The ledger was straightforward and ugly. Names, dates, shipping manifests, routes. Nothing poetic. Just numbers and motion. Cooper pushed it across the table like it might bite.
"It lists discrete pickup points," he said. "Routes that look like ordinary freight. Nothing flashy." He let that sit. "Except these pickups line up with an infrastructure of private transfers — planes, cars, and safe houses. Lines that aren't on regular manifests."
Liz traced a route with a finger. "These manifests — they fit no single company. They look like a patchwork designed to hide origin and destination. Why would someone keep a ledger of that if not to control movement?"
Reddington watched her. "Control movement is valuable. Information about who moves what, where, when — it's brokerage. People pay handsomely for that kind of certainty. And some men prefer to erase the paper trail when they think it's someone else's advantage."
Ressler looked up. "You're saying this ties back to you?"
Reddington gave a small, measured nod. "Parts of this route network intersect with shipments I oversee. It is not entirely my ledger, but pieces of my transportation grid appear under other names. Either someone was using my routes without authorization — which would be an inconvenience I dislike — or someone with intimate knowledge of those routes kept their own book."
Cooper's face hardened. "So Revenant took something that compromises your movement, and you want it back."
"I want the ledger contained," Reddington said. "Contained and recovered. It is the only way to stop a secondary threat from leveraging pieces of infrastructure that should belong to trusted nodes."
Aram tapped his tablet. "If those routes line up with what we can trace, we might get a location for a node when he pulls a job. If Revenant uses shipping drop points that intersect Reddington's paths, then he's not just operating independently. He's touching major arteries. That increases risk exponentially."
Ressler's eyes sharpened. "We need to watch those arteries. Stakeouts. Man the manifests. Force the killer to show a hand."
Cooper agreed. "Ressler, assemble a discrete team. Watch the points on the ledger. Aram — you're our best shot at catching a live node. If it fires up, we have to be able to intercept in seconds."
Aram's jaw clenched. "I'll need resources. A dedicated trace cluster, access to unmonitored bandwidth, permission to stand up mirror nodes. And I need the kind of quiet window where nothing else in the network is scanning me to trigger the code's defence."
Cooper didn't hesitate. "You'll have it."
Revenant watched them through other people's eyes. He watched the Task Force arrange chess pieces the way they always did: paperwork, posture, and pressure. He'd read their patterns and known how they moved before he ever sat in his chair that night. He noted Cooper's need for order, Reddington's tendency to catalogue, Ressler's impatience, and Aram's uncanny hunger for puzzles. Each was a potential risk. Each was entertainment.
He updated his own ledger in the quiet of a rented server room with a coffee cooling on the desk. The site was a living thing — a mesh of ephemeral nodes and self-validating keys. It was written by someone who preferred not to be read: him. He monitored pings, rotated ciphers, and let the architecture recompose every five minutes. Pride made him tinker. Survival made him ruthless.
Aram's attempts to mirror an inbound node were not a surprise. They were expected. He'd written the site to observe attackers and rearrange itself when anomalies appeared. It never panicked; it reconfigured.
At two in the morning, Aram got a hit.
"Live traffic," he muttered, eyes white. "A node just spun up."
Ressler and a small tactical team were on a van in under ten minutes, covert radios, blurred badges. Cooper authorized a live watch. The Task Force prepared to snapshot whatever they could.
Aram began the mirror.
On his screen, a neat burst of packets flashed — a node handshake, ephemeral, honest for three heartbeats. He launched the capture routine, a script that would clone the node state, duplicate the key fragments, and hold the session long enough to backtrace the originating chain.
The mirror grabbed the handshake.
For two seconds, Aram felt something like triumph.
Then the code changed.
It was subtle at first: a header field rewrote itself in transit as if a river suddenly changed course. The session token recomputed. The node spawned a sibling and blurred into another subnet. Aram's capture routine stalled — a null-pointer in a place his scripts hadn't accounted for. Every packet after the instant reshaped its signature. The mirror found only red herrings: an IP that resolved to a legitimate weather service, a certificate that matched a multinational provider, and then—nothing. The ephemeral node evaporated as if it had never been there.
"Someone's watching our watch," Aram said, stunned. "It's adaptive. It's mutating on detection."
Ressler slammed a fist against the van's interior. "So we spooked it and it hid. Can we lock it down? Force it to stay?"
Aram's fingers flew. "Not in its current state. It's got a defensive routine that morphs when it detects deep packet cloning or consistent probing. It rotates keys, redirects metadata to sound like benign services, and then kills the process. If we hold the connection too long, it will poison the breadcrumbs we collect."
"Then what do we do?" Cooper asked through the earpiece, voice low.
Aram didn't look up. "We need a bait node. We need to give it something to latch on to that looks like prey and let it expose itself. But setting up a believable bait requires resources and control over a network we can't risk linking back to the Bureau."
Reddington's voice came through the call he'd placed to Cooper. "The creature you face is clever. It built a mirror to see mirrors. It is not merely hiding — it is hunting hunters."
Back in his rented room, Revenant watched the live traffic of the Task Force's attempt like someone observing a child learning how to leap. Aram had skill. He'd almost touched the node. The code's mutation had been cleaner than most countermeasures. He made a note to refine the timing and the false flags the node would provide next cycle. He admired Aram more than he cared to admit. It was rare to find an adversary who could almost pull you out of the light.
He pushed a change to the network: a micro-evolution of the obfuscation layer that would cause any unvetted mirror to receive a decoy packet set and an intrusion alarm that simulated a corporate counterstrike. He wanted no one to come closer than they already had. Pride told him to make it perfect. Survival made him ruthless about the details.
At the Task Force, the van returned, radios low, faces tight. Aram sat slumped, chewing the end of a pen.
"I had two seconds," he said in a voice that sounded rough even to himself. "Two seconds of a node. But it mutated on detection. It was like watching a body change clothes mid-fall."
Cooper fixed him with a patient stare. "We keep trying. You got a feel for the pattern — now we build on it."
Ressler's jaw worked. "If he's touching Reddington's logistics, somebody high up is now exposed. That'll get him moving. We'll have more heat."
Reddington's eyes were distant. "Heat is always welcome if it expands the scope of who pays attention. But tread carefully. The ledger's contents intersect with networks that do not like being catalogued. You remove one ghost, and you may find three more waiting in the dark to replace it."
Liz folded the ledger back into the folder and closed it. "So we bait him. Aram builds something that looks sweet enough to grab. We watch the grab. We close the net."
Aram looked up, tired but alive. "I can make bait. But it will be a living thing. It will need to appear low-tech, like an amateur operator, and yet be rich enough to tempt the network. If Revenant is watching for professionalism, he'll ignore it. If he's watching for opportunity, he'll bite."
Cooper nodded. "Then we make a mistake that looks profitable. We make the ledger visible in a way that could tempt the buyer side. We leave crumbs that look like a vulnerability in Reddington's routes. If Revenant moves to exploit it, we'll have eyes waiting."
Reddington's smile was almost invisible. "You will be playing with a clever animal, Harold. It will not walk into your cage without thinking. But it may sniff anyway. Sometimes that is enough."
Outside, in the architecture of the city, Revenant closed down connections and spun up new ones. He left breadcrumb noise designed to mislead anyone who would try the exact trick Aram had used. He did not panic. He refined. He set new thresholds for detection and made the cost of probing higher. Whoever tried again would spend time and resources, and he could use their movements against them.
In the Task Force van, Aram patched his scripts and catalogued every packet he managed to capture. Two seconds was not nothing. It was leverage. He could build a better mirror on that small window if he had the resources. Cooper promised them. Reddington promised hints.
And Revenant, who had no need of promises, folded the ledger into his jacket and smiled once. The game had escalated. He liked games.