Luna. Chapter 187

(Kael's POV)

"Sir, we have a problem."

The voice crackled through my earpiece as I crouched behind the abandoned delivery truck, watching the government facility through night-vision binoculars.

"What kind of problem?"

"Cassius is gone."

I lowered the binoculars and pressed the radio button. "Gone how?"

"Someone cut through his restraints. The guards are unconscious but alive. No signs of forced entry."

The news should have been alarming. For the past year, Cassius had been our most valuable intelligence asset. Losing him meant losing our primary source of information about government operations.

But instead of alarm, I felt a cold smile spread across my face.

Perfect.

"When?"

"Best guess is about thirty minutes ago."

Thirty minutes. Just enough time for him to reach government communications and warn them about our assault. Just enough time to provide detailed intelligence about our troop positions and tactical objectives.

Just enough time to fall completely into the trap we'd been preparing for months.

"Sir, should we track him?"

"No. Let him go."

"Let him go? But he knows our entire operational structure. He could compromise everything."

"Marcus, how long have you known me?"

A pause. "Four years."

"In those four years, have I ever made a tactical decision without good reason?"

"No, sir."

"Then trust me now. Cassius escaping is exactly what we want."

I could hear the confusion in Marcus's voice. "I don't understand."

"You don't need to understand. You need to follow orders. Let Cassius run straight back to his masters."

I clicked off the radio and returned to watching the facility.

For the past six months, I'd been feeding Cassius carefully crafted intelligence. Information that was accurate enough to be believable but incomplete enough to be useless for strategic planning.

He thought he knew our troop positions. Our supply lines. Our assault timeline. Our primary objectives. Our escape routes.

He was wrong about all of it.

The real assault force was positioned thirty miles south of where he expected. Our heavy weapons were mobile units, not fixed installations. Our communications hub was a decoy operation designed to draw attention away from actual command centers.

Most importantly, our primary objective wasn't the target he'd been led to believe.

Tonight, Cassius would report to Adrian that our main force was attacking the eastern perimeter at dawn. That our heavy weapons were positioned in Grid Seven. That our communications hub was located in the old grain elevator.

That our objective was capturing the government communications center to disrupt their coordination capabilities.

Adrian would redeploy his forces accordingly, leaving his real vulnerabilities exposed.

The beauty of the plan was that Cassius would be telling the truth as he understood it. His information would pass every supernatural lie-detection test Adrian's people could devise.

Because Cassius genuinely believed everything we'd let him overhear during his captivity.

Every briefing he'd witnessed had been carefully staged. Every document he'd seen had been specifically designed to reinforce false assumptions about our capabilities and intentions.

Every interrogation session had been structured to make him think he was revealing our secrets while actually absorbing the misinformation we wanted him to carry.

It had taken months of patient psychological manipulation. But Cassius's arrogance had made him an ideal target for the kind of intellectual deception we needed.

He believed he was smarter than his captors. He believed his superior education and institutional training made him immune to crude rebel tactics.

He believed he had been extracting information instead of being fed it.

I checked my watch. Ninety minutes until phase two began.

By now, Cassius would be in full debriefing mode. Explaining to Adrian's staff exactly what he'd learned during his year in captivity. Providing detailed intelligence about our operational capabilities.

Positioning Adrian's forces exactly where we needed them to be.

"Alpha to all units," I said into my radio. "Phase two is go. Repeat, phase two is go."

Time to show my brother what I'd learned about strategy during our year apart.

Time to prove that sometimes the most effective weapon wasn't superior firepower or tactical advantage.

Sometimes the most effective weapon was letting your enemy think they were winning.