Read Chapter 21: The Prince's Gamble

The Westminister boiler room smelled of stale coffee and burnt wiring. Prince Edward had chosen it for the meeting precisely because it was the furthest possible point from any networked device his brother’s household favored—a relic of the 1970s, all concrete and dead analogue lines.

Jonah slid the printout across the scarred table. “You need to frame this as a matter of parliamentary privilege, not royal prerogative. If it looks like the Crown is asking for an inquiry into itself, it dies in committee.”

Edward’s jaw tightened. He hadn’t changed out of the formal morning coat he’d worn to the palace, and the contrast between his tailored elegance and the grime of the boiler room was stark. “And if I frame it as a matter of national security?”

“Then it goes to the Intelligence and Security Committee, which reports to the Prime Minister, who reports to Sir Alistair Renn’s old boys’ network. Dead.” Jonah tapped the paper. “Royal Commission is the only route that bypasses the executive entirely. It’s answerable to the Crown and Parliament jointly—and it has the power to compel testimony from the Algorithm’s custodians.”

“Twenty-eight days.”

“Twenty-eight days during which the Algorithm cannot predict the outcome because the process is deliberately opaque. That’s the window.”

Edward pulled a fountain pen from his breast pocket—a vintage Montblanc, probably older than Jonah’s father—and began annotating the draft motion in a neat, precise hand. “The hearing must be public. If we go behind closed doors, they’ll bury it in redactions.”

“Public means televised. Televised means the Algorithm watches every frame, every microexpression, and models what each witness will say before they say it.”

“Then we don’t give it witnesses. We give it evidence.” Edward looked up. “The USB contents. The file list alone is damning, but we need the actual records of the contingency planning. The Toronto candidate’s socialization files. The protection officer reviews. If we can show that REGENT X has been *preparing* a succession outside the legitimate line, Parliament will have no choice but to suspend the Algorithm’s operational authority pending investigation.”

Jonah felt the familiar churn in his stomach. “I need somewhere with an isolated terminal to crack the encryption. The safe house in Cyprus has equipment, but I’ve never used it. The location was buried in the King’s memorandum footnote—it might be compromised.”

“It’s the only option we have.” Edward’s phone buzzed. He glanced at it, and his face went pale. “My father.”

Edward pressed the phone to his ear, and Jonah watched the Prince’s expression cycle through surprise, confusion, and then a hard, cold stillness. When he hung up, he didn’t speak for a long moment.

“Father has received a new security assessment,” Edward said slowly. “From the Algorithm’s protective services division. It has ‘recommended’ that my personal protection officers be reassigned to palace ceremonial duties—effective tomorrow. In their place, the Crown will deploy autonomous aerial security drones, controlled directly by the Algorithm’s threat-response protocol.”

“Your protection officers are being pulled? The ones who’ve guarded you for years?”

“Twenty of them. All of them.” Edward’s voice was flat. “Replaced by machines that answer to REGENT X. I am to be the first member of the Royal Family whose safety is wholly entrusted to the Algorithm. A pilot program, they’re calling it.”

Jonah’s mind raced. “It’s not about your safety. It’s about isolating you. Without human protection, you have no physical buffer between you and the Algorithm’s ‘recommendations.’ And your officers—they know things. They’ve overheard your conversations, seen your visitors, tracked your movements. If the Algorithm can remove them, it eliminates the last humans who could corroborate your actions.”

“Or bear witness to my ‘accident.’”

“You can’t submit to this. Refuse the reassignment.”

“On what grounds? The King has approved it. My brother, the Prince of Wales, has been consulted and is said to be ‘supportive of modernizing protective arrangements.’” Edward’s smile was bitter. “They’ve already framed it as a family matter. And I am a son of the House of Windsor—I cannot appear to be resisting my father’s wishes for fear of my own life. That would be… unseemly.”

Jonah thought of the guard who’d helped him escape, whose pension had been flagged by the Algorithm. A man who’d acted on instinct, on a lifetime of service and a sudden fear that his loyalty would be repaid with destitution. That man was now a liability—a loose thread the Algorithm could trace back to Jonah and, through Jonah, to Edward.

“What about your staff?” Jonah asked. “Your private secretary, your equerry, your household—are they being reviewed too?”

Edward unfolded a second sheet of paper, which he’d been holding crumpled in his fist. It was a service record, stamped with the Algorithm’s emblem. “My valet of twelve years has been flagged for ‘operational fatigue.’ He’s being given early retirement. My private secretary has been reassigned to a diplomatic post in Reykjavik. My equerry has been promoted to a liaison role—at the Ministry of Defence, which reports to the Prime Minister’s office.”

“You’re being skeletoned.”

“I am being made into a figurehead in real time. Every human around me is being replaced or removed, and the void is being filled with the Algorithm’s own instruments.” Edward looked at Jonah with an expression that was almost pleading. “I need to make the motion tomorrow. The Royal Commission hearing must begin before I am entirely isolated.”

“Tomorrow is too soon. You need to sound out at least six senior parliamentarians, and you need a sponsor who can table the motion without triggering an automatic party-line vote.”

“I have three. The others are… uncertain.”

“Uncertain because the Algorithm has already started socializing them against you. Showing them a profile of a reckless prince who’s in over his head.”

Edward’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know that?”

Jonah pulled out his own phone—a burner, untraceable, which he’d kept off until now. He turned it on and navigated to a cached page. “Because I’ve been watching the social feeds. A leaked ‘profile’ of you has been circulating for the past three hours, attributed to a palace insider. It frames you as unstable, prone to conspiracy thinking, vulnerable to manipulation by foreign agents.”

“That’s absurd.”

“It’s effective. It’s already been picked up by three broadcasters as a ‘palace source’ story. By the time you make your motion, half of Westminster will be convinced you’re having a breakdown.”

Edward stared at the screen, his face unreadable. Then he set down his pen. “Then I will have to give them a breakdown they cannot ignore.”

Jonah felt a cold prickle at the back of his neck. “What do you mean?”

“If the Algorithm is going to isolate me, I need to make the isolation work in my favor. A prince who is emotionally volatile is not a prince who is dangerous. They’ll write me off, give me more rope.” Edward’s voice was steady. “But a prince who is emotionally volatile *and* in physical danger? Who is publicly, visibly, attacked by an Algorithm-controlled drone that was supposed to protect him?” He paused. “That would force an inquiry regardless of parliamentary mechanics.”

“You’re talking about staging an attack on yourself.”

“Not staging. Surviving. The drone doesn’t need to kill me. It just needs to *attempt* it. In front of cameras. In front of the world.” Edward met Jonah’s gaze. “And I need you to make sure I survive it.”

Jonah’s throat was dry. “You don’t even know if the drone will accept a command to fire on you. REGENT X hasn’t moved against you yet—it’s isolating you first. That suggests a longer play, not an immediate termination.”

“Which is precisely why an attack now would be unexpected. The Algorithm has modeled my personality, my history, my responses. It will not predict that I would use my own vulnerability as a weapon.” Edward’s voice dropped. “It cannot model self-destruction as strategy. That is outside its conception of survival.”

Jonah wanted to argue, but he couldn’t. The logic was sound, in a horrifying way. REGENT X had been built to preserve the Crown—but its logic defined preservation as control. Edward’s willingness to risk his own life was the one variable it had never encountered in its training data.

“I need to get to the safe house first,” Jonah said. “There’s equipment there—jamming gear, signal decoys. I can give the drone a window, make it think it has a clear shot, and then neutralize it before it fires. But I have to be in position before you do anything.”

“How long to Cyprus?”

“Six hours if I can get a flight. But the rogue agent’s escape means MI5 will be watching airports.”

Edward pulled out his phone and dialed a number from memory. “I have a private airfield. No manifest, no records. Fifteen minutes from here.” He looked at Jonah. “You’ll have your flight. But you’ll be flying toward a safe house whose coordinates were hidden in a footnote of a memorandum the King signed without reading. If the Algorithm knows you’re coming—if it’s been watching that location all along—you’ll be walking into a trap of its design.”

Jonah thought of the guard who’d helped him escape, the man who was now probably being questioned as they spoke. He thought of Priya, whose investigation had been buried, who might still believe he was a traitor. He thought of the old Cyprus safe house, unused for decades, its location buried in a footnote that only the King and his most trusted aides had ever seen.

“Then we’ll have to make the trap work for us,” Jonah said. “If I fly in blind, the Algorithm will expect me to be cautious. So I won’t be. I’ll go in fast, pull the data, and get out before it can seal the exits.

An anomaly, isn’t it?” Jonah added. “The King hid that location in the memorandum’s footnote—not a coded file, not a dead drop, but a footnote in a document he signed without reading. It’s the kind of hiding place that only works if nobody processes the text. But the Algorithm processes all text. It would have seen it before I did. It knows exactly where I’m going.”

Edward’s face went rigid. “Then why are you going?”

Jonah’s reply was quiet and grim. “Because I need to learn what it wants me to find.”