PART 1: Porto Exit
The headline didn't even make the front page.
Just a slim bar across the bottom of a financial ticker:
PORTO: INTL. TAX CONSULTANT FOUND DEAD IN HOTEL ROOM. SUICIDE SUSPECTED.
Izzy sat in a narrow terminal café at Logan Airport, hood up, burner phone resting on a tray beside a half-finished espresso. The rain had followed her all the way to Boston.
Her phone buzzed.
Carl Vanz
Encrypted channel.
She accepted the call. No video. Just voice.
"She's dead," Carl said. "Name was Andrea Lobo. Forty-six. Specialized in dual citizenship logistics and offshore real estate. Used to file paperwork for a firm called Heversham & Thorne."
Izzy closed the article with a tap.
"Hotel room?"
"Fourteenth floor. Locked door. Note typed. Sound familiar?"
"Same printer model as Hugo's?"
Carl hesitated.
"I didn't say I was allowed on their server."
She smiled faintly. "You're stalling."
He exhaled. "Same printer. Same signature block. Same timestamp formatting. It's not just the method. It's the sequence."
Izzy watched the rain thread down the window beside her.
"Andrea wasn't in the ledger," she said.
"No," Carl replied. "But she built the shell Thorne used to shield V.A.T. — Veteran Asset Trust. One of the routing accounts under Arthur's ledger."
Izzy sat forward slowly.
"That name again."
"Yep."
"You're sure this isn't just cleanup?"
Carl's voice hardened.
"No. It's design. You're not chasing ghosts, Izzy. You're following the pattern they left behind. And whoever's drawing it now? They're better funded than Thorne ever was."
She hadn't said his old name aloud since the NATO leak trials — back when the tribunal was sealed and the files buried so deep no one dared speak about them.
Kristof Rausch had been methodical, loyal, terrifyingly quiet.
When they pulled her out of Skopje, when the conditioning failed and the serum degraded faster than expected, he'd vouched for her with four signatures no one could trace. And then vanished.
Carl Vanz was a myth — a shell designed to vanish the man who once rerouted a leak from six countries without leaving a single metadata trace.
Now she could hear it in the static of his voice — not just the paranoia, but the fracture. The slow, surgical kind that comes from losing everything real and still surviving.
She never thought she'd hear him again.
And now he was all she had.
A boarding call buzzed overhead. São Jorge. Final call.
Izzy picked up her duffel.
"I'll call when I land."
"You won't."
She paused.
Carl added, almost softly:
"You'll already be running."
PART 2: Hugo's Ghost File
The file came through in pieces.
It was a low-resolution screen recording, stitched from a fragment Carl had pulled out of Hugo's SSD cache. Most of it was junk — mouse movements, open folders, file renames. But twenty-three seconds in, the window locked on a document titled:
The Ledger That Burned the Truth — Draft 4
Carl had slowed it down and annotated it frame by frame.
Izzy watched the cursor highlight a single paragraph.
Then pause.
Then press Ctrl+S.
And that was it.
But the words were enough.
"The Veteran Asset Trust (V.A.T.) is not a financial instrument — it's a classification. Deployed by joint-agency oversight from 2002 to 2014, it was designed to protect former intelligence field contractors too 'visible' to formally retire. Payments were routed through real estate proxies, luxury trusts, and dormant entities tied to black-budget audits. The name most often redacted from these records is: N. Brandt."
Carl's voice clicked through her earpiece.
"I ran it through a military pension table. There's no V.A.T. fund listed. But I found six bounced accounts with similar architecture. All closed within a month of Arthur's death."
Izzy didn't reply.
Carl filled the silence.
"You said Brandt was an overseer."
"He was."
"Of what?"
Izzy leaned forward in her seat, watching the cursor blink at the end of the paragraph.
"Project Griffin. The real one. Not the paperwork version."
Carl's breath caught. "So he knows about you."
"Carl—" she said quietly, "he made me."
That shut him up.
She closed the laptop. The plane was still taxiing, wheels biting into wet tarmac. She stared through the porthole at the fog curling around the runway.
Nolan Brandt wasn't cleaning up a mess.
He was erasing his own reflection.
PART 3: Jack Follows Arthur's Trail
The lock clicked open with a reluctant snap.
Unit 118. Back corner. Ground level.
The kind of storage facility meant for seasonal junk and forgotten lives.
Jack stepped inside.
The place smelled like dust and aluminum. A single fluorescent light flickered overhead. The unit was small — maybe six feet by ten — and packed with exactly three items:
• A dented metal desk
• A plastic bin with tax records
• And an old laptop, closed, resting beneath a folder marked "ARCHIVE: E.K."
Jack flipped open the folder first.
Inside: a photograph.
Evelyn. At a train station. Laughing. Hair caught mid-movement by wind or timing or something that looked like freedom.
It wasn't recent.
But it wasn't old either.
He set it aside, careful not to crease the corners.
Beneath it, a printed sheet of numbers and addresses:
ROUTING POINTS – FINAL, UNTESTED
GENVA-DX03
FJORD-RX72
FALK-PROXY06
QUAY-NODE44 (dead)
ROURKE/EK shared – [handwritten] "only use if compromised"
He tapped the laptop's power button.
Nothing.
Dead.
The battery was probably long gone. He searched the drawers — no charger, no cables, no backup drive.
Just the paper. And Evelyn's face.
He slid the list into his coat pocket, then the photo.
As he turned to leave, he glanced back at the desk.
One drawer still locked.
He didn't try to open it.
Not yet.
Outside, the wind had shifted. Cold, biting, sharper than it should've been for early spring.
Jack lit a cigarette, then thought better of it and put it out.
Some things were better faced clear.
PART 4: What Izzy Remembers
The plane had leveled out.
Turbulence gone. Cabin lights dimmed.
Soft mechanical hum — the kind that gave your mind too much room.
Izzy sat upright, staring out into black sky.
She hadn't thought about Brandt in over a decade. Not directly.
There were pieces, sure — habits she picked up from his methods, training scars that didn't heal right.
But the last time she saw him?
That had stayed sharp.
It was a debrief in a concrete-walled bunker disguised as a water treatment facility in Nevada. No clocks. No windows. No rank insignia.
Brandt wore the same thing he always did: dark suit, no tie. Clean lapel. Wedding ring he never mentioned.
She sat across from him, fresh off a conditioning failure — too many variables, too much independence.
He hadn't raised his voice.
He never did.
He tapped her dossier with two fingers.
"You're not built for command," he said. "You want truth too much. Truth makes you delay. Makes you hesitate. Makes you pick a different kind of fight."
Izzy said nothing.
Then he said the thing that stuck:
"We didn't make you for justice. We made you for cleanup. You just didn't take."
Now, thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic, she finally understood.
Brandt wasn't removing threats.
He was removing evidence that he ever existed.
If the funding trails vanished...
If the assets died quietly...
If Arthur's ledger was the last document with his name on it...
Then he could disappear without stain.
A perfect ghost.
Izzy blinked once.
Her hand trembled — just slightly — the same hand that used to crush a pistol grip like chalk.
The degradation was catching up. The formula had a half-life, and hers was running out.
She flexed her fist until the tremor stopped.
Then she closed her eyes and whispered:
"Not yet."
PART 5: Flightplan Red
The message came in just after landing.
No signal bars. No ringtone. Just a quiet pulse on the backup phone Izzy kept strapped to the inside of her boot.
From: Redline Relay – CID fallback
Subject: ::one shot::
She opened it in the airport restroom, seated on a closed toilet with her duffel on her knees.
The message was one line.
"You have one shot to reach her before they do."
Attached was a single image: Evelyn, mid-stride, stepping out of a fog-covered produce market in Velas, São Jorge. Her hood was up. Hair longer. Bags under her eyes. But unmistakable.
She looked straight at the camera.
Not surprised.
Not afraid.
Just resigned.
As if she knew this part of the story had to end here — or not at all.
Izzy stared at the image for a long time.
Then deleted it.
At the front of the terminal, she bypassed the rental counter and flagged a local van driver with two fingers and a tap of her boarding pass.
"Velas," she said. "Market side. No stops."
The driver nodded. No questions.
Good.
In the back seat, Izzy opened her duffel.
Inside:
• Soft armor vest
• Two burner phones
• One loaded Sig, field cleaned
• And a plastic-sealed envelope labeled: "CHAINLINK // E.K. – HAND DELIVER ONLY"
She zipped it shut, then leaned her head against the window.
The road curved downward, the ocean drawing closer.
This wasn't recon.
It wasn't retrieval.
This was an intercept.
She didn't pack for comfort.
She packed for war.