Page 4 of Code Name: Phoenix

I take a moment to let his words sink in.

He’s not wrong.

If it were any other mission, I would have held back. We would have waited until we properly confirmed our sources and prepared our teams, but this is different. I’ve been searching for Maxwell and his operation for almost ten years.

Ten years with leads that go nowhere—or come two weeks too late.

Maxwell’s father, Matteo, is the reason Jessa and her family are dead. When she was alive, Matteo Sparr had his hands in everything around town, and most of it was illegal. The only part aboveboard was his cover company, Sparr Industries, where Jessa’s father worked. That was until Matteo began using the company to launder money from his illegal activities.

The night before we were preparing to take everyone in, something went wrong. Out of nowhere, the Sparr family packed up. Loose ends at the company were tied up, and they were gone by morning, with nothing but a trail of bodies in their wake. All signs show they had advance notice, but all of the men in our unit were cleared, and post-op review couldn’t find any leaks.

The family disappeared into thin air.

Our resources say Matteo retired. He still keeps one hand in his family’s dealings, but he’s chosen to live out his life with his wife somewhere secluded, somewhere where extradition almost definitely isn’t honored.

Matteo and Victoria Sparr also had a daughter, four years older than her brother Maxwell. She vanished from the family picture about five years before my mission. There was no police report, and Jessa once told me word around town was she went to live abroad with relatives and has never been back. I don’t blame her.

So, this leaves Maxwell. That apple didn’t fall far from Matteo’s poisonous tree. Maxwell is his father’s son. To everyone at school, he was the cool rich kid. The mask he wore fooled everyone except those of us who knew the brutal truth.

Matteo groomed his son to walk in his footsteps, and Maxwell did so with enthusiasm, becoming an entirely different person. By the time I came into the op, Maxwell was already overseeing his father’s execution orders at seventeen years old.

We had just gotten enough intel to end both father and son and seize all of their assets when they vanished.

They liquidated as much as they could within two days of the family’s disappearance. The courts finally froze a lot of their assets, but not before they made off with millions. Strip clubs changed hands fast. Drug operations changed groups or shut down, and Maxwell became almost as elusive as the guy we are looking for today.

Maxwell is deep into digital espionage, fraud, and treason, and his digital team are practically ghosts. After all our digging, we only know the handles of the people at the top of his hacking team. As much as it pains me to admit this out loud, they are geniuses. They’ve hacked into corporate and government systems with an ease we’ve never seen before.

And they are always ahead of the curve. Most hackers have the basic languages down, but usually they use one favorite language to hack. This group seems to jump easily between every computer language out there like they wrote them all, sometimes using processes they make up as they go along. They don’t follow hacking rules—they create them, and over the last seven years, most of our clients’ system updates have been necessary because of loopholes they’ve exploited.

Our government has spent massive amounts of money just trying to keep up with their skills, and right now I have two objectives. First, we need to contain his digital team. Their talents are unmatched, and taking them out of play would solve a lot of problems.

My second goal is personal. We need to dismantle Maxwell’s empire and eliminate him. His family took away the only person I’ve ever gotten close to.

I know it won’t bring her back. But revenge is all I have left, and I cling to the thought that, in the moment I destroy Maxwell, I will be close to her again.

Even if it’s fleeting.

I’ll take it.

I would give a lifetime to have one more minute with her. To have her back in my arms. To tell her what I should have told her ten years ago.

While I agree that driving out to this farmhouse in Kentucky on an anonymous tip isn’t the smartest thing we’ve done, we can’t afford to let this opportunity slip by.

“It’s the best intel we’ve gotten on this group in nine years. You know we won’t get better, and our lookout says there is movement on the premises.” I raise my eyebrows at Logan, daring him to challenge me, but he doesn’t.

He knows I’m right. Even if this doesn’t pan out, we can’t let it go.

Logan has been there with me through every failed attempt and close call.

Maxwell and his team are thorns in our sides. They are the longest outstanding contract we’ve had, and no one has been able to take them down.

I drop my gaze back to the folder on my lap. Thin piece of shit that it is, it holds all of the information we have on this group, which is barely enough to wipe my ass with. Two pathetic sheets of paper. No photos. We don’t even have a picture of the guys we’re looking for. Just two names: Jay and Zane.

Zane is our main target. He’s the one who coordinates the whole team. He’s the brains behind everything, but I’ll take his second in command and any others I can get my hands on too.

We contract out our services to various companies and work closely with our government, but today’s operation isn’t on anyone’s radar. This is something our company is doing off the record and without documentation. There have been too many failed attempts in the past to waste manpower, but this is a lead our team can’t let slide, so we’re doing it on our own dime.

“Two minutes out.” Grey’s update cuts into our silent car, and everyone tenses.

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