Chapter 141: Mole Hunt
Vrenn Myrvalis built traps the way a spider built webs — patiently, invisibly, and with the absolute certainty that something would walk into them.
The trap was information. Specifically, different information provided to different suspects through different channels, each piece unique — a *canary trap*, the intelligence technique of distributing marked variants of the same intelligence to identify who was leaking it. If the foreign network received information that matched a specific variant, the leak was the person who received that variant.
The operation targeted eight suspects — individuals with access to the type of intelligence that the dead drop messages had contained. Military installation locations, patrol schedules, Crucible security personnel names. Eight people who knew enough to be useful to a spy network and who had opportunity to pass that knowledge.
Three were military officers — garrison commanders with access to deployment schedules and installation maps. Two were Crucible administrators — staff in the Crucible’s security division whose work involved maintaining the protection schedules for temples and the Grand Cathedral. Two were Ministry of Coin clerks — financial officers who processed the military’s budget and whose records revealed troop strength, equipment allocation, and logistical capacity. And one was an Academy professor — a scholar with research access to the kingdom’s infrastructure records who could legitimately examine information that a spy would need.
"Each suspect receives a briefing package," Vrenn said. He was in the Veilwood safehouse — the permanent operational facility that he kept in Ashenveil’s merchant district, different from the tailor’s-shop safehouse where he’d briefed Tess months ago. This one was beneath a tea house, accessed through a service tunnel that smelled like jasmine and damp stone. "The packages are identical in format and apparently identical in content. The differences are numerical: patrol frequencies, personnel counts, installation capacity figures. Minor variations — less than five percent deviation from actual values — embedded in the data."
Tess reviewed the packages. "The values are close enough to be useful but distinct enough to be traceable."
"The foreign network wants accuracy. They’ll transmit the numbers they receive. When those numbers appear in the network’s traffic — which we can’t read yet, but will, once decryption completes — we’ll know which suspect’s variant entered the pipeline."
"And if none of them match?"
"Then the leak isn’t in our suspect pool. We expand." He paused. "But I’m confident. The dead drop traffic required access to military and Crucible data at a specificity level that only these eight people — or someone who received information from these eight people — could provide."
***
The packages were distributed. The suspects received their briefings through normal channels — routine intelligence summaries, standard-format reports, the daily paperwork of a kingdom that generated administrative data the way it generated grain: constantly, voluminously, and with the assumption that someone, somewhere, was reading it.
Vrenn waited. Waiting was the intelligence operative’s primary skill — not action, not analysis, not the dramatic confrontations that popular stories attributed to spies. Waiting. The disciplined, controlled patience of watching for a signal that might come in days or weeks or not at all.
While he waited, he worked the secondary investigation — the one that didn’t involve traps and marked intelligence but instead involved the patient, pedestrian work of knowing things.
He knew things about Suspect Three — Colonel Ervan Marshell, garrison commander of the Western Ashenveil Garrison, forty-one, Human, married, two children, fourteen years of military service. Colonel Marshell’s personal finances showed a debt pattern that revealed a gambling habit — not spectacular, not ruinous, but persistent. Monthly card games at the Officers’ Club. Quarterly visits to the horse races in the Shimmerfields. Cumulative losses over fourteen years: approximately thirty-five hundred Marks. Significant for a colonel whose annual compensation was twelve hundred Marks.
Gambling debts were the oldest vulnerability in intelligence work. A person in debt was a person who could be purchased. Not with ideology, not with persuasion, but with the simple, irresistible currency of financial relief.
He knew things about Suspect Six — Administrator Calton Breer, Crucible security division, thirty-seven, Human, unmarried, no family in Ashenveil. Administrator Breer had arrived in the capital eleven years ago from the Pale Coast — unusual, because Crucible administrators were typically recruited locally. His prior employment: temple administrator in Tidewatch. His transfer: requested by him, approved by the division chief, unremarkable in the administrative record. His social patterns: quiet, professional, no close relationships, the kind of person who lived inside his work and left no impression on the world outside it.
Invisible people worried Vrenn. Invisible people were either genuinely bland — which was common, because most people were bland — or deliberately constructed. And deliberately constructed invisibility was the hallmark of a deep-cover operative.
"Breer or Marshell," Tess predicted.
"I’m not predicting. I’m collecting." Vrenn’s claws tapped his thigh — the fast, rhythmic tapping that meant he was processing. "Predictions are theories without evidence. They feel productive. They’re not. They’re premature conclusions that bias subsequent analysis. I’ll identify the leak when the trap snaps. Until then, I collect."
***
The trap snapped on day nine.
Not from the dead drop — the dead drop remained inactive, the courier still absent, the network clearly aware that the physical communication channel was compromised. The signal came through the second method — the one that Vrenn had been monitoring since the network’s discovery.
Serra — the female handler, the traveling merchant — made a trip. Ashenveil to Greywater Crossing, the usual route. But this time, Vrenn’s surveillance team in Greywater Crossing documented her meeting with a man who wasn’t in the normal pattern. A new contact. Old, weathered, dressed in the nondescript clothing of a neutral-zone trader. The meeting lasted four minutes. Serra passed a sealed container — the same type used in the dead drop. The man disappeared into the neutral zone.
Three days later, Vrenn’s cryptanalysis team broke the fifth message — a message recovered from the dead drop before it went silent. The message contained patrol frequencies for the western garrison.
The patrol frequencies matched Suspect Three’s variant. Colonel Marshell’s numbers. The five-percent deviation, embedded in the data, reproduced exactly in a coded message that had been intended for a foreign intelligence service.
"Marshell," Vrenn said.
Not triumph. Not satisfaction. The flat, clinical acknowledgment of a confirmed hypothesis. A colonel in the kingdom’s military, selling patrol schedules to a foreign network, for reasons that Vrenn would now determine through the next phase of the operation — the phase where the leak was not arrested but turned.
Because a leak you controlled was more valuable than a hole you plugged. A turned agent — a person who continued feeding the foreign network, but now feeding them the information that Vrenn chose — was the most powerful weapon in intelligence work.
The mole hunt was complete. The whisper war had produced its first prisoner.
The prisoner didn’t know it yet.