NATE & ADRIAN'S POV
The master suite of St. Jude's Key was usually a cathedral of digital silence, but tonight, the atmosphere was pressurized. Outside, the Atlantic was screaming a Category 3 storm, hammering the obsidian cliffs with a rhythmic violence that felt like a pulse.
I was standing at the primary command console, my eyes tracking the data streams from the London markets, when the first anomaly hit. It wasn't a red light or a siren; it was a soft fail. On the tactical map of the Northern Perimeter, a single guard's icon, Unit 4, a man named Henderson, didn't blink. It didn't turn red to signify a casualty; it simply stopped reporting. It was a flatline in the telemetry.
"Adrian," I said, my voice cutting through the low hum of the servers. "Henderson just went dark. No radio check, no movement, no biometric shift. He's just... gone."
