The Fox's Dead Signal

Elena checked her iPhone for the third time in five minutes. The blue light from the screen washed over her tired face in the empty parking garage. 2:47 AM. Her husband David would be asleep by now, probably lying on his side of the bed, one arm thrown across where she should be.

"Fox is in position," the text read.

She typed back: "Copy."

Elena was a corporate spy, though that sounded far more glamorous than the reality. The reality was sitting in rental cars outside office parks, downloading data from unsuspecting executives' phones, and feeling like a piece of her soul died with each successful extraction. She was becoming something like a zombie — hollowed out, moving through the motions, alive but not living.

The fox, as they called her, because of her red hair and her ability to slip through any security perimeter undetected.

She watched the distant figure of Marcus Sterling, the CEO she'd been tracking for three weeks, emerge from the building. Her iPhone's hacking software had already extracted everything from his phone — compromising photos with his assistant, offshore accounts, the whole sordid package that would destroy his career and make her clients very wealthy.

Her iPhone pinged with another message: "Proceed with phase two."

Elena's fingers hovered over the keyboard. Phase two meant planting the evidence. It meant destroying a man she'd watched cry over his daughter's ballet recital videos, the same man whose bathroom break schedule she'd memorized, the same man whose private moments she'd violated day after day.

The fox in her wanted to survive — to keep the apartment, the marriage, the life that was already fraying at the edges. David had asked her last week if she was happy. She'd lied.

The zombie in her just wanted it to end.

Elena thought of Sterling's daughter — seven years old, missing front teeth, holding a ballet trophy she'd seen in the stolen photos. The girl's father was a terrible person, but he was her father.

"Fox? You there?"

"I'm out," she typed.

She deleted the thread, reset her iPhone to factory settings, and started the car. The fox had one last trick left: she wasn't going to be anyone's weapon anymore.