Read Chapter 7: Silent Coup at NAEOC

The first warning was a change of locks. Jonah knew because his key card—the one that had opened the NAEOC server room door for six years—now beeped red against the reader. He tried twice, then stepped back, letting the morning crowd of analysts shuffle past him with their coffees and lanyards.

"Jonah."

He turned. Margaret Ellison stood in the corridor, not his boss's usual brisk stride but planted, hands folded, the posture of someone delivering news she'd rehearsed. She was fifty-three, grey-streaked, with the weary authority of someone who'd survived three government restructurings.

"Margaret. My card's not working."

"Your access has been suspended pending review."

"Review of what?"

She didn't answer. Instead she gestured toward the corner office that had belonged to Douglas Chen for the last two years. The nameplate was gone. Behind the glass, a new figure sat at the desk—a man in a muted blue suit, early forties, with the polished blandness of someone who'd spent his career in palace communications.

"Who is that?"

"Alistair Finch," Margaret said. "Formerly deputy private secretary to the Prince of Wales's office."

Jonah felt the floor tilt slightly. The palace had moved on him faster than he'd expected. Faster than anyone could expect.

"What happened to Douglas?"

"He's been seconded to a cross-departmental data review committee. Indefinitely." Margaret's eyes held his for a moment longer than necessary. "I'd advise you to cooperate fully with the review, Jonah. They're asking about your audit history. Whether it was as complete as you claimed."

His stomach went cold. He'd been careful—covered his tracks in the logs, backdated his findings, made his file look ordinary. But they were using the word *complete*. They knew something. They knew about the nights he'd spent mapping the Algorithm's decision tree when he should have been verifying compliance checklists. The years of quiet exploration he'd passed off as routine monitoring.

"When's the review?"

"This afternoon. Three o'clock, room 4B."

"Will I be able to access my files before then? I have work to hand over."

Margaret hesitated—a flicker of something that might have been sympathy, or might have been calculation. "Your credentials are already revoked. You can remain on premises until the review, but you're not to enter any restricted systems."

She walked away. Jonah stood in the corridor, watching Finch through the glass as the man examined a document with the fastidious attention of someone who'd never had to do real work in his life. The Actuarial Subroutine, the crisis model, all of it—sitting in servers three floors below, suddenly more remote than the moon.

---

He spent the morning pretending to cooperate. Moving files from his desk to a cardboard box, answering questions from colleagues with vague reassurances. He watched Finch hold court in the corner office, receiving a stream of palace staffers and consultants Jonah had never seen before. By noon, the third floor had been emptied of its senior auditors—all of them summoned to meetings, all of them returning with thin smiles and empty notebooks.

They were burying it. The data, the trace evidence, years of accumulated understanding of the Algorithm's internal logic—all of it would be reclassified, sanitized, made to disappear inside the machinery of institutional review.

At one o'clock, Jonah excused himself to the bathroom. He locked the stall door, sat on the lid, and pulled out his phone. Stone's number, already memorized.

"Eliya."

"Jonah. You sound like you're in a well."

"Metaphorically, yes. They've moved on NAEOC. New palace liaison in charge, all senior access suspended. My credentials are dead."

A pause. He could hear her breathing, the faint scratch of a pen against paper. "They're consolidating the model."

"Yes."

"Have you made copies of everything?"

"No. I was in the middle of—" He stopped. The backdoor. He'd built it years ago, after a systems audit revealed gaps in the monitoring protocol. He'd told his supervisor at the time that he'd closed them all, filed the paperwork, made it clean. But he'd left one open—a maintenance access point buried in the lighting control subsystem, immune to standard credential checks. He'd used it twice in six years, both times to check the Algorithm's response to minor data irregularities. Nothing more.

He'd never told anyone it still existed.

"Eliya, I have an option. But I need to stay in the building past three."

"What happens at three?"

"They review me. Probably terminate me. Either way, I'll be escorted out."

"Then you need to move before three. What do you need?"

"A distraction. Something that pulls Finch away from the floor for twenty minutes."

Stone's voice was dry, almost amused. "Twenty minutes. That's not much."

"It's enough. But I need you to cause it."

"Give me his schedule."

"I don't have access to the internal calendar anymore."

"Then send me a photograph of the corridor outside his office. I'll take it from there."

Jonah ended the call, pocketed his phone, and walked out of the stall. He spent the next hour positioning himself near the corner office, pulling files off the shelf outside the door, watching patterns. Finch's assistant—a young man with sharp cheekbones and a palace pin on his lapel—made three trips to the photocopier. A woman from the palace IT team arrived at 1:45 with an encrypted tablet. Finch took calls on a secure line, hands free, pacing in short circles.

At 2:15, Jonah's phone buzzed. Stone, one word: *Bathroom next to the server staging area. Motion your head.*

He went. The building's second floor had a maintenance hallway that led to an intermediate server room, mostly decommissioned equipment, a single access point to the main core. Jonah slipped through a fire door propped open by a broken latch and pressed himself against the wall.

At 2:30, Finch's assistant appeared in the corridor, cellphone pressed to his ear, face tight. He knocked on the corner office door, entered, and left fifteen seconds later with a folded note. Two minutes after that, Finch himself emerged, striding toward the elevators with the assistant trailing.

Stone had done something. He didn't know what, but she'd clearly triggered a palace escalation—probably a fabricated emergency, a summons to some committee meeting, something that required Finch's physical presence away from the building.

He had maybe fifteen minutes.

Jonah moved. Down the maintenance corridor, past the staging room, through a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY that clicked open with a code he'd memorized in his second year at NAEOC. The server room was cold, humming, blue lights blinking in the dark like a message from another world. He crossed to the core rack—third from the left, bottom shelf—and knelt beside the housing unit.

The backdoor was still there. A hidden maintenance profile nested inside the building automation system, tied to an inactive service account that had never been flagged. He entered the credentials from memory, hands steady, and the terminal blinked green.

He pulled the core executable—the full Algorithm runtime, not the sandboxed version he'd analyzed for years. It was massive; his encrypted drive needed a full minute to receive the transfer. He watched the progress bar fill in jerky increments, one eye on the corridor, listening for footsteps.

The transfer completed at 2:47. He disconnected the drive, wiped the terminal's local logs, recoded the access point to someone else's name—a mid-level IT contractor who'd left the agency last year. Then he walked out through the maintenance hallway, back into the bright fluorescent normalcy of the third floor, and sat down at his desk as if he'd been there all along.

At 2:55, he slid the drive into a cavity in the lining of his jacket, between the seams. Evidence you could not strip-search him for without cause.

At 3:00, room 4B. A clean table, five chairs, a carafe of water that no one touched. Finch sat across from him, flanked by two palace lawyers in identical grey suits. They asked questions about his audit methodology, his access patterns, his relationship with Professor Eliya Stone.

Jonah answered in bland paragraphs. Cooperative. Forthcoming. He spoke for twenty minutes, inviting inspection, offering explanations, and never once mentioning the core executable now sitting against his ribs.

At 3:45, Finch nodded, closed his folder, and offered his hand to shake. Jonah took it.

"We'll be in touch," Finch said. "You'll be hearing from the review committee within the week."

The lawyers stood. Jonah stood. He walked out of room 4B, through the corridors of NAEOC, past the glass office where Finch had already resumed his watch, and took the stairs to the ground floor rather than the elevator, because he wanted the extra thirty seconds to process what he'd heard.

Finch had asked about Stone. Not Margaret, not Marcus, not the USB. Stone.

The palace knew who he'd been working with.

He pushed through the revolving doors into the grey London afternoon, and the phone in his pocket buzzed. A text from an unknown number, encrypted with a key only one person in the world could have used.

It read: *Fourth seal is not what we thought. Come to the flat in Vauxhall. Bring everything. Priya's address is 14 Heron Quay, third floor.*

It was signed not by Stone but by a single initial: *M.*

Marcus. Marcus had the second encrypted message, and he'd just decoded something that had sent him to Priya's flat.

Jonah checked the street behind him. No tails. Not yet.

He flagged a cab, gave the driver the Vauxhall address, and pressed the encrypted drive against his ribs like a second heartbeat.