“Marcus, where did you get that designator?”

That’s what Special Agent Marcus Hale kept telling himself, even as the hard drive in his hand grew warm, then hot. The file name was a string of alphabet soup— XC3D-USA-CIA-RF-Ziperto.part2.rar —buried inside a decommissioned server at Langley. A server that was supposed to have been wiped clean three presidents ago.

“It’s not an asset network.” Her voice dropped. “XC3D was a Black Program. Terminated before inception. Officially, it never existed. Unofficially, it stood for ‘eXperimental Continuity, 3rd Directive.’ It was a ghost protocol. If the chain of command was decapitated—nuclear strike, pandemic, coup—XC3D was supposed to wake up.”

He did what any sensible analyst would do. He didn’t tell his supervisor. He called a friend at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency—a woman named Dr. Samira Venn who owed him a favor.