Chapter 15 · The Envoy’s Choice
Milan was waiting for her in her own office.
Isabel saw the half-open door from the end of the corridor — the light spilling through the gap was exactly as she’d left it, the blind angles unchanged. She had left the office at 7:45 AM for a hearing. Now, at 11:20 PM, Milan Vojnović sat in her swivel chair, an untouched glass of water at his hand, like a boulder that had been carried into the room.
She stopped at the door and didn’t enter.
“Your access control system didn’t alert,” she said. Not an accusation, not surprise — a delay tactic, buying thinking time while confirming facts. “How did you get in?”
“The Starlink terminal you use has a backdoor,” Milan said without turning around. “Not the kind I leave in firmware. The kind every Starlink-authorized terminal has — written into Section 47, Paragraph 3 of the user agreement — a remote maintenance interface. You didn’t read that far when you signed. Most people don’t.”
He turned the chair to face her. He looked almost exactly as he had when she’d first met him in Geneva — dark gray suit, white shirt, no tie, no visible expression on his face, the lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth set just right in that meticulous visage. Forty-seven years old. A man who grew up in the fires of Belgrade, now sitting in an office of the EU Digital Freedom Commission in Brussels, like a landlord come to collect rent.
“Come in. Close the door.”
Isabel stepped inside and closed the door. She didn’t walk to her own seat — Milan sat in her chair, so she leaned against the edge of the radiator by the window. The radiator was cold. Late April in Brussels, and the heating had already been turned off. The cold metal penetrated through her suit skirt to her skin, keeping her lucid.
“The Sahel operation failed,” Milan said. Not a question, not a probe — he was stating a fact they both already knew, using it only as an opening.
“I know,” Isabel said.
“Do you know how many people died?”
Isabel’s jaw tightened. “Twenty-three terminals intercepted — fifteen arrested, four injured, two critically, two unaccounted for.”
“Your data is very accurate.” Milan’s voice carried no mockery, only something close to objective evaluation. “Consistent with my data.”
He stood and walked to the window. Streetlight from the Brussels night filtered through the gaps in the blinds, cutting his profile into alternating bands of light and shadow. He wasn’t looking at the view — he was watching Isabel’s reflection in the glass.
“Isabel, I have never needed you to tell me what the Data Party is doing.”
Isabel’s fingers curled slightly at her sides.
“I know what they’re doing. They use the systems I designed, walk through the traps I left, read the logs I placed there. Farhan Malik thinks he’s reverse-engineering my protocol — I’ve been helping him reverse-engineer it. Every step he’s taken has been guided by clues I left in the logs, precisely enough, just enough for him to follow the path I paved.”
He turned and looked at her. His gaze was as calm as a pool of water with no visible bottom.
“What I need from you is — who in the Data Party is seriously thinking about how to defeat me.”
The room fell silent. Not the natural pause in a conversation — a frozen silence, like solder cooling and solidifying at a joint. Isabel could hear her own breathing, too loud in the quiet room. She could hear the occasional ding of the elevator at the end of the hall. But she didn’t speak. Her mind was processing every word of Milan’s statement at maximum speed — not the surface meaning, but the structure beneath.
He wasn’t asking what the Data Party was doing. He knew what they were doing.
He wanted to know who had the potential to do something beyond his expectations.
“You’ve met many people in the Data Party — Farhan is a technician. He’s smart, but his thinking operates within a technical framework. Amina is an organizer. She has strategic vision, but her resource base is at the physical layer — the Pigeonnet — incapable of striking Starlink’s core. You’ve seen the people in Berlin, Lagos, Singapore — all capable fighters. But a fighter and someone who can defeat me are two different things.”
Isabel’s lips moved, but no sound came out.
Milan said it for her: “You won’t say it? Then I’ll tell you: a former Huawei engineer named Lu Yuan and his genius friend Farhan. You think they found my vulnerability by themselves? No — I gave them that vulnerability.”
He picked up the untouched glass of water and took a sip. The water was clearly at room temperature. His expression didn’t change.
“I designed the Ingress-7 Protocol in 2049. I left the audit mirror interface in it. I embedded a nested backdoor deeper still — buried so deep that Farhan would need three years to find it. And the activation condition for that nested backdoor is — the noise void characteristics of the QKD channel. That’s not a vulnerability in the SkyWalker protocol. That’s the keyhole for the SkyWalker protocol.”
He set the glass down. The bottom met the wood surface with a crisp sound, like a period in the silent room.
“How far they can go depends on how far I allow them to go.”
Milan looked at her. There was no hostility in his gaze, no anger, no victor’s smugness — it was closer to the look of a veterinarian examining an anesthetized animal: precise observation with a clear objective.
“But you, Isabel — you’ve reached the end of the road.”
Isabel leaned against the radiator. The metal edge of the radiator pressed into her lower back, but she didn’t move. Her expression maintained the composure expected of a senior EU official at the negotiating table — facial muscles relaxed, eyes not evasive, breathing even. But she knew Milan could read the uncontrollable physiological details: the pulse in her carotid artery, the minute changes in her pupil diameter, the rate of sweat gland secretion. He didn’t need any equipment — he’d grown up in a war zone. His ability to read people was as strong as his ability to read protocols.
“Do you have anything else to say?” Milan asked.
Isabel thought about it and shook her head.
“Good. Then I’ll continue. You have forty-eight hours.”
He walked back to her desk — no, her desk, now occupied by him. He opened the middle drawer, removed a thin black folder with no label, placed it on the surface, and pressed his hand on top of it, like a notary confirming a document’s integrity.
“Two choices. First — become a full-time Starlink intelligence operative. You’ll receive immunity. Your current position, benefits, and access within the EU Commission will be fully preserved. Your job is to continue what you’re doing now — gathering intelligence from the Data Party — but every piece of intelligence will be reported directly to me without your filtering. You’ll go from double agent to my single-line agent. On the Data Party side, you don’t need to expose yourself — you continue your current role, but your output has only one channel: to me.”
He paused.
“In exchange, all your past actions involving conspiracy in space terrorism — specifically, the full range of intelligence you’ve provided to the Data Party from 2049 to the present — will be legally treated as ‘controlled counter-intelligence operations.’ Starlink will not pursue charges. The EU Commission will not know. The International Criminal Court will receive no dossiers.”
Isabel was silent. She could hear her own heart pounding against her ribs — not from fear, but the instinctive response of a mind compressed to its limit.
Milan didn’t wait for her response. He continued, his voice maintaining the same steady tone:
“Second — I submit a complete record of your transmission of military-level intelligence to the Data Party over the past four years to the International Criminal Court. Including the audit implementation details of the Ingress-7 Protocol you provided to Farhan Malik — Starlink’s core trade secrets and protected security information — along with a comparative analysis of all the false intelligence you submitted to me, which I have marked, proving you knowingly transmitted false information that could affect Starlink’s global network decisions.”
He sat back in the chair. The leather creaked softly.
“The maximum sentence for ‘conspiracy in space terrorism’ under the current legal framework is life imprisonment. I can ensure the trial takes place in the location you least desire — Singapore, for example.”
Isabel realized she hadn’t blinked in a long time. She blinked; her eyes were dry.
“You have forty-eight hours,” Milan said. “Until 11:20 PM the day after tomorrow. That’s the maximum grace my time zone allows — I was going to give twenty-four hours, but I thought you might need some time to process.”
He stood. His movements were not fast, but every step was certain. As he passed her on his way to the door, he didn’t look at her. His leather shoes made evenly spaced, rhythmically steady sounds on the standard-issue floor tiles.
At the door, he paused. He didn’t turn around.
“Oh — the right terminal in your office — the Pigeonnet channel — I physically disconnected it when I came in. Not through software. I cut the fiber optic cable in your wall.”
He pulled the door open.
“It will take at least a week to repair. You have forty-eight hours to decide. Don’t use that terminal for anything inside this office.”
He walked out and closed the door behind him. The lock clicked with a crisp, automatic sound. Footsteps receded down the corridor, terminated by the opening and closing of the elevator at the end.
Isabel stood alone in the room.
She stood for a long time — long enough for the streetlights outside to shift from warm yellow to the cold white of the early morning hours. The cold from the radiator seeped through her lower back into her bones.
She walked to the right terminal, crouched down, and traced the wall to where a short segment of fiber cable emerged from behind the baseboard. The cut was clean — made by a dedicated fiber shear in a single stroke, beyond any repair. She looked at the severed fiber and felt a strange lightness — not the relief of good news, but the release of something she’d carried for too long being forcibly taken from her hands, taken so roughly that she no longer had to agonize over whether she should put it down.
She stood and walked to the window.
Brussels in the deep night. The neoclassical buildings of the EU quarter appeared theatrically serene under the orange streetlights. No pedestrians. Occasionally a night tram passed in the distance, its interior lights briefly illuminating a few scattered passenger faces before they vanished around the next corner.
Forty-eight hours.
She opened the left terminal — Milan hadn’t touched it. The screen displayed the EU Digital Freedom Commission’s internal system interface. An unread email from the Commission President’s office reminded her of a follow-up meeting tomorrow morning on Starlink pricing transparency.
She closed the email.
Then she did something Milan hadn’t anticipated. From the inner pocket of her jacket, she took out a phone — not the Commission’s official device, not the Data Party’s encrypted terminal — an extremely old device with no Starlink interface, supporting only terrestrial cellular networks. The existence of this phone had never been recorded anywhere. It contained a single SIM card, and that card contained a single number.
She dialed the number.
One ring. Two. Three.
Connected.
The person on the other end didn’t speak. But Isabel knew he was listening.
“Farhan,” she said. Her voice was steadier than she’d expected, as if finally reaching the end of a long road had left no room for trembling. “Milan came to see me.”
Farhan listened to the full account on the encrypted channel without interrupting, without asking questions — only the occasional sound of keyboard clicks as Isabel spoke, which was him taking notes.
Isabel told him everything. She repeated every word Milan had said — carefully, preserving the tone and pauses as faithfully as she could. She told him about the forty-eight-hour deadline. About the two choices. About the severed fiber.
When she finished, the channel was silent for about ten seconds.
“Where are you?” Farhan asked.
“Brussels. My apartment.”
“Is that phone secure?”
“Pure terrestrial cellular. Doesn’t go through Starlink. Signal covers only three blocks. Never taken out of this area.”
Farhan was silent for another few seconds. She could hear the faint sound of his fingertips tapping the desk — his thinking habit.
“Isabel, you told me everything — including the real intelligence you passed to Milan about the Data Party. Do you know what this means?”
“I know,” she said.
“No, you don’t. The information you just gave me — about yourself — would be enough for me to treat you as a Starlink spy at any time. You could have held some back. Kept a lifeline for yourself.”
Isabel didn’t answer on the phone.
“But you told me everything.” Farhan’s voice carried something she’d never heard from him before — not emotion, but a confirmation after judgment. “You held nothing back.”
“I held nothing back.”
“What do you want?”
Isabel leaned against her apartment kitchen counter. Outside the window, Brussels was transitioning from deep night to the darkest hour before dawn — the sky a color between deep blue and pure black, no stars, no moon.
She realized what she wanted was actually simple. She wanted to stop playing any role. Double, triple — she’d spent too much of her life calculating her position within frameworks set by others. She wanted a day when she didn’t have to change masks. She didn’t know if she could have it, but she knew that in forty-eight hours, she had to stand somewhere.
“How much time do you have?” she asked. “Milan’s nested backdoor — have you found it?”
“We have a direction. No concrete address yet.”
“I have something here. Milan’s diary — not the technical logs, his personal handwritten diary. He wrote a lot of things in it that he never put in code. About his daughter. About his father. About why he left another door beneath every trap.”
She paused.
“And — about the last entry in Starlink that even Farhan hasn’t found.”
A faint creak came from Farhan’s end — the sound of a chair suddenly straightened.
“Where did you see these?”
“Last winter. A closed-door negotiation in Geneva. Milan’s hotel room was on the same floor as mine. His security system used Starlink’s custom protocol. I spent three months preparing to breach that system — not through any of my terminals, but through the hotel room’s smart thermostat.”
She paused.
“I only read twenty-three pages. There wasn’t enough time. But I memorized every word. I can write them out for you.”
“Can they be in my hands within three days?”
“Not in three days. I can write them now. The question is — what do I do after I write them and send them to you?”
Farhan didn’t answer immediately on the channel. Isabel could hear rapid keyboard clicks — maybe checking something, maybe just using a repetitive motion to focus his thoughts.
“Milan gave you forty-eight hours. The first twenty-four of those hours — he can’t monitor what you do with them. Those hours belong to you. The severed fiber only affects your pigeon channel, not your decision-making process.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Pretend to accept his terms.”
Isabel’s fingers stopped on the counter’s edge.
“Accept,” Farhan repeated, his voice not loud, but every word placed like a weight on a scale. “Accept his first option — become his full-time intelligence operative. You keep everything you have: position, clearance, freedom of movement. He’ll continue to trust you — at least on the surface. You’ll get access to more information.”
“And then?”
“Then pass every piece of information you receive to me — through a new channel I’ll give you.”
“A new channel?”
“Lu Yuan came up with it. He modified SkyWalker’s void modulation scheme in a different direction — not for transmitting the Data Party’s own information, but to establish a one-way information injection path between your official terminal and my receiver. Your official terminal is Starlink-authorized — Milan won’t suspect it. Because all the traffic is under his audit. But if we embed data in the timestamps of system logs — not the content itself, but the time intervals between log entries as the encoding itself — then Milan’s audit system sees only normal log flow.”
Farhan paused.
“He’s watching your content. He won’t watch the rhythm of your breath.”
Isabel ran the scheme through her mind. She saw its fragility: extremely low transmission rate — roughly one bit every few minutes. But it required no new hardware, no new fiber, no physical changes to anything. She just needed to encode information through the timing intervals between mouse clicks on specific buttons during her daily routine on her official terminal. Milan’s audit system would see a series of normal operational logs. Only Farhan’s decoder could extract the hidden information from those time intervals.
“He knows you’ll keep trying to contact me,” Isabel said. “He must know.”
“He knows. Milan is a man who’s calculated every step. But what he can’t calculate — is that you’ll choose to accept his terms on the surface.”
“What am I actually choosing?”
Farhan was silent on the channel for a long time. Long enough for Isabel to think the connection had dropped.
“You’re choosing to become someone who’s already been burned,” Farhan said, very softly. “But you can make this fire burn brighter.”
Isabel hung up. She disassembled the old phone, removed the SIM card, cut it in half with scissors, and flushed it down the toilet. The phone itself she put in the freezer — not to preserve it, but to ensure no thermal imaging could recover fingerprint residue when she disposed of it tomorrow.
Then she sat on the living room sofa. The lights were off.
She remembered what Milan had said: “You’ve reached the end of the road.”
He was wrong. She hadn’t reached the end of the road. She’d only reached the end of the road Milan had paved for her. Beyond that road, there was another — narrower, darker, more dangerous — but it was one she had chosen herself, not one placed beneath her feet by someone else.
Wind from the balcony seeped through the gap in the window, carrying the particular chill of late April in Brussels. She didn’t close the window. She let the cold air wrap around her body, keeping her awake.
She sat in the darkness for a long time. The light outside shifted from pure black to deep blue, from deep blue to a color between gray and white — the color of the quietest hour before dawn. In the distance, a night tram passed, its headlights drawing a blurred column of light through the humid air.
She still didn’t move.
In her mind, she was organizing the contents of those twenty-three diary pages — every word, every punctuation mark, every trace of emotion Milan might have left in his handwriting. She arranged them in chronological order, adding her own analysis notes to each section. She knew some of these words might have been deliberately left there by Milan, waiting for her to find them. But others — beyond doubt — were things Milan had said only to himself.
She would write them all down.
Not for Farhan.
Not for the Data Party.
Not even to defeat Milan —
But to prove that in the ashes left after she was burned, there was still something glowing.
At four in the morning, Isabel opened her official terminal — Starlink-authorized, fully audited, Milan’s gaze potentially falling on it at any moment. She opened a work document. The title read: Supplementary Comments on the Starlink Service Pricing Transparency Report — Isabel Krause.
She began writing.
It looked like she was writing a work report.
But what she was actually writing — in the placement of every comma, the spacing of every line break, the character count left blank at the end of every paragraph — was an encryption of the twenty-three diary pages in her memory.
No one would see it.
But between the lines of those orderly bureaucratic sentences, a hidden river only one specific person could decode was flowing silently. Like the photon arrival time differences in a QKD channel, dismissed as noise.
Like a person in a bright room, using her own shadow to cast another line of characters on the wall — characters that no one could see.
