The Price of Trust

The oil was cold. I worked it into the bolt carrier with a soft cloth, my movements practiced and economical. One piece at a time, laid out in perfect order on the grey mat. The rifle was a Steyr SSG 08, disassembled. It looked like a diagram, like something abstract and harmless. The city glittered through the window behind me, a silent, sprawling network of light.

I didn't think about the purpose of the tool, not really. Thinking was a liability. The process was what mattered. The smooth glide of the bolt in its housing, the clean scent of the solvent, the faint click as a pin was seated correctly. It was a ritual that emptied my head of everything but the mechanics of the thing in my hands. It was better than sleep.

My apartment was a sterile box in the sky. White walls, polished concrete, a bed pushed against the far wall. No photographs, no books, no clutter. Clutter was a history, and I didn't have one I cared to revisit. The only thing of value was the view, and I didn't own that.

My phone vibrated against the concrete floor. A single, insistent buzz. I didn't look at it. I finished wiping down the barrel, holding it up to the light to inspect the rifling. Clean. Perfect. I began reassembly, the pieces coming together with a series of satisfying, metallic sounds. It felt solid in my hands again, a single object with a single purpose.

The phone buzzed again. Silas. He was impatient.

I picked it up, my thumb swiping across the screen. I didn't say anything.

"You there?" His voice was tinny, stripped of warmth by the encryption.

"Yes," I said.

"New contract. Deputy Mayor Alistair Finch."

I slotted the magazine into place. It seated with a firm click. "Okay."

"City Hall. East balcony. He has a cigarette at ten P.M. every night. He thinks no one knows."

"And now we do." My voice was flat. I looked out the window, at the thousands of other windows staring back. Thousands of people with their own little routines.

"He'll be alone. The window is exactly fifteen minutes. After that, his security does a check."

"The shot?"

"From the rooftop of the Sterling building. I've already cleared your access. A maintenance keycard will be in the usual place."

"Payment is standard?" I asked, my eyes tracing the lines of the rifle stock.

"Standard transfer upon confirmation. Visual confirmation, Winona. A photo. And be clean. This one needs to look like a heart attack until the coroner gets a closer look."

"Understood."

There was a pause. I could hear him breathing on the other end of the line, a small, irritatingly human sound. "The file is sent. Don't call this number again until it's done."

He disconnected.

I set the phone down, screen-side down. The conversation was already fading, just another set of parameters in a complex equation. Finch. Ten P.M. Sterling building. Clean. I stood up and walked to the window, resting the cold steel of the reassembled rifle against my shoulder. The city didn't look any different. It was just a place. Finch was just a name, a set of coordinates. My job was to make a small, precise adjustment. To remove one light from the millions below. It meant nothing. I felt the familiar quiet settle over me, the calm before the work began. It wasn't peace. It was just emptiness.

The wind was a physical presence on the rooftop, pushing against my jacket. It smelled of rain and exhaust fumes. Below, the city was a river of light, cars flowing like blood cells through arteries. I lay on a thin foam mat, the concrete cold beneath it. The Sterling building was old, its parapet decorated with stone gargoyles that were now just dark, misshapen lumps against the bruised purple of the sky.

My rifle was already set up, the bipod steady on the ledge. I had checked the wind speed twice. A slight crosswind, from left to right. I made the adjustment on the scope, a few small clicks. My breathing was slow, even. In, out. My heart rate was low. This was the stillness I worked for.

Through the scope, the balcony on City Hall was a bright rectangle of light cut out of the darkness. It was empty. I checked my watch. 21:54. Six minutes.

I didn’t think about Finch. I didn’t know what he looked like beyond the grainy photo in the file Silas had sent. Middle-aged, thinning hair, a soft jawline. He was just a shape I was waiting for. Thinking about him as a person, giving him a family or a favorite meal, was unprofessional. It was noise. My job was to eliminate noise.

The minutes passed. A siren wailed somewhere to the south, then faded. I watched the windows of the apartments across the street. People were moving around inside, living their lives. A woman was washing dishes. A man was watching television, the blue light flickering on his face. They were unaware of me, of the small, violent act that was about to take place in their periphery.

21:59. My finger rested on the side of the trigger guard.

At 22:01, a glass door slid open and the shape appeared. Finch. He was wearing a dark suit, his tie loosened. He moved to the railing and pulled a cigarette from a case. The flame of his lighter was a brief, bright flare in the scope. He inhaled, and the tip of the cigarette glowed red.

I shifted my position slightly, settling the rifle butt into the pocket of my shoulder. The crosshairs found the center of his chest. I tracked his slow, rhythmic breathing. He exhaled a plume of smoke that was immediately snatched away by the wind. He looked small and insignificant.

I let out half a breath and held it. The world narrowed to the circle of glass in front of my eye. The shape of his suit jacket, the faint light glinting off his watch.

I squeezed the trigger.

The rifle bucked against my shoulder, a firm, familiar push. The sound was a dull cough, swallowed by the suppressor and the city noise. Through the scope, I saw Finch jolt. His cigarette fell from his lips, a tiny orange ember tumbling into the darkness. He staggered back a step, his hands flying to his chest. He looked confused, as if he’d forgotten something important. Then his legs gave out and he crumpled to the ground, out of my line of sight.

The balcony was empty again.

I didn't move for a full minute. I just breathed. In, out. The adrenaline was a low hum under my skin, but it was already fading, leaving behind the usual hollow space. I pulled out my phone, attached the telephoto lens, and took the picture. Finch’s legs were visible, his expensive shoes askew. It was enough for confirmation. I sent the image to the number Silas had provided. No message. None was needed.

The work was done.

Methodically, I began to break down the rifle. The barrel was warm. I packed each piece into its custom foam slot inside a nondescript black case that looked like it held a musical instrument. The process was grounding. It was the only part that felt real. The rest was just a series of actions, a program I was running.

I wiped down the area where I had been lying, making sure nothing was left behind. No brass, no fibers, no trace of my existence. I was a ghost.

Carrying the case, I moved to the roof access door, the keycard Silas had mentioned sliding it open with a soft beep. The stairwell was dark and smelled of dust. I descended the twenty flights of stairs without making a sound, my soft-soled boots silent on the concrete. I emerged into a back alley, the air thick with the smell of garbage and damp pavement. I pulled up my hood and merged into the sparse late-night foot traffic, just another anonymous figure heading nowhere in particular. The wire transfer would be in my account by morning. The money was the only proof that any of it had happened at all. It didn't buy happiness, or peace. It just bought another month of this. Another month of stillness.

The bar was called The Alibi. It was a stupid name, too on the nose, which was probably why it worked. It was dark, smelled of stale beer and old wood, and no one looked at you twice. I took a booth in the back, the vinyl cracked under my thighs. The table was sticky.

I ordered a whiskey, neat. The bartender was a large man with a grey beard who looked like he’d been here since the place was built. He poured the drink without a word and I paid in cash, leaving a small tip. I didn't want him to remember me, but I didn't want him to remember me for being cheap, either. It was a fine line.

I took a slow sip. The alcohol burned a clean line down my throat. My phone remained in my pocket. The transfer confirmation had come through an hour ago, but Silas liked the physical exchange for certain jobs. A performance of trust, or a way to keep his runners busy.

A young man slid into the booth opposite me ten minutes later. He couldn't have been more than twenty-two. His jacket was too big for him and he had the nervous energy of someone who was trying very hard to look like he belonged. He was new. Silas burned through runners.

He didn't speak. He kept his eyes on the table. I took another sip of my whiskey, watching him. His hands were clasped in his lap, but I could see his thumbs rubbing against each other.

I slid a small memory card, housed in a plain white plastic case, across the table. It stopped just short of his side. He looked at it, then at me, a flicker of eye contact. His eyes were a watery blue. He reached out, his fingers fumbling slightly as he picked it up. He slipped it into his jacket pocket without checking it. He was either trusting or stupid. Or both.

He pushed a slim, hard-sided briefcase along the vinyl seat towards me. It bumped against my hip. He stood up, gave a short, jerky nod, and walked away, disappearing back into the city. The entire interaction took less than thirty seconds.

I didn’t touch the briefcase. I finished my whiskey, letting the warmth spread through my chest. The bar was starting to fill up. A couple sat in the booth adjacent to mine. They were laughing. The woman tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, her fingers brushing against the man's cheek as she did. He caught her hand and held it. They were in their own world, a bubble of shared jokes and casual touches. I watched them, cataloging the details. His watch was a cheap knock-off. Her shoes were scuffed at the heels. They were probably in debt. They were probably happy. I felt nothing watching them. Just a sense of distance, as if I were observing a different species.

My professional assessment was automatic. The man was oblivious, his back to the main room. The woman faced the door but was focused entirely on him. They were soft targets. Both of them. The thought was as natural to me as breathing.

Across the room, another man sat alone at the bar, nursing a beer. He stared at his own reflection in the mirror behind the rows of bottles. He wasn't a threat. He was just lonely. His shoulders were slumped. He looked tired. I understood tired.

I felt a familiar sense of detachment settle over me, heavier than usual. The noise of the bar, the low murmur of conversations, the clink of glasses, it all seemed to be happening behind a thick wall of glass. I was here, in the room, but I wasn't a part of it. I was an observer. A ghost at the feast. The briefcase at my side was the only thing connecting me to this world, and it was a connection I had to purchase.

I stood up, leaving the empty glass on the table. I picked up the briefcase. It was heavy, solid. The weight was grounding. I walked out of the bar without looking back, the door swinging shut behind me and cutting off the sound of other people's lives. The street was wet, the neon lights of the city bleeding across the slick pavement. The money didn't feel like a victory. It just felt like currency for the next quiet, empty room.

The apartment was as I had left it: white, clean, anonymous. It felt less like a home and more like a holding cell between assignments. I placed the briefcase on the polished concrete floor and locked the door behind me. The three deadbolts slid home with heavy, satisfying clicks. Safety was a series of mechanical actions.

I didn't open the briefcase. I knew what was inside. Stacks of used, non-sequential bills. I’d run it through my own counter-scanner later, but I knew it would be clean. Silas was many things, but he wasn't careless with payment. The money was a tool, not a prize. It bought equipment, information, and silence.

My own silence was free. It was the default setting.

I walked past the kitchen, a space I rarely used for anything more than making coffee, and into the main living area. The furniture was sparse and modern—a low-slung grey sofa, a single black leather armchair, a glass and steel table. Nothing personal. Nothing to hold onto. The only thing that was truly mine was in a simple wooden crate in the corner.

I knelt and lifted the lid. Inside, nestled in soft foam, was a turntable. A Rega Planar 3. Beside it, a small collection of vinyl records in protective plastic sleeves. Maybe twenty of them in total.

I slid one out. The cover was worn at the edges, the cardboard soft from years of handling. A black and white photograph of a woman with long hair sitting on a stool, a guitar across her lap. Her face was in shadow. There was no title, no artist name. I didn't need one.

The ritual was always the same. I wiped the disc with an anti-static cloth, my movements precise. I placed it on the platter, the weight of it familiar in my hands. I lowered the stylus, and after a moment of soft crackling, music filled the room.

A lone acoustic guitar, fingerpicked. Then a voice. A woman’s voice, clear and high, singing about rain and leaving and the taste of salt. It was a simple song. A sad song. I had no memory of who gave me the record, or when. I only remembered the music itself, a faint echo from a time before this life, before the stillness became a requirement for survival.

I sat in the black armchair, the briefcase still on the floor near my feet. I didn’t close my eyes. I watched the city through the floor-to-ceiling window. The endless stream of headlights on the freeway below looked like blood cells moving through an artery. The city was a living thing, and I was a foreign body within it. A parasite.

The singer’s voice swelled, holding a note that seemed to hang in the air, vibrating against the glass of the window. It was a beautiful sound. I could appreciate it on a technical level. The purity of the tone, the control in her breath. I could analyze it. But I couldn't feel it. The sadness in the lyrics was just data. Words arranged in a specific order to evoke a specific response. The response simply failed to materialize in me.

The song ended. The next one began. This one was about a house by the sea. I thought about the logistics of an assassination in a coastal town. The humidity would affect the ballistics. The sound would carry over the water. Escape routes would be limited. My mind mapped it out, a professional exercise to pass the time.

I was aware, in a distant, academic way, that this was supposed to be a comfort. This music. This small moment of indulgence. It was meant to fill the emptiness left behind by the adrenaline. But the silence in my apartment was vast. The music didn't fill it, it only decorated the edges of it. It made the silence seem bigger, more profound. Acknowledging loneliness would be a vulnerability, a crack in the foundation. It was better to feel nothing. To be a clean, empty room.

The record played on. I didn't move. I just sat there, watching the lights of the city, listening to the ghost of a feeling. The woman on the record was singing about love now. About hands intertwined and secrets whispered in the dark. It was a language I no longer spoke. I wondered if I ever really had. The memories were like the photograph on the album cover, the faces lost in shadow.

When the final song faded and the needle lifted, the silence that rushed back in was absolute. It was louder than the music had been. It pressed in on me from all sides. I sat in the dark for a long time, the briefcase a solid weight by my feet, the only real thing in the room.

Eventually, I pushed myself out of the chair. The room was cold. I put the record back in its sleeve and the turntable back in its crate, securing the lid. The small ritual was over. Back to work.

My laptop was on the glass table. A matte black machine with no identifying marks, running a custom-built operating system that existed only on a handful of encrypted drives, one of which was currently in my possession. I powered it on. The screen glowed, illuminating my face in the dark room. I entered a string of alphanumeric characters, sixty-four of them, from memory.

The system booted into a stripped-down interface. No desktop, no icons. Just a command line and a single, secure browser. I connected to a private network, bouncing the signal through half a dozen proxy servers in different countries before accessing the forums I needed. These were the black markets of my trade. Not for weapons, but for information and technology. The places where zero-day exploits were sold and new surveillance hardware was reviewed by a discerning clientele.

My current toolkit was adequate, but adequacy was a slow death in this business. I was looking for advancements in audio surveillance. Something smaller, with a longer battery life and a more secure transmission protocol. I filtered through threads, dismissing most of the offerings. Too much of it was repurposed consumer tech, unreliable and easily detected. I was looking for bespoke engineering.

I navigated to a sub-forum called ‘Field Notes.’ It was a place for operators to trade stories, boast, or complain. Most of it was noise. Egos competing for status. But occasionally, buried in the posturing, there was useful intelligence. A new security measure being tested at a European airport. A flaw in a popular brand of armored vehicle.

A thread started two days ago had an unusual amount of activity. The title was simple: ‘The Lisbon Job.’

I clicked on it. The original post was from a user I recognized, a Belgian logistics specialist named ‘Vaucanson.’

Vaucanson: Anyone have eyes on Lisbon last week? The finance minister. The official report says heart attack on his yacht. My source on the ground says the boat’s security detail was top-tier. Ex-military. Full comms blackout for twelve hours. When they came back online, he was dead. No signs of entry. No toxins in the preliminary report. Clean.

The replies were a mix of skepticism and speculation.

Spectre7: Sounds like an inside job. The wife always benefits.

Janus: Or just an old man with a bad heart. Happens.

Vaucanson: The detail was vetted by his own people. And his wife was in Monaco. The interesting part is the chatter from his security firm. They’re spooked. They think someone got on and off that boat without tripping a single sensor.

I scrolled down, my eyes scanning the text. It was a professional puzzle. Interesting, but not relevant to me. Then I saw the name. Or rather, the initial.

Cain99: It has H written all over it. Audacious. Impossible.

The name was met with a flurry of activity.

Spectre7: Don’t start with the H myths.

Janus: I heard he used a modified submersible drone to attach a device to the hull that vibrated at a frequency that could induce cardiac arrest. Bullshit, obviously.

Vaucanson: The drone story is bullshit. But H is not. I worked a job in Dubai he was on the other side of. We were guarding a sheikh. H didn’t come through the doors or the windows. He came up through the plumbing. Bypassed a forty-million-dollar security system by posing as a municipal sanitation worker for three weeks to map the pipes.

Cain99: That’s the one. He didn’t even kill the target. He just replaced his medication with placebos. The guy’s own body did the work for him. The creativity of it. That’s his signature.

I leaned back. The stories were like ghost stories for people in my profession. Legends told to scare the new hires and impress the clients. Every field has them. The super-soldier, the master spy, the ghost who can’t be caught. I had always dismissed it. Professionalism meant dealing with facts, with tangible data. Legends were a distraction.

Still, I kept reading. They talked about him like he was a force of nature. A chaotic element in a world built on cold, hard rules. They said he never used the same method twice. That he took contracts based on their difficulty, not their payout. That he once completed a hit using only items he could purchase in a single convenience store.

It was all unverifiable. Gossip. The kind of talk that gets people killed for focusing on the wrong things. I should have closed the thread. My search for audio tech was the priority.

But I didn't. I found myself scrolling back, re-reading Vaucanson’s post about the plumbing in Dubai. The detail was specific. Posing as a sanitation worker. Mapping the pipes. It wasn't the kind of thing you would invent. It was too mundane, too practical. The kind of tedious, long-term planning that went into a truly successful infiltration.

A flicker of something unfamiliar registered in my chest. It wasn’t admiration. It wasn’t fear. It was curiosity. A clean, sharp feeling. I wanted to know the schematics of that plumbing system. I wanted to know how he bypassed the pressure sensors. I wanted to know if it was true.

The feeling was a loose thread on a perfectly woven fabric. I had an impulse to pull on it. To type the initial ‘H’ into my own search parameters, to cross-reference the jobs they mentioned with my own private databases.

I caught myself. My fingers hovered over the keyboard. This was a waste of time. An unprofessional indulgence. I had work to do. My own methods were effective. They were tested. They were safe. That was all that mattered.

I closed the thread. I went back to the listings for surveillance equipment. But the thought remained, a quiet subroutine running in the background. H. It was just a letter. A piece of gossip on a forum full of liars and braggarts. It meant nothing. I told myself it meant nothing.

My phone vibrated against the glass tabletop, a harsh, buzzing sound in the quiet. It wasn't my personal phone, which never made a sound and sat powered down in a lead-lined box. This was the work phone, a burner model identical to a dozen others I kept in storage. The screen lit up with a string of scrambled characters. An incoming call on a secure channel. It was Silas.

I let it vibrate a second time before answering. A small, pointless assertion of control.

“Yes,” I said. No greeting. We didn't do greetings.

“I have a new acquisition proposal.” His voice was different. Usually, it was flat, stripped of all inflection, like a machine reading a script. Tonight, it was tight. Stretched thin over something else. The difference was subtle, but I heard it. It was like listening to a recording with a faint, almost imperceptible distortion in the audio.

“I’m listening,” I said, my eyes still on the empty command line of my laptop.

There was a pause. Silas didn't pause.

“The principal is Julian Croft,” he finally said.

I knew the name. Everyone knew the name. Croft was the founder of Sentinel, the data-mining firm that had become an unofficial arm of global intelligence agencies. He was a ghost who had built an empire on knowing everyone else’s secrets while keeping his own locked down. He hadn’t been seen in public in almost five years. He was more myth than man, a modern Howard Hughes with a server farm instead of a film studio.

“Croft,” I repeated. The name felt heavy.

“The compensation is eight figures,” Silas said. “Half on acceptance, half on completion.”

I didn't react. My face remained neutral, my breathing steady. But inside, something shifted. It was an absurd number. A state-sponsored assassination might fetch that. Not a private contract. A number like that didn't just buy a death. It bought a guarantee. It bought silence and perfection and the career of the person who took it if they failed.

“What are the parameters?” I asked. My voice was even.

“Absolute. Discretion.” He bit off each word. “This cannot be traced. Not to us, not to the client. The official cause of death has to be natural. Undisputed.”

“His security is legendary.” It wasn't a question or an objection. It was a statement of fact. A prompt for more data.

“It’s beyond legendary,” Silas corrected, and the tightness in his voice sharpened. “He lives on a private, fortified island. His staff are lifers who haven't left the grounds in years. His digital security is a black hole. We assume he has a kill-switch that can wipe his entire digital footprint in seconds. This isn’t a job for a rifle, Winona.”

He had used my name. He never used my name. It was a violation of his own protocol. It was a warning light. It meant the stakes were higher than the money. It meant he was nervous. I had never heard Silas sound nervous before.

“The client,” he continued, his voice lowering slightly, “is not someone who tolerates failure. There is no margin for error. If anything goes wrong, if there is even a whisper of outside involvement, they will burn the entire network to cauterize the wound. That includes you. That includes me. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“You’ll be erased,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

“We will all be erased,” he clarified. “This is a zero-fail contract. You’re the only person I can offer it to.”

I didn’t know if that was a compliment or if he was simply out of options. Perhaps the other names on his list had been smart enough to say no. Or perhaps he was telling the truth, and my specific skill set—the patient, technical, invisible approach—was the only one that stood a chance. The thought offered no comfort.

“Why me?” I asked.

“Because you’re clean,” he said. “You have no attachments. No patterns. You’re a ghost. That’s what this job requires.”

He was telling me my isolation was my primary qualification. My emptiness was my greatest asset. He wasn't wrong.

“I’m sending the initial file now,” he said. “It’s everything we have. It isn’t much. The rest will be up to you. I need an answer within the hour.”

The call ended. There was no goodbye. Just the click of the disconnected line and the return of the silence, which now felt heavier, charged with the weight of eight figures and a target who lived in a fortress.

A notification appeared on my laptop screen. A new encrypted data packet had arrived.

File ID: SC-8491. Principal: CROFT, JULIAN.

I stared at the name. The gossip about some operator named H felt like a childish distraction now, a story from a different, less serious world. This was real. This was the kind of job that ended careers, one way or another. I moved the cursor over the file. The tightness in Silas’s voice echoed in my head. He wasn't just offering me a contract. He was handing me a live grenade and telling me not to make a sound while I pulled the pin.

I clicked to decrypt the file. It opened into a slim folder containing a single text document and three low-resolution satellite images of a small, rocky island. The text file was a summary of known facts, most of which were public knowledge, albeit obscure. Julian Croft, born 1978. No listed family. Founder and majority shareholder of Sentinel. No criminal record. No known political affiliations. The last confirmed public photograph was from an tech conference in Berlin, six years ago. He looked pale and unremarkable, a man you would forget the moment he left the room.

The file Silas sent was useless. It was an insult. But I knew it wasn't laziness on his part. It was a testament to the target. This was all they had.

I started where I always started: with the money. A man like Croft didn’t exist outside of a complex financial ecosystem. I began tracing Sentinel’s corporate structure. It was a labyrinth, designed to be. A holding company in Delaware owned by another in the Cayman Islands, which was in turn a subsidiary of a trust in Liechtenstein. It was standard, textbook obfuscation. Annoying, but not impenetrable. I spent the first hour peeling back the layers, following the digital paper trail through encrypted ledgers and firewalled servers. My fingers moved across the keyboard in a steady, familiar rhythm. It was a language I was fluent in.

I found the edges of his network, but I couldn't find the center. Each path I followed eventually terminated in a blind trust or a shell company that had been legally dissolved years prior, its assets absorbed into another entity that would itself lead to a dead end. It was an intricate construction of legal and financial misdirection, and it was flawless. There were no loose ends, no lazy accounting, no forgotten digital signatures. It was like running your hands over a perfectly smooth sphere. There was nothing to grip.

After three hours, I abandoned the financial approach and moved on to the personal. People were always the weakest link. Everyone had a past. A disgruntled ex-lover, an estranged family member, a former business partner with a grudge. I ran his name through global databases, searching for birth records, school yearbooks, university transcripts, old addresses.

Nothing.

It wasn't that the records weren't there. It was that they had been professionally and systematically erased. I found a digital ghost of a high school record from a private academy in Switzerland, but when I tried to access the archived file, it was corrupted. Not just deleted, but digitally shredded, the data overwritten with junk code so many times that recovery was impossible. I found a mention of his name on a university enrollment list from ETH Zurich, but his student ID led to a profile that had been wiped clean. His photo was a grey silhouette. His academic history was a string of zeroes.

This was more than just privacy. This was a complete and deliberate erasure of a life. He hadn't just built walls around his present; he had gone back in time and demolished his past. He had un-made himself, brick by brick, until all that was left was a name on a corporate letterhead.

I leaned back in my chair and looked out the window at the city lights, smears of colour against the dark glass. A feeling was settling in my gut, something cold and sharp. It wasn't frustration. It was a quiet, grudging respect. This was the work of a master. The paranoia was so absolute, so meticulous, it was a work of art. The man had built a fortress not of concrete and steel, but of pure absence.

I turned back to the screen. My own life was a curated void, a series of safe houses and clean identities. I existed to be forgotten. But my methods were reactive, a process of shedding skins as I moved through the world. Croft’s was proactive. He had engineered his own nonexistence from the ground up. He wasn't just a ghost. He was the architect of the haunted house. My job was to get inside. And for the first time in a long time, looking at the blankness on my screen, I had no idea how I was going to do it. The scale of the challenge was clarifying. The eight-figure payout no longer seemed absurd; it seemed appropriate. You paid that much to hunt something that had made itself impossible to find.

For two days, I lived inside the machine. I slept in four-hour shifts, my head resting on my desk, waking to the persistent hum of the servers in my living room. I ate protein bars and drank black coffee until my teeth felt gritty. The world outside my window—the traffic, the weather, the lives of millions of people—ceased to exist. There was only the screen, and the ghost I was hunting.

The direct approach was a failure. Croft the man was a digital black hole. So I changed tactics. I stopped looking for the man and started looking for his shadow. Sentinel. A company of that size, with that much influence, could not be entirely invisible. It had to interact with the world. It paid taxes. It signed contracts. It had a public face, even if its founder did not.

I went through corporate filings, shareholder reports, press releases. It was all sterile, carefully managed corporate speak. But buried deep in a subsidiary’s tax filing from three years ago, I found a line item for a charitable donation. It was a significant amount, funneled through two shell corporations before it reached its destination: The Atherton Foundation, a high-profile medical research charity. It was a quiet donation, designed to be missed. But it was a thread.

I pulled.

The Atherton Foundation was a different world from Sentinel. Its security was for appearances, its digital presence was for fundraising. It was porous. It took me less than an hour to bypass their firewall and gain access to their internal servers. I moved through their files like a whisper, careful not to trip any alarms. I found donor lists, event plans, internal emails. And I found the name Sentinel again. They were a primary benefactor, their donations cloaked under the name of a philanthropic trust.

The Foundation’s major annual event was a fundraising gala. It was always the social event of the season for a certain stratum of the city’s elite. Politicians, old money, new tech billionaires. They came to be seen, to write checks, to feel good about themselves. It was a soft target. A nexus of wealth and influence with a thousand moving parts. A security nightmare.

I scanned the planning documents for the upcoming gala, two weeks away. Guest lists, seating charts, vendor contracts. I searched for Croft’s name. Nothing. I searched for the name of the trust. Nothing. It was what I expected. He wouldn’t use his own name. He wouldn’t make it that easy.

I started reading the internal email chains between the foundation’s director and her event planning committee. Most of it was banal chatter about catering and floral arrangements. But then I found a chain with the subject line: Special Security Protocol - Principal Donor.

My focus narrowed. The emails were deferential, almost fearful. They spoke of a guest whose privacy was paramount. They referred to him only as ‘The Benefactor’. The arrangements were being handled by an external security consultant, not the foundation’s usual team. There was a list of demands. No press in the west wing of the museum. A private, secure entrance. A pre-screened service staff for that section. A ten-minute window for a private speech to a small group of board members.

There was no name. But there didn't have to be. This was him. This was the crack in the fortress. For one night, Julian Croft was going to leave his island. He was going to step into the world. And I was going to be there waiting for him.

The frustration that had been coiling in my stomach for days unspooled, replaced by a cold, clean surge of adrenaline. The hunt was on.

I pushed away from the server files for the foundation and opened a new set of windows on my screen. The gala was being held at the Museum of Contemporary Structures, a striking glass and steel building on the waterfront. I pulled the public blueprints first, then cross-referenced them with the versions submitted to the city planning commission, looking for discrepancies. I found them in the service corridors and ventilation systems—the parts no one ever looked at.

I acquired the museum’s security schematics from a contractor who had worked on an upgrade two years ago. I found his name on a vendor list from the foundation, found his personal email, and sent a phishing link disguised as an invoice query. He clicked it without a second thought. People were always the weak point.

His credentials gave me access to the live camera feeds. I watched the guards on their rotations. I saw the blind spots. I mapped the motion sensors, the pressure plates, the infrared beams. I saw the building not as a museum, but as a system of interlocking security measures. A puzzle box.

My mind was completely absorbed. The city outside, Silas, the eight-figure contract—it all faded into background noise. There was only the schematic on my screen, the layout of the rooms, the placement of the cameras. I began to formulate a plan. Not one plan, but three. An infiltration route for every contingency. A sniper’s nest. A close-quarters approach. A poison vector. Each one was a complex problem of timing and access. Each one had a dozen points of failure.

I worked through the night, my fingers flying across the keyboard. I was no longer hunting a ghost. I was building a trap for him. The museum became my entire world, its corridors and galleries more real to me than the apartment I was sitting in. I knew where every door led, where every camera pointed, where every guard would be standing at any given second. The puzzle was intricate, beautiful in its complexity. And I was going to solve it.

It was a matter of thoroughness. My plans were solid, but complacency was a form of suicide in this line of work. Croft’s paranoia was exceptional, but the security firm he’d hired, Argent Security Solutions, was a known quantity. I decided to spend an hour digging into their history, not just their successes, but their failures. Every fortress has its cracks, and often the architect is the last to see them.

I pivoted from the museum’s schematics and burrowed into the dark web, accessing a private, members-only intelligence archive that scraped data from various law enforcement and private security servers. It was a digital library of professional disasters. I typed in Argent’s name.

Most of the hits were minor. A corporate executive’s stolen laptop, a botched bodyguard detail in Monaco. Then I found a file flagged with an Interpol header. The title was simple: Incident Report 77B-4. Unauthorised Access Event. Geneva International Depository.

The Depository was not just a bank; it was a fortress, a private vault for the kind of wealth that didn't officially exist. It was a facility that made the museum look like a public library. And two years ago, someone had walked right through its front door. Or rather, they had bypassed it entirely.

I opened the file. Much of it was redacted, thick black lines obscuring names and dates as if a censor had attacked the page with a permanent marker. But the technical summary of the breach was left intact, a professional courtesy between security analysts. I read it, and then I read it again.

The operative hadn't used explosives or brute-force hacking. They hadn't bribed a guard or cloned a keycard. According to the report, they had exploited a flaw in the building's fire suppression system. The system used Halon gas, and to prevent accidental discharge, it required two separate sensors in a room to trigger before flooding the area. The operative had introduced a minute, almost undetectable quantity of a specific organic compound into the ventilation system. The compound was harmless to humans but registered on the Halon sensors as smoke.

They hadn't triggered the alarm. They had used the system's own failsafes against it. By activating a single sensor in the target vault and another in an adjacent, empty corridor, they had convinced the building’s central computer that there was a sensor malfunction. The system, following its protocol, temporarily deactivated the sensors in that zone for a manual inspection that wouldn't be scheduled for another twelve hours. It was elegant. It was audacious. It was the kind of solution you could only arrive at by thinking so far outside the box you forgot the box ever existed.

The breach was a success. Nothing was reported stolen. The point, it seemed, was simply to prove it could be done. A demonstration of skill so profound it bordered on contempt.

My eyes scanned down to the final section of the summary. Attribution.

The incident is attributed with high confidence to a single male operative. All surveillance data within the affected zone was digitally scrubbed by a self-erasing worm activated thirty seconds prior to the breach. No visual identification was made. However, forensic data analysis of the worm’s signature code shows similarities to two prior incidents (see Appendix C, redacted). The operative’s suspected callsign is HYWEL.

The name sat there on the screen. Hywel.

It wasn't a name, not really. It was a collection of letters that felt both foreign and familiar. I leaned forward, my nose almost touching the monitor. The chatter from the black market tech forum weeks ago. The gossip about the operative known only as "H." The one they said was a legend, whose methods were more art than science.

It was him.

A cold feeling trickled down my spine. It wasn't fear. It was something else, something I couldn't name. The clean, sterile lines of my plan, the perfect puzzle box I had been constructing for days, suddenly felt compromised. I had been preparing for a target, for a system of cameras and guards. I had not been preparing for another player. Especially not one who could dance through an Argent Security system like it wasn't even there.

I had always worked alone. The world was divided into two categories: targets and clients. Everyone else was just scenery. The idea of a rival, a peer, was an academic concept, something I’d never had to seriously entertain. The best operators were ghosts to one another. We existed in different dimensions, our paths designed never to cross.

But this felt different. Reading the description of his methods, the sheer intellectual arrogance of it, I felt a strange and unwelcome flicker of recognition. It was like hearing a piece of music and knowing, on some deep and cellular level, the mind that had composed it. This man, this ghost named Hywel, didn't just think like me. He thought in a way that challenged the foundations of my own skill. He wasn’t just a variable. He was a question I didn't know how to answer. And he had been inside a system almost identical to the one I was about to break into. The job had just become infinitely more complicated.

My phone vibrated on the desk, the buzz unnaturally loud in the silent room. I didn't need to look at the screen. It was Silas. I let it vibrate three times before answering, my eyes still fixed on the redacted report.

"Yes," I said.

"The advance has been wired. It should be cleared in your account," he said. His voice was the same as always, a flat, transactional tone that could have been discussing the weather or a murder for hire. It made no difference to him. "Any progress?"

"He'll be at the Museum of Contemporary Structures in two weeks. A charity gala." I kept my own voice level, professional. I gave him the overview, omitting the finer details of my planned approaches. He didn't need to know the how, only that it would be done. "It's a viable window."

"Good. The client is pleased with the timeline." A pause. I could hear the faint, sterile hum of the secure line. "No complications."

It wasn't a question. It was a statement of expectation. My plans were clean. The infiltration was complex but manageable. There were no complications. Except for the name on my screen. A name that felt like a grain of sand in a precision engine.

I made a decision. It was unprofessional. It was a deviation from the protocols that had kept me alive and anonymous for years. But the report on the Geneva breach had unsettled something in me.

"Silas," I said, my voice steady. "The name Hywel. Does it mean anything to you?"

The silence on the other end of the line was immediate and absolute. The sterile hum seemed to disappear. For a full five seconds, there was nothing. When he spoke again, his voice was entirely different. The transactional flatness was gone, replaced by something cold and sharp, like a shard of ice pressed against skin.

"Where did you hear that name?"

"It came up during my research on Argent Security. An old breach report." I kept my answer factual, devoid of the curiosity that was burning through me.

"You're researching Argent," he stated. "Not their history of failures. You are focused on one thing, Winona. The target. Julian Croft."

"Due diligence," I said. "Understanding the security I'm up against."

"Your job is to bypass the security, not write a thesis on it." The coldness in his voice intensified, turning into something hard, something dangerous. "Some names are ghosts for a reason. They're meant to be forgotten. You are paid to focus on the target. Not to go chasing phantoms down digital rabbit holes."

He let the words hang in the air. I said nothing. My hand was resting on the mouse, my finger hovering over the file with Hywel's name in it. It felt like it was radiating heat.

"Distractions are expensive," Silas continued, his voice low and deliberate now, each word a carefully placed stone. "They can be fatal. For everyone involved."

The subtext was gone. This was the message itself. This wasn't professional advice. It was a command. A threat. The kind of warning you only give once.

"Focus on Croft," he said. "The gala is in two weeks. That is the only thing that matters. Nothing else exists. Do you understand me?"

"I understand," I said. The words tasted like metal in my mouth.

"Good."

The line went dead. He didn't say goodbye. He never did.

I sat there in the glow of the monitors, the silence of the apartment pressing in on me. The conversation had lasted less than a minute, but the atmosphere in the room had changed completely. The name Hywel was no longer just a professional curiosity, a rival to be measured and accounted for. Silas had made him into something else. He had drawn a line around the name, marking it as forbidden territory. And in doing so, he had made it infinitely more interesting.

The threat didn't frighten me, not in the way he intended. But it did unnerve me. It was a reminder that I was a component in a much larger machine, and that Silas, or whoever he worked for, held the controls. My autonomy was an illusion, granted only as long as I followed the invisible tracks they had laid out for me. By asking a simple question, I had brushed against the edge of the track, and the response had been swift and absolute.

I closed the Interpol file. But I didn't delete it. I moved it to a triple-encrypted partition on a separate drive, a place Silas would never find. His warning echoed in my mind. Focus on the target. He was right. Focusing on anything else was a fatal mistake. But as I turned my attention back to the museum blueprints, a new variable had been added to the equation. It wasn't just me, Croft, and the security anymore. There was a ghost in the machine now. And I had a feeling he wasn't going to stay one for long.

The digital world was a map of ghosts and echoes. The physical world was concrete. I preferred the concrete. It was honest.

The Museum of Contemporary Structures was a brutalist fantasy of poured concrete and plate glass, a stark grey wedge against the soft, shifting grey of the waterfront. It looked less like a home for art and more like a high-security data vault. Which, for Croft’s purposes, it was.

My cover was simple, almost insulting in its lack of complexity. Art student. I wore oversized, paint-flecked trousers that weren't mine and a thin grey sweatshirt. My hair was tied back messily. On the oversized portfolio case slung over my shoulder, I’d scrawled the name of the city’s most pretentious art college. No one looks twice at an art student. They are part of the scenery, expected to be quiet, observant, and poor.

I found a bench on the wide plaza that faced the museum’s main entrance, far enough away to be unobtrusive but close enough to get a clear view. The air smelled of salt and diesel from the river. I opened my sketchbook. To anyone watching, I was just another young person attempting to capture the building’s severe angles.

My pencil moved across the page, but I wasn't sketching architecture. I was mapping vulnerabilities. The long, uninterrupted facade of glass on the second floor was a sniper’s dream, but also a liability. I drew the mullions, not as design elements, but as potential anchor points. The wide, ceremonial steps leading to the entrance offered no cover. A death trap. I shaded the area in, marking it as a kill zone.

A guard emerged from the main doors. He wore the crisp, dark uniform of Argent Security. He stood for a moment, hands clasped behind his back, his gaze sweeping the plaza with a practiced, lazy disinterest. He was bored. That was useful. Boredom creates patterns. I timed him. Seven minutes. He walked the perimeter of the plaza, checked in at a guard post near the west wing entrance, then returned to the main doors. Another guard replaced him. The shift change was precise, almost military. They were bored, but they were disciplined.

I focused on the cameras. Three domes covered the plaza. I watched their movements. The one on the left had a slight, almost imperceptible hesitation at the apex of its sweep, a tiny mechanical stutter. A blind spot. Not a big one, maybe two seconds, but two seconds was a lifetime. I marked its position with a small ‘x’ on my sketch, disguising it as a bird in the sky.

My focus was absolute, a state I cultivated like a garden. It was a clean, quiet space in my head where there were only problems and solutions, angles and probabilities. But today, a name kept intruding. Hywel.

I found myself scanning the other people on the plaza, not for threats, but for him. The tourist with the camera, was his lens too long? The man reading a newspaper on the next bench, was he too still? It was a pointless exercise. I had no idea what he looked like. He was a ghost. But Silas’s warning had given the ghost a shape. It was a distraction, a useless one, and I hated it. I forced my attention back to the building.

The loading bay was around the back, shielded from the street. I spent an hour sketching a fountain on the west side of the building, my body angled so I had a clear line of sight to the service entrance. A delivery truck arrived. The driver had to swipe a keycard and enter a code. A heavy steel door rolled up. Another Argent guard was inside, checking the manifest. The protocol was tight. The door remained open for exactly four minutes and thirteen seconds. I drew the fountain’s cherubic face with a grim little smile.

By late afternoon, the pages of my sketchbook were filled with schematics disguised as art. I knew the guard rotations, the camera sweeps, the delivery schedule. I knew there was a potential entry point through the HVAC system on the roof, but the access ladder was exposed to a camera on an adjacent building. I knew the glass on the upper floors was rated to stop a handgun round, but probably not a .338 Lapua.

I had the bones of a plan. The physical survey was the most tedious part of any job, a slow accumulation of mundane facts. But it was the foundation upon which everything else was built. One missed detail, one wrong assumption, and the whole structure would collapse.

The sun began to dip lower, casting long, distorted shadows from the museum’s sharp edges. The sky turned a bruised purple. I had been here for eight hours. My back ached. My fingers were smudged with graphite. I had a clear picture of the fortress I needed to breach. The cold satisfaction that usually came with this stage of the work was there, but it was thin, diluted. Underneath it was the unsettling awareness that I wasn't the only one drawing these maps. Somewhere, another mind was doing the same calculations, seeing the same angles. My plan felt incomplete, like a dialogue with only one person speaking. I packed up my sketchbook, the image of the building etched into my mind. The concrete was honest, yes. But I was no longer sure I was the only one listening to what it had to say.

I got a coffee from a cafe across the street the next morning. The place smelled of burnt espresso and sugar. I sat at a small table by the window, the lukewarm cup warming my hands. From here, the museum looked different. Less of a fortress and more of an object, something to be studied from a distance. I was letting the previous day’s observations settle, allowing the patterns to emerge from the noise.

That’s when I saw him.

He was on the same plaza I had occupied for most of yesterday. He looked like any other tourist, which was the first thing that felt wrong. His clothes were right—jeans, a plain dark jacket, comfortable-looking shoes. He had a camera slung around his neck, a bulky DSLR with a telephoto lens. He was taking pictures.

But he wasn't photographing the building's imposing facade or trying to get an artistic shot of the sky reflected in the glass. He was aiming up, at the roofline. I watched him take three shots in quick succession. He lowered the camera, zoomed in on the small screen, then aimed again. This time at the mount for the security camera on the west corner, the one with the two-second stutter. He took another photo. Then he swung the camera around, pointing it at the adjacent office building, the one with the clear line of sight to the HVAC access ladder.

My stomach tightened. It was a cold, familiar feeling. The feeling of being beaten to a punch.

He moved with a casual, unhurried pace, ambling over to the fountain I had sketched. He didn't look at the cherub. He took a picture of the service road behind it. He was methodical. Patient. He was doing my exact job, just with a different set of tools. He was building his own map, and from what I could tell, his map was just as detailed as mine.

I took a slow sip of my coffee. It tasted bitter. This had to be him. Hywel. The ghost from the file. He wasn't a ghost at all. He was a man in a dark jacket, meticulously documenting the flaws in Argent’s security. He was good. The thought was irritating, but undeniable. His cover was better than mine. The art student draws attention, invites questions. The tourist is invisible, one of a thousand others, his long lens dismissed as amateur enthusiasm.

I watched him for another ten minutes. He never stayed in one place for more than a minute, constantly moving, creating a profile of random, meandering interest. But his focus was anything but random. Every shot was deliberate. The loading bay doors. The keypad panel. The armored glass of the ground-floor windows. He was cataloging every lock, every sensor, every weakness.

He was standing near the main steps when it happened. He had the camera raised, pointed not at the entrance, but at the cafe. At me. I didn't move. I didn't look away. For a moment, I thought he was just taking a wide shot of the street scene.

Then he lowered the camera slightly, just enough so I could see his face over the top of it. Our eyes met through the window, across four lanes of traffic.

The distance was too great to make out the color of his eyes, but I felt the weight of his gaze. It was direct and unnervingly calm. There was no surprise in it, no hostility. It was simple, clear acknowledgment. I see you.

The world outside the window seemed to quiet. The noise of the traffic, the murmur of the cafe behind me, it all faded into a low hum. There was only the concrete building, him on the pavement, and me behind the glass. The professional solitude I had carefully constructed for years felt suddenly, irrevocably breached. I wasn't an observer anymore. I was being observed.

A half-second passed. Maybe a full second. Then the corner of his mouth moved, a fractional shift that wasn't quite a smile. It was something else. Amusement, perhaps. Or a challenge. He gave a nod so small it was barely a movement at all, a slight dip of his chin. Then he raised the camera again, took one more picture of the window where I sat, and turned away, melting back into the thin crowd of pedestrians.

I stayed perfectly still, my hand wrapped around my cooling cup. The game had changed. The target was still Croft, the location was still the museum. But the objective had a new dimension. It wasn't just about bypassing the security anymore. It was about him. The ghost had a face, and he had just put me in his sights.

My heart was still beating a little too fast. I left the cafe, dropping a few crumpled bills on the table without looking at the barista. On the street, the air was cool against my face. I didn't look for him. I knew he was gone. The acknowledgment had been made. The plaza was no longer neutral territory; it was a chessboard, and he had just made a move I hadn’t anticipated.

The next day, I became someone else. I wore the gray overalls of a city maintenance worker, stained with just enough grease to look authentic. My hair was tucked under a nondescript baseball cap. In the utility belt, among wrenches and screwdrivers, were my own tools: a bypass chip for electronic locks, a frequency scanner, and a micro-camera no bigger than a grain of rice. My target was a service corridor on the ground floor, near the loading bay. It housed a network junction box for the west wing’s security cameras. Placing a bug there would give me a direct feed, unfiltered by the main security hub.

I timed my arrival with the morning’s first delivery, a catering truck. I approached the loading bay from the opposite side, pushing a wheeled dolly with an empty toolbox on it, walking with the weary slump of someone who had been doing this job for twenty years. When the bay door rolled up, the Argent guard was distracted by the driver’s paperwork. I didn’t hesitate. I slipped through the gap between the truck and the wall, melting into the shadows of the cavernous bay. No one looked twice. The best camouflage is to look like you belong somewhere you absolutely do not.

The door to the service corridor was thirty feet away. It was locked, of course. A simple mag-lock. I knelt, pretending to check the wheels on my dolly. My hand went to my belt. The bypass chip was a small gray rectangle. I pressed it against the seam of the door, near the lock mechanism. A tiny green light on the chip blinked once. I heard the faint click of the lock disengaging. I stood, pushed the dolly into the corridor, and pulled the door shut behind me. It locked again with a heavy thud.

The corridor was silent. The air was cool and smelled of dust and ozone. A single line of fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting a sterile, even light. I was alone. It was the kind of space I was most comfortable in. Functional. Unseen.

I found the junction box easily, a gray metal panel set flush into the concrete wall. It was exactly where the blueprints said it would be. I set my toolbox down and pulled out a screwdriver. The panel was held in place by four standard flathead screws. I paused, my hand hovering over the first one. Something was off.

The screw heads. They were too clean. In a place like this, dust and grime settled into every crevice. These looked like they had been wiped. I leaned closer. The paint around the edge of the screw slots was infinitesimally chipped, the silver of the metal underneath glinting in the harsh light. Fresh marks. Someone had been here.

My breath caught in my throat. I knew, even before I opened it. The feeling was a cold weight settling in my gut. Annoyance, sharp and acidic, followed by a wave of something else. Something I refused to name.

I carefully unscrewed the panel. The screws turned smoothly, too smoothly. He had lubricated them. The thought was so meticulous, so infuriatingly professional, that I almost stopped. I lifted the panel away and placed it silently on the floor.

Inside was a neat bundle of colored wires, zip-tied and orderly. And there, affixed to the main coaxial cable for the camera feed, was a tiny black square. It wasn't mine. Mine were gray, a custom polymer blend I sourced from a specialist in Seoul. This one was glossy black, elegant, and impossibly small. A faint blue light, the size of a pinprick, pulsed steadily. It was active. It was transmitting.

He had beaten me to it.

The tourist with the long lens. The man who nodded at me from across the street. He hadn't just been mapping the exterior. He had already been inside. While I was sitting on a park bench sketching fountains, he was here, in this corridor, planting his own eyes and ears. His infiltration had been cleaner, faster. The realization was a physical thing, a tightening of the muscles in my jaw. He wasn’t just my rival. He was better. Or at least, he was a step ahead.

I stared at the tiny, pulsing light. It felt like I was looking at his signature. It was arrogant, leaving it here for me to find. He had to know I would try for this exact spot. It was the most logical point of entry. He was counting on it. He wasn't just doing his job; he was playing with me. Acknowledging me again, not with a nod this time, but with a demonstration of superior skill. I felt a flush of heat rise up my neck. It wasn't just professional pride that was wounded. It was something more personal, something that coiled in my stomach with a strange, unwelcome energy.

My first instinct was to disable it. A snip of the wire, a drop of corrosive gel. Simple. Effective. It would blind him. But that felt crude, a brute force reaction to an elegant move. Removing it entirely was even worse. It would leave a blank space, a screaming void that would tell him nothing except that I had been there. It would be an answer, but not a conversation.

And this felt like the start of a conversation. He hadn't tried to hide it from a maintenance worker; he had hidden it from me. He knew I would look here. He had placed it with the expectation of it being found by a professional, by his competition. Taking it away would be like hanging up the phone.

I wouldn't give him the satisfaction.

I let my fingers trace the air around the small black square, not touching it. I could plant my own device next to his, a petty declaration of parity. We could both watch the same empty corridor, our signals crossing in the ether. But that felt redundant, like admitting I had no better ideas. He had claimed this territory. I would cede it to him, for now. But I wouldn’t leave without making my presence known.

I reached into a concealed pocket in my belt and pulled out a small, pen-sized tool. A diamond scribe, designed for etching glass and metal. The tip was needle-sharp. I knelt, my body steady, my breathing even. I held the scribe like a scalpel. This required precision.

Just below his transmitter, on the cool gray metal of the junction box itself, I began to scratch. The sound was almost imperceptible, a faint, dry whisper of diamond on steel. I didn’t press hard. This wasn’t vandalism. It was a signature. I etched a tiny, three-line mark. Two lines forming a V, with a third, shorter line bisecting it from the bottom. It was an abstract shape, meaningless to anyone else. But it was mine. I’d left it once before, on the underside of a table in a Kyiv cafe where another operative had tried to place a listening device in my bag. He had understood.

It was a quiet statement. I was here. I saw this. I let it be. It was a gesture of professional respect, and a profound act of aggression. It told him I was good enough to find his work, and confident enough not to destroy it. It told him I was choosing to let him keep his vantage point, because I would find a better one. The challenge was implicit: You have this spot. Now find my next one.

My hand was perfectly still. The mark was no more than a centimeter tall, barely visible unless you were looking for it. I ran the pad of my thumb over it, feeling the faint, sharp edges of the new grooves. Satisfied, I replaced the scribe in my belt.

I didn't plant my own camera. This corridor was his now. My plans would have to change. I would have to find a new vulnerability, a new point of ingress he hadn't considered. He had forced me to be better, to think harder. The irritation was still there, a low hum beneath my ribs, but it was now overlaid with a sharp, clear sense of focus. The job was no longer a simple equation of access and execution. It was a game against an opponent I couldn't see, but whose intelligence I could feel in the lubricated screws and the placement of his bug.

I carefully lifted the metal panel and fitted it back into the wall. I screwed the four screws back into place, tightening them to what I judged was their original torque. I wiped the screw heads with my gloved finger, smudging them just enough to match the surrounding grime. I stood back and looked. It was perfect. Indistinguishable from how I had found it. Except for the nearly invisible mark hidden inside. A secret between us.

I picked up my toolbox, grabbed the handle of the dolly, and walked back the way I came. The corridor felt different now, charged. It was no longer an empty space. It was his space, and I had trespassed, leaving a deliberate footprint. As I reached the door to the loading bay, I paused, listening. The sounds of the delivery truck were gone. It was quiet. I used the bypass chip again, slipped out into the bay, and walked away, just another worker at the end of a shift, disappearing back into the city. The entire operation had taken less than ten minutes. But in those ten minutes, the contract on Julian Croft had become secondary. The real hunt had begun.

Back in my apartment, the city was a silent film playing outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. I showered, the hot water scalding away the museum’s dust and the lingering scent of ozone from the service corridor. I scrubbed my skin until it was red, a pointless, ritualistic cleansing. I couldn't wash away the feeling of his presence, the ghost of his work under my fingertips.

Dressed in a plain grey t-shirt and sweats, I made tea. Earl Grey. The routine was grounding, a series of familiar motions in a world that had suddenly tilted on its axis. The warmth of the mug in my hands was a small, solid anchor. I carried it to my workstation, a slab of polished concrete and steel that held three monitors. The city lights swam in their dark surfaces.

My nightly routine was as ingrained as cleaning my rifle. A full diagnostic sweep of my digital footprint. I checked my encrypted servers, my firewalls, the half-dozen virtual machines I used to partition my activities. It was usually a formality, a fifteen-minute confirmation that my fortress was still secure. I expected nothing. My security was flawless. Silas himself had once said my network was less a fortress and more a black hole. Nothing got in, nothing got out unless I willed it.

I started the sweep. Lines of code scrolled down the central monitor, a familiar waterfall of green text on a black background. System checks, integrity validations, packet authentications. Everything was nominal. Normal. And yet, I watched with an attention I hadn’t felt in years. I was looking for something. I didn’t know what, but the day’s events had left an itch under my skin. He was too good to confine his response to the physical world.

There.

It was almost nothing. A single packet, flagged for a nanosecond by the diagnostic before being authenticated and passed through. It had been flagged for an irregular size signature, just a few bytes off, but it had corrected itself by spoofing a legitimate handshake protocol from my own system. It was a ghost, a flicker in the stream so brief that any automated system—even mine—would dismiss it as a data echo, a meaningless anomaly.

But I wasn't an automated system. I saw it.

My pulse quickened, a low, steady drum against my ribs. I isolated the memory sector where the packet had been processed. It was already gone, of course. He would be that clean. But the system cache would hold a ghost image, a temporary file, for another ninety seconds before it was permanently overwritten. My fingers flew across the keyboard, typing commands that were pure muscle memory. I rerouted the cache to a sandboxed environment, a digital quarantine, and froze the process.

I had it.

I spent twenty minutes peeling it apart. It was a marvel of coding. It had no malicious payload, no virus, no tracker. It was a container, and its only purpose was to carry a single, tiny piece of data, deliver it, and then dissolve its own structure into untraceable binary noise. It was the digital equivalent of a soluble capsule. Elegant. Arrogant.

I finally managed to isolate the data it carried. I executed it within the sandbox.

For a single second, an image flashed on my central monitor. It was a simple line drawing, white on the black screen. Two lines forming a V, with a third, shorter line bisecting it from the bottom.

My mark.

The one I had scratched into the metal of the junction box hours earlier. He had reproduced it perfectly. He hadn’t just found it. He had been watching. He had a camera on his own device, not just to see the corridor, but to see who came looking. He had watched me find his transmitter. He had watched me kneel. He had watched me leave my signature. And then he had gone home and sent it back to me.

The image vanished. A single line of text replaced it.

NOW YOU SEE ME.

And then it was gone. The sandbox reported a complete data dissolution. No trace. No residue. Nothing. It had never been there.

I leaned back in my chair, my tea forgotten. The warmth had gone out of the mug. My apartment, my sanctuary, felt violated. He had walked through my front door, left a note on my pillow, and walked out again without a sound. The sheer audacity of it. The skill.

The chill that ran down my spine was not fear. It was something else, something sharp and electric. A feeling of being seen, of being matched. He wasn't just reacting to my moves; he was anticipating them, engaging with them, turning them back on me in a language only we could understand. This wasn't a contract anymore. It was a dialogue. A tense, intimate correspondence written in scratches on metal and self-deleting code.

I stared at the blank screen where his message had been. The silence in the room was absolute, but I felt less alone than I had in a decade. The city outside was no longer a silent film. It was a board game, and he had just made his move. My turn.

The next two days passed in a state of heightened awareness. Every reflection in a shop window held a potential observer. Every anonymous face on the tube was a possible threat. I felt his presence not as a physical shadow, but as a pressure against my own senses, a sharpening of the world. I slept in four-hour shifts, my Sig Sauer on the nightstand, its cold weight a familiar comfort. He had breached my digital space. The thought of him breaching my physical space, my apartment, was a constant, low-grade hum of anxiety.

I did not respond to his message. A digital tit-for-tat was a game he wanted to play, a demonstration of skill. My silence was its own response. It was a refusal to engage on his terms. Instead, I returned to the work. Julian Croft. The gala. The kill. The distraction of Hywel was a luxury I couldn't afford, a current pulling me away from the shore of the mission. I needed to get back to solid ground.

My primary plan had always been a long-range shot. It was my specialty. Clean, distant, impersonal. I had identified the ideal location during my initial survey, before I even knew Hywel existed. It was a perch in the Atlas Tower, a half-finished skyscraper directly across the water from the museum. The forty-seventh floor was an empty shell of concrete and steel, exposed to the elements, offering an unobstructed, 800-meter line of sight to the museum's grand terrace, where Croft was scheduled to make an appearance. It was a perfect nest. High-risk, high-reward, and entirely my style.

On the third day, I went to check on it. I didn’t take my rifle case. This was pure reconnaissance. Dressed as a construction surveyor, with a hard hat, a high-visibility vest over a dirty jacket, and a clipboard, I blended in with the morning shift change. I walked through the site gates without a second glance from security, my boots crunching on gravel and dust.

The service elevator rattled its way up, smelling of grease and cold metal. It stopped at the forty-fifth floor, the highest it would go. The final two floors were accessible only by a temporary steel staircase. I climbed, the wind whistling through the building's skeletal frame. The city spread out below, a grey and sprawling map.

The forty-seventh floor was a vast, open space. Plastic sheeting flapped and snapped in the wind like panicked birds. Piles of rebar lay in rusted heaps. The air was cold, biting. I walked to the edge facing the museum, my boots scuffing on the rough concrete floor. The view was exactly as I remembered. Perfect. The museum’s terrace was laid out like a diagram. I could see the spot where the podium would be, the flow of the entrances and exits.

I knelt, my clipboard resting on the floor. I ran my hand over the concrete ledge, feeling the grit. This was where I would place the bipod. I could calculate the windage from here, the slight drop of the bullet over the water. My mind was already in the moment, seeing the crosshairs settle, my finger tightening on the trigger.

That’s when I saw it.

It was resting on the ledge, precisely where my rifle would have been. A single bullet casing.

My breath caught in my throat. It was a quiet, involuntary reaction. I didn’t move. I just stared. The casing was pristine, the brass polished to a high sheen, catching the flat morning light. It stood on its base, placed with the care of a collector displaying a rare specimen.

I leaned closer, my eyes scanning every detail. It wasn't my caliber. I used a 7.62mm for urban work. This was bigger. Much bigger. From the size and shape, I guessed it was a .338 Lapua Magnum. A military-grade sniper round. A round for killing at twice this distance.

He had been here. He had stood in this exact spot. He had looked at the same view, made the same calculations. He had identified my nest. My perfect, secret nest. And he had left me a message. This wasn't code on a screen. This was a piece of brass and lead, a token of his profession left in the heart of mine.

The audacity of it made my jaw tighten. He hadn't just found my spot; he had claimed it. He was telling me that he was better equipped, that his reach was longer, his methods more powerful. A .338 round was a statement of intent. It was overkill for this range. It was pure arrogance.

I crouched, my face inches from the casing. There would be no prints. He was too good for that. It was placed there for me and me alone. A construction worker would kick it aside without a thought. But I saw it for what it was. A violation. A challenge. The intimacy of the gesture was chilling. He knew how I thought, where I would go. He had walked in my footsteps and then planted his flag.

I felt a cold anger rise in my chest. It was clean and sharp, like the wind whipping around me. He was in my head, and now he was in my space. This quiet game of ours had escalated. The scratch on the panel, the digital message—those were moves in a chess match. This felt different. This felt like he’d reached across the board and put his hand on my queen.

I looked at the casing for a long moment. I could take it, analyze it, but what was the point? I already knew what it meant. Taking it would be an admission that I had received the message, that he had succeeded in unsettling me.

I stood up, leaving the shiny brass sentinel exactly where it was. I turned my back on it, on the perfect view, on my compromised plan. I walked away without looking back, my footsteps echoing in the vast, empty space. The mission was no longer about Julian Croft. It was about the ghost who left bullets on ledges. He had taken my sniper’s nest. I would take something of his. Something he couldn't see, something he couldn't touch, but something he would surely feel.

Back in my apartment, the smell of dust and concrete still clung to my clothes. I stripped them off, throwing them in a pile by the door, and stood under a scalding hot shower, letting the water sluice the grime of the construction site and the residue of his presence off my skin. But the feeling remained. It was under my skin now, a low-frequency hum of violation.

He thought the high ground was a physical place. A tower, a ledge, a better rifle. He was wrong. The high ground was information. It was the space between the ones and zeroes where the real work was done. He had left a piece of metal in my world. I was going to leave a ghost in his.

Finding him was the first problem. A man called Hywel was a digital phantom. But the phantom had made a mistake. He had sent me a message. And while the message itself had dissolved, its journey had left a faint, ephemeral trail through the city’s network infrastructure. A whisper of a memory in a dozen routers and switches. Tracing it would be like reconstructing a dead man from a single eyelash. It was painstaking, meticulous, and exactly the kind of impossible puzzle I excelled at.

I sat at my terminal, the city lights beginning to glitter outside my window. For hours, I worked. I didn't drink tea. I didn't eat. I moved through layers of public and private networks, using backdoors I’d built years ago, calling in silent favors from sleeping programs I’d left behind in corporate systems. I followed the echo. It was faint, distorted, and deliberately convoluted. He had routed his signal through a chain of proxies that bounced from a server in Seoul to a university in Brazil before it ever got to me. It was a masterful piece of misdirection. Amateur work would have stopped there. But I kept digging.

I found the origin point nine hours later, just as the sky was beginning to soften from black to a deep, bruised purple. It wasn't a commercial server. It was a private, encrypted machine, shielded by a firewall that was both elegant and brutal. It was his. His digital fortress.

Getting in was a battle. His defenses were active, intelligent. They learned. They adapted. Every port I scanned, every probe I sent, was met with an immediate, surgical countermeasure. It was like fencing in the dark. I could feel his personality in the code. It was clean, ruthlessly efficient, and profoundly arrogant. He had built a fortress and dared the world to attack it.

I didn't attack. I listened. I watched the way his system responded, the patterns it used to deflect and deny. I found its rhythm. And in that rhythm, I found a single, half-second lapse in its patrol cycle. A flaw so minuscule it was likely invisible to its creator. It was enough.

I slipped inside.

The silence of his server was absolute. I was a ghost in his machine. His entire operation was laid out before me in neat, obsessively organized files. Research on Croft. Financials. Psychological profiles. Blueprints for the museum, annotated in a crisp, precise font. He had schematics for the ventilation system that I hadn't even found. He had audio files of guards' conversations, likely picked up by his transmitter. He was good. Better than I had anticipated.

I saw a folder labeled with a single, stark letter: W.

My stomach tightened. I knew what it was. His file on me. My known associates, my preferred methods, my psychological weaknesses. The temptation to open it was a physical thing, a pressure in my chest. To see myself through his eyes.

I didn't touch it. Looking was a sign of weakness. It would mean he had gotten to me. My purpose here was not to learn, but to teach.

I navigated to his operational plans for the gala. He had a copy of the security schedule, identical to mine. He had highlighted the same vulnerabilities, the same blind spots. And he had a timeline. A precise, second-by-second plan for his infiltration and exfiltration. It was a beautiful piece of work. It would have succeeded.

I found the detail I was looking for. The master override codes for the security shutters on the terrace level. According to the schedule, the system would be deactivated for a maintenance check between 22:40 and 22:45, a five-minute window. His plan was timed to it perfectly.

I didn't delete the file. I didn't corrupt it. I made a single, tiny change. I altered the deactivation time. Not by an hour, not even by ten minutes. I changed it by ninety seconds. Instead of 22:40, the window would begin at 22:41:30. It was a small enough discrepancy to be an error, a typo in the intelligence. He would be moving into position, thinking he was in the clear. And for a minute and a half, he would be completely exposed to a network of sensors and cameras he believed to be blind. It wouldn't get him caught, not necessarily. But it would shatter his timeline. It would force him to abort or adapt in a fraction of a second. It would inject chaos into his perfect, beautiful plan. It would make him doubt his own research, his own meticulousness.

I made the change and then I erased my entry. Not just the logs. I erased the very path I had carved to get in, overwriting the data sector by sector until there was no evidence I had ever been there. The server was exactly as he had left it, except for a single, poisoned number.

I leaned back in my chair, the tension draining from my shoulders. The sun was rising, casting long shadows across my floor. I had not slept. I felt wired, alive. The bullet casing on the ledge was a shout. This was a whisper. A seed of doubt planted directly in his mind. I had been inside his space, walked through the corridors of his thoughts, and left my own invisible mark. The board was reset. It was his move.

His move came two days later. I had allowed myself a brief, private sense of satisfaction, the clean hum of a job well done. I had slept, a deep and dreamless sleep, and woken feeling like the board had been cleared, the pieces reset in my favor. I spent the next day running errands, moving through the city with a renewed sense of control, the memory of his compromised server a secret I carried like a weapon.

My car was in a private residential garage beneath a block of luxury flats I didn't live in. The space was rented under a shell corporation, paid for in cash a year in advance. It was clean, anonymous, and secure. Triple-gated entry, 24-hour surveillance, pressure plates at the exit. Getting a vehicle in or out without authorization was theoretically impossible.

I keyed in the code and the heavy steel gate rolled up with a low groan. The air inside was cool and still, smelling of concrete and cold exhaust fumes. My footsteps were the only sound. My car, a nondescript dark grey sedan, was parked in its designated spot in the far corner, away from the elevator and the other vehicles.

I unlocked it with the fob, the double click echoing slightly in the silence. I slid into the driver's seat, the leather cool against my skin. I put the key in the ignition, but before I turned it, I saw it.

It was sitting dead center on the dashboard, directly in my line of sight. A small, antique compass. The housing was brass, tarnished with age, and the glass face was slightly convex. The needle, a sliver of dark, magnetized steel, quivered almost imperceptibly, trying to find north in the steel and concrete tomb of the garage.

My blood went cold.

It wasn't the shock of an unexpected object. It was the immediate, certain knowledge of who had left it. This was his reply.

My first thought was professional. Breach. He had bypassed the garage security. He had bypassed my car's alarm system. He had opened my door, sat in my car—or at least reached inside it—and placed this thing here. He had been in this small, contained space. The thought was a violation so profound it made my skin crawl. I could almost feel the ghost of his presence, the warmth he might have left on the seat, the scent he might have left in the air.

I scanned the interior of the car. Nothing else was out of place. No wires, no new blinking lights. Nothing disturbed. Only this. This quiet, symbolic little object.

My hand trembled slightly as I reached out and picked it up. The brass was cool and heavy in my palm. I turned it over. No maker's mark. It was old, well-used. A traveler's tool.

The message was not subtle. A compass. For someone who has lost their direction.

He was telling me he knew. He knew I had been in his system. He knew I had meddled with his plans. And this was his judgment. That my focus had drifted. That in my obsession with him, I had lost sight of the target, of true north. The arrogance was staggering. The accuracy was infuriating.

A chill traced its way down my spine, a feeling so complex it was almost paralyzing. It was fear, sharp and clear. He knew my car. He knew where I kept it. He could have planted a bomb, a tracking device. He could have been waiting for me in the back seat. The fact that he hadn't, that he had chosen this instead, was what made it so terrifying. He wasn't trying to kill me. Not yet. He was playing with me.

But beneath the fear was something else. Something dark and thrilling that I refused to name. The bullet casing was a display of power. The hacked server was a display of skill. This was different. This was intimate. He hadn't just breached my security; he had analyzed my psyche and delivered a verdict on a piece of antique brass. He had responded to my whisper of code with a physical touch, an object I could hold. The game had shifted again, from the abstract to the tangible.

I forced myself to move, my professionalism kicking back in like a defense mechanism. I got out of the car and began a systematic sweep. I checked under the chassis, inside the wheel wells, behind the bumpers. I popped the hood and examined the engine block. I ran a counter-surveillance detector over the entire interior, from the headrests to the floor mats.

Nothing.

The car was clean. Of course it was. He was too good for something as crude as a tracker. The compass was the message. The breach was the threat. The silence was the proof of his skill.

I finally got back into the car, the compass still in my hand. I closed my fingers around it, the edges of the brass pressing into my palm. He was telling me I was lost. Maybe he was right. My heart was beating faster than it should have been. It wasn't the adrenaline of a near-miss. It was the frantic, consuming excitement of the game. Of him. He was no longer a name on a file or a ghost in the network. He was a man who had been in my car, a man who left beautiful, cruel little objects for me to find. He was close. And god help me, I wanted to see what he would do next.

I drove home on autopilot, the compass on the passenger seat beside me. Every time I glanced at it, the needle gave its little shudder. Find north. The city's grid system was so ingrained in me I didn't need a tool to tell me where I was. That wasn't the point of it. The point was the judgment. That I had lost my way.

Back in my apartment, I placed it on the polished concrete of my kitchen island. It looked absurd there. A piece of history, of human exploration, sitting in my sterile, digital world. It felt like an accusation.

I needed to focus. The gala was in less than a week. Croft was the target. Julian Croft. I said his name in my head, trying to make it stick. I pulled up his file on my main monitor. His face, blandly handsome and forgettable, filled the screen. Corporate headshots, paparazzi photos from years ago. A man who paid a lot of money to be invisible. He was the mission. The paycheck. The entire reason I was engaged in this ridiculous, escalating feud.

But I couldn't concentrate on his security detail or the updated guest list. My eyes kept drifting from the screen to the small brass object on the island. My mind wasn't dissecting Croft’s routines; it was dissecting Hywel’s.

Each of his moves was a sentence in a conversation I hadn't realized we were having. The single bullet casing on the sniper’s perch: I am here. This is my space too. It was bold, almost theatrical. A statement of presence. The tiny transmitter in the service corridor: I am better at this than you are. It was about technical precision, a quiet boast of superior skill. The digital calling card in my network: I can get to you anywhere. That was elegant, a display of power that was as clean as it was invasive.

And now the compass. This was different. This was personal. I see you. I know what you’re doing, and I know why. It wasn't about skill or territory anymore. It was about psychology. He had read my play—the ninety-second shift in the security schedule—and understood its intent perfectly. It was designed to unsettle him, to make him doubt himself. And his response was to tell me that it was I who was unsettled. That I was the one who was off-balance.

I stood up and walked around the island, looking at the compass from different angles. He was building a profile of me. I knew because I was doing the exact same thing to him.

He was meticulous, but not rigid. He was capable of creative, unorthodox thinking. The compass proved that. He was patient. He could have planted it days ago and waited for me to find it. He was confident, bordering on arrogant. He enjoyed this. The game. He fed on it, the same way I did. The professional challenge, the intellectual puzzle of another competent operative.

I felt a strange, unwelcome flush of heat. It wasn't sexual, not exactly. It was the thrill of being truly seen. Silas saw me as an asset, a tool. My targets saw me, for a brief and final second, as an agent of their own demise. The anonymous crowds in the city didn't see me at all. But Hywel saw me. He saw my work, my thought processes, my intentions. And he was responding in kind. This silent, deadly dialogue was more intimate than any conversation I had had in years.

I closed the file on Julian Croft. It felt pointless. The man was a blank space, a prop in a play that was no longer about him. The real objective, the real point of focus, was the man who had left the compass. Who was he? Not his methods, not his skills. What was the person behind the moves? What kind of man leaves an antique compass on the dashboard of his rival's car as a warning? Someone with a sense of history. A sense of poetry, maybe. A sense of cruelty, definitely.

The thought was consuming. It was a feedback loop, my analysis of him feeding my obsession, which in turn demanded more analysis. I was spending more time thinking about Hywel than about how I was going to put a bullet in a tech mogul.

This was a fatal error. I knew it with a cold certainty that cut through the strange excitement. Distraction kills. Attachment kills. Obsession was a gilded cage, and I was walking into it with my eyes wide open. He was a variable I hadn't accounted for, and he was threatening to derail the entire operation. My operation.

I picked up the compass again. The needle settled, pointing towards the wall of windows overlooking the city. North. He was right. I was lost. My focus was supposed to be on the mission. Instead, it was on him. A man I had seen for only a handful of seconds across a street. A ghost who had been inside my car. A rival who felt more real to me than anyone I knew.

I broke one of my foundational rules. I sat down at my terminal, the one I used for mission architecture and digital reconnaissance, and typed his name into the search field.

Hywel.

It looked foreign on the screen. I had no context for it, no origin. It was just a name, the first piece of solid data I had on him that wasn't inferred from his actions. It felt like a key.

My own rules were simple, built over a decade of survival. Never research a rival beyond their professional capacity. Never make it personal. A rival was a set of skills, a pattern of behavior, a threat to be neutralized or avoided. They were not a person with a name and a past. To make them a person was to give them power. It was to create a weakness in yourself.

I bypassed my own protocols and ran the search. I didn't use the standard encrypted channels. I dove deeper, using backdoors I had built into federal and international intelligence networks, tools I reserved for only the most critical target acquisition. This felt critical. My fingers moved over the keyboard with a speed that was purely muscle memory. I wasn't thinking about what I was doing, only about the need to fill the blank space he represented.

The results began to trickle in, a cascade of dead ends.

Interpol. The name appeared twice. Both files were Level 7 classified, sealed and redacted into uselessness. Just a black bar where a life should be.

CIA Contractor Database. A hit. A ghost profile. No photo, no date of birth. Just a callsign—H—and a list of regions where he was active. Middle East, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia. The list was extensive, a travelogue of global instability. The file was flagged as inactive, but the date of the flag was only two years old. He had been on their books. Or he had wanted someone to think he had been.

I moved to the dark web, to the forums and message boards where the bottom feeders of our world exchanged rumors. Here, he was a legend. They didn't use his name, only the initial. H. The stories were fantastical, exaggerated. A politician poisoned with a custom-engineered airborne fungus in Tokyo. A cartel leader’s entire armored motorcade silently disabled and its occupants vanished on a highway in broad daylight. The methods were always different, always creative, always impossible to verify. He was a folktale, a boogeyman used to scare amateurs. The more I read, the less I knew. The stories were chaff, designed to mislead, to build a myth that obscured the man.

Hours passed. The city outside my window went from a glittering web of light to a soft, pre-dawn grey. My eyes burned from the screen. The frustration was a cold, hard knot in my gut. I had thrown my best tools at him, my most secret access points, and I had found nothing. Nothing real.

Then, I found a thread. It was buried in the archives of a defunct private security firm based out of Brussels. Their servers were a mess, a digital graveyard. But I found an incident report from a job in Monaco five years prior. A corporate espionage case. A rival company had tried to steal data from their client. The report detailed how the attempt was thwarted by a single, unnamed security consultant. The appendix, however, contained a fragmented log from the building’s security system. A log the firm’s techs had failed to properly scrub.

And there it was. A single entry. External consultant ‘Hywel’ logged out of system. A timestamp. That was it. But it was attached to a security file. The file was corrupted, but I spent the next hour reconstructing it, pulling fragments of code together like a digital resurrection.

For my efforts, I got a single image.

It was from a low-resolution security camera, aimed down a service corridor. The timestamp matched the log. A man was walking away from the camera. He was wearing a dark, tailored coat. He was tall, with broad shoulders. His posture was relaxed, confident. His face was completely obscured. It was just a picture of a man’s back.

I stared at the image for a long time. All that work, all those broken rules, for this. A grainy photograph of a man’s back.

I leaned back in my chair, the exhaustion hitting me all at once. It was a complete failure. He had built a fortress around his identity, a digital maze with no exit. He was a professional ghost. The lack of information was more maddening than any damning fact could have been. The void he left behind was a vacuum, and my obsession rushed in to fill it.

This was the danger. Not the man himself, but the space he occupied in my head. He was a puzzle I couldn't solve, and the not-knowing was becoming an addiction. Silas’s warning echoed in my mind. Focusing on anyone but the target is a fatal mistake. He was right. Hywel was no longer just a rival. He was an obsession. And in this line of work, obsession was just a slower, more elaborate form of suicide.