his pistol. Two rounds. She had two rounds. They were a matched pair of nearly-empty menaces.

The barn offered nothing else useful. He had food for maybe two days, water from a nearby stream he didn’t trust, and a map of central France that was now meaningless. His original plan—skirt the border through the Jura, cross into Switzerland near Geneva under cover of the forested ridgelines—was still the only plan. But the jammers changed the calculus.

They couldn’t jam what they couldn’t find. Mobility was his shield. But he couldn’t move with livestock haulers or military convoys shadowing every main road. He needed to think like the man he used to be—the one who’d spent a decade mapping vulnerabilities in Europe’s most critical infrastructure.

What did the grid still have that ran on something other than electricity?

He dug through his pack and pulled out a creased technical manual he’d grabbed from a burnt-out relay station two days ago. SCADA system schematics. Outdated, but the backbone hadn’t changed in thirty years. He flipped to the regional map in the back cover.

RTE maintained dozens of semi-automated border substations—facilities designed to operate on diesel backup for up to ninety days. They’d be locked down, probably abandoned. But they still had one thing the consortium couldn’t jam: hardwired, buried fiber-optic trunk lines. Copper. Shielded. Millions of euros of pre-digital infrastructure that no one remembered existed.

Geneva was three hundred kilometers away. There was a substation at Bellegarde-sur-Valserine, right on the Swiss border. If it still had power, if its hardened comms were intact, he could reach Jacques. He could verify the data center. He could warn him.

*If*. Too many ifs.

Étienne packed what he could carry—the beacon, the pistol with its two rounds, a battered water bottle, and the half-eaten tin of sardines he’d found in a farmer’s shed. He left the radio equipment behind. It was dead weight now.

He stepped out of the barn into the grey morning. Mist clung to the fields, swallowing the horizon. No birdsong. No distant traffic. Just the hum of nothing.

He’d walked two kilometers along a drainage ditch when he saw it—a military drone, high and silent, banking in a lazy circle about a kilometer ahead. It wasn’t searching. It was holding position. Guarding a point.

He dropped flat, pressing his face into the mud, and watched it through the reeds. The drone didn’t move. It was covering the bridge over the Ain river. The only crossing for twenty kilometers in any direction.

They weren’t jamming him because they knew where he was. They were jamming him because they knew where he had to go.

Étienne crawled backward through the ditch until he was certain he was out of the drone’s visual range, then sat up, breathing hard. He pulled out the dead receiver again. Held it.

Geneva wasn’t just the destination. It was the filter. They were herding him toward it, funneling him through the only viable corridors so that someone—the reset faction, the consortium, whoever—could watch him arrive.

The realization settled over him like the morning cold.

His brother Marc had disappeared in Geneva. Marc had been chasing something in that data center, something that got him killed or taken. And now Étienne was being pulled toward the same spot, along a path designed to make him think he was choosing it.

But there was one thing they hadn’t accounted for.

The consortium believed he was still broken, still running, still trying to survive. They didn’t know about the Marseille postbox relay. They didn’t know the archive was set to leak in seventy-two hours if he didn’t check in.

He looked south, toward the ridgelines that would lead him to the border. He couldn’t cross at Bellegarde anymore—the drone coverage would be thickest there. He’d have to go high. Cold. Through the mountains, where the grid was thinnest and the watchers would be spread too thin to cover every pass.

It would cost him two days. Maybe three. And every hour on the mountain was an hour he couldn’t reach Claire.

He put one foot in front of the other and started to climb.