The air in Liszt Ferenc Airport stank of jet fuel and stale espresso. Ghost moved like a shadow past customs—diplomatic badge scanned, fake accent mumbled, not a flicker of suspicion in the agent's eyes. Soap limped two steps behind, clean-shaven and dressed like he'd rather be in a boardroom than a battlefield.
Their aliases checked out. EU economic observers, some nonsense about infrastructure development. The irony wasn't lost on either of them.
"Bet this city's got more cameras than bullets," Soap muttered as they stepped into the cab queue, eyes scanning glass rooftops and tramlines veined with surveillance.
Ghost slid into the backseat of a waiting sedan, low voice to the driver: "District V. Radisson Blu."
Soap winced as he eased in beside him, crutch folded against the seat. "Aye, mate. Let's go see where ghosts die."
District V was all clean lines and polished glass, the kind of place spooks used when they wanted to pretend they weren't running operations. The hotel loomed like a data center—windows blacked out, façade mirrored and sterile. Corporate shell. Bureaucrats loved it.
Ghost eyed the upper floors. "Doesn't scream final resting place."
"Maybe Ward just had expensive taste," Soap offered, rubbing at the wrapped wound under his slacks. "Or someone wanted it to look that way."
They entered through the revolving doors, suits stiff on their shoulders, the lobby lit like a showroom. Concierge didn't even glance up.
Laswell's ping came through on the burner phone:
> Room 914. Ward checked in three days ago. Checked out an hour after. Never left the building.
Elevator hummed upward, soft classical music scraping at Ghost's nerves.
Soap adjusted the weight on his bad leg. "You believe he offed himself here?"
Ghost's eyes locked on the floor counter. "No."
They hit the ninth floor. Clean carpet. No sound. No staff.
Ward had picked a quiet floor. Or someone picked it for him.
Ghost drew a lockpick set from his inner coat, knelt, and worked the card reader.
Too smooth. Too fast.
Soap kept his back to the hallway, hand near his sidearm.
The lock blinked green.
---
The latch clicked open, too quick. Ghost felt it in his gut—someone had prepped this door to be breached.
He stepped in first, weapon low, eyes slicing the room clean: single king bed, desk, half-drunk water bottle on the nightstand. Lamp still on. Shadows stretched long across sterile carpet. Soap followed, back to the wall, checking angles.
Closet door hung ajar.
Ghost's boot crunched over glass. He stopped. The minibar was open—glass shattered, untouched bottles. Something had gone violent, but quiet.
Then he saw the legs.
Michael Ward's body dangled from the closet rod, belt cinched around his neck, shoes just grazing the floor. Gun loose in his right hand. Blood pooled under him in a wide, thick circle, seeping into the carpet.
"Jesus," Soap muttered. "Clean shot, right through the chest."
Ghost didn't speak. He scanned: angle of the belt, tightness of the knot, looped once. A staged job. Too perfect.
He moved in. The gun didn't sit right—wrong grip angle for a self-inflicted shot. No powder stippling on Ward's shirt or skin. Ghost grabbed a pen, nudged the weapon free.
"Check his fingers," Ghost said.
Soap pulled a wipe from his pocket, bent down with a grunt, then paused.
"Nothing. Clean. Not even oil. Wiped down."
Ghost walked to the mirror. Pressed his palm flat. Cold, bone-dry. But the bathroom door was open, and the floor tiles still held steam. Showerhead dripped. A used towel hung over the rail.
He turned back. "Whoever did this, they were here twenty minutes ago."
Soap glanced at the door. "You thinking we walked in while they were still in the building?"
"Or watching from another floor," Ghost said. He looked at Ward—jaw slack, expression frozen between rage and fear. "He didn't kill himself. He got silenced."
A long pause.
Soap straightened slowly. "Then where's the real scene?"
Ghost scanned the room again. Bed untouched. Curtains drawn. No luggage. No clothes in the drawers. No laptop.
---
Ghost crouched by the minibar, fingers moving quick under the counter. He found the safe tucked behind a false panel. A keypad blinked red.
He didn't bother guessing.
Instead, he yanked the compact multi-tool from his belt, popped the outer casing with a flat wedge, and jammed a pulse pick into the circuit port. Two seconds later, the lock chirped. Open.
Inside: no files, no money, no burner.
Just a cracked USB drive and a single index card, folded once. Ghost flipped it open.
Three chess moves in Ward's neat block lettering: e4 e5 Nf3.
Soap stepped in, eyeing the item from over Ghost's shoulder. "That some kinda geek shit, or are we meant to decode that?"
"It's a dead drop key," Ghost muttered. "Ward used it back in Syria. Joint op with NATO and SAD—had to pass intel under Moscow's nose."
He held the card up to the light. No watermark, no ink bleed. Fresh. Whoever staged the room hadn't found it. Or had, and left it.
Soap tilted his head. "So they torched everything else, but left this?"
"Yeah," Ghost said. He pocketed the card, then the USB. "Which means either they missed it… or they want us to have it."
He stood slowly, eyes sweeping the room again. The bedspread hadn't been pulled back. Trash bin was empty. Not a single receipt, no DNA trace beyond Ward's corpse.
"Whole room's been sanitized," Ghost said. "But they left a hook."
Soap moved to the window, pulled the curtain a half inch aside. His voice dropped. "Question is—are we chasing breadcrumbs… or walking into a trap?"
Ghost didn't answer.
He just stared at the card again, thumb brushing the edge. That opening move? It wasn't just a cipher protocol.
It was a challenge. One Ward knew Ghost would recognize. One only they could finish.
He slipped it away. "Time to see if the board's still set."
---
The hallway bled into the elevator foyer, quiet except for the distant chime of a lift arriving three floors down. Ghost's boots landed soft on the carpet. Soap trailed him, slower, one hand pressed to his side—still sore from Prague—but eyes sharp.
Then Ghost stopped.
Elevator mirror caught him first—an angular silhouette, too still to be a guest. Tall. Peacoat. Clean-shaven, but off somehow. No luggage, no room key. Just watching.
Ghost turned slightly. "Elevator guy. Far end. Third mirror panel."
Soap's voice stayed low. "Spot us?"
"Not yet."
They moved casual. Ghost peeled left toward the maintenance corridor. Soap went right, heading to the concierge kiosk.
Then—crash.
Tourist brochures exploded across the marble as Soap knocked over the stand. "Are you kiddin' me?! Bloody thing just fell over!" he shouted, voice sharp with fake irritation.
Heads turned. The man in the peacoat flinched, eyes narrowing—but Ghost was already gone, slipped behind the "Staff Only" door, boots silent on linoleum. He moved fast, cutting through narrow halls, past laundry carts and mop buckets, until he reached the service hatch that opened near the elevators.
The watcher stepped forward.
Wrong move.
Ghost yanked him inside by the collar, slammed the door shut with his heel. They struggled, brief and brutal. A half-choked grunt escaped the man's throat as Ghost drove him into the wall, forearm crushing windpipe. The guy clawed for a weapon—too late.
"Who sent you?" Ghost hissed, close enough to feel the man's breath hitch.
The watcher coughed blood, voice barely a whisper: "Too late. It's already on its way."
Ghost didn't blink. One twist—sharp, final. The man slumped. No alarms, no last-minute heroics.
He lowered the body to the tile, checked pockets. Burner phone. Keycard. No ID.
Soap pushed in a moment later, face tight.
"Well?" he asked.
Ghost shook his head. "Spectre. Eyes on us since we landed."
Soap nudged the body with his boot. "Think he was solo?"
Ghost pocketed the burner. "Doesn't matter. He won't talk."
They left through the loading dock. Fast. Quiet. No time for cleanup.
Too late for that.
---
The safehouse was buried behind a scrapyard in Csepel District, its entrance disguised beneath corrugated steel and the stink of burnt engine oil. No signage. No cameras. Just a rusted keypad tucked behind a stack of stripped car doors.
Ghost punched the code Laswell sent. The slab of metal creaked open like a crypt.
Inside, it dropped two floors deep—concrete stairs, low light, dead air. Soap followed, breath short, hand brushing his side again.
"Place smells like Cold War hangover," he muttered.
"Perfect," Ghost said.
They entered a room built like a bunker—brick-lined, ceiling thick with cables, humming server racks against one wall. In the middle sat Brenna Laird, cross-legged in a spin chair, fingers tapping across a backlit keyboard. Hood up. Eyes bloodshot. Her accent was East Coast and razor-edged.
"You the ones dragging ghosts behind you?" she asked, not looking up.
Ghost tossed her the USB and the folded index card. "Ward's last words. Can you crack it?"
Laird caught them without flinching. Slid the card under a worn mechanical keyboard. "e4 e5 Nf3… classic bait opening," she said. "He liked using chess for layered ciphers—moves translate to hex key shifts."
She worked fast. Code bloomed across three monitors—white on black, broken strings turning legible piece by piece. Soap hovered, silent.
After five minutes, she exhaled sharply. "Jesus."
"What is it?" Ghost leaned in.
She angled the monitor. "GPS logs. Satellite tag data. Masked behind NATO asset filters, but someone sloppy forgot to wipe the keyhole pulls. All these points feed into Kazakhstan. Oblast-7."
Soap straightened, tension tightening his jaw. "Didn't they burn that place down after '92?"
"No," Ghost said. "They just locked the door and changed the name."
Laird scrolled to a red-highlighted note embedded in the files—Ward's final cross-reference.
"Red echo confirmed. Entry point: Archive Room D-4."
Soap read it aloud. "That's not just a dead drop. That's storage."
Ghost nodded, voice flat. "Ward wasn't meeting anyone. He was scrubbing a trail."
Laird sat back, hands off the keyboard now. "Trail to what?"
Ghost's eyes didn't leave the screen. "Voss. Whatever he pulled from Mosul, he buried it out there."
Laird pointed at a blinking icon. "That sat-tag's still pinging. Low orbit. We've got a live eye on the site."
Ghost took that in. Quiet. Focused.
"Then we're not chasing ghosts," he said. "We're walking into their house."
---
The drone feed stuttered to life on Laird's second monitor, choppy frames pulled from an archived cache buried behind three layers of NSA metadata filters. Thermal shadows spilled across the snow-covered sprawl of Oblast-7—low-slung concrete buildings half-swallowed by drift and time.
"Camera feed's from a blacksat bird, six weeks old," Laird said. "Pulled from dead logs tagged under Mosul-era op aliases."
Ghost didn't blink. "Show me what it caught."
The footage sharpened—barely. Enough to see a convoy crawl through the outer perimeter. Five vehicles, matte black, headlights killed, tires crunching untouched snow. No flags, no insignia. Men spilled from the doors in tight formations, weapons at low ready. Not military. Too fluid. Private muscle—Spectre's breed.
"Non-standard gear," Soap muttered, jaw flexing. "That's not NATO."
"Not even close," Laird confirmed, scrubbing forward.
A frame froze. One SUV door opened. A tall man stepped out, face obscured beneath a half-mask, parka zipped to the chin. But the posture gave him away—deliberate, clean movements. Leader energy.
Ghost leaned closer.
Laird tapped the satchel slung over the man's shoulder. "That bag—recognize the tag?"
Soap squinted. "CIA inventory code. From Mosul."
Ghost's tone dropped. "Voss."
Laird didn't ask how they knew. She froze the frame and isolated the tag—CIA asset number. Redacted now. Wasn't redacted then.
"You're looking at someone who walked away from a black site with state secrets," she said. "And you're telling me he's stashing them in a place that officially doesn't exist."
Ghost stared at the image like it might flinch. "No. He's not stashing them. He's setting the table."
The screen dimmed for a second as the sat feed looped. The convoy vanished back into the white.
Then Laswell's voice crackled through Ghost's encrypted burner. Direct line.
"You were right," she said. "That's our ghost. Oblast-7 isn't dead. It's waiting."
Ghost didn't answer right away. Just watched the snow swallow the complex again. Quiet. Watching the future unfold in static.
"Then we wake it up."
---
The air in the bunker felt heavier the deeper they dug. Concrete walls, stale with cold-war mildew and dust, wrapped around them like a tomb. Ghost sat back from Laird's terminal, eyes locked on the scrolling code—layers of metadata stripping themselves bare line by line.
"Here," Laird said, voice clipped. She pointed to a string of embedded hex code. "Subchannel payload. Not part of the main encryption. Someone hid this intentionally."
She executed the extract. A plain-text message populated the screen—no headers, no signature. Just twelve lines in Courier font, bleeding like a deathbed confession.
> If you find this, I'm already dead.
Don't trust SRG.
Don't trust NATO.
Oblast-7 was never decommissioned.
They buried something there.
Something they made.
Spectre runs the shell now.
But Voss? He's not following orders.
He's rewriting them.
There's a map in Archive D-4.
Burn it.
Or it burns us all.
No one spoke.
Soap leaned forward, mouth a tight line. "That read like a man digging his own grave with a keyboard."
Ghost stood slowly, eyes still fixed on the screen. His tone dropped into something flint-hard. "He wasn't trying to disappear. He was trying to leave a trail back."
Laird glanced between them. "You think he knew they'd come for him?"
"He knew they wouldn't let him walk," Ghost said. "But he gambled someone might pick up the pieces."
Soap exhaled through his nose. "Then we finish the job. We find that room. We torch whatever Spectre's keeping buried."
Ghost turned toward the exit, the message burned into memory. Not a warning.
A directive.
"Ward's last order," he said. "Let's not waste it."
---
The rail yard reeked of rust and diesel—industrial and forgotten, the kind of place that swallowed things whole and didn't ask questions. No security, just a shiftless loader in a rain-warped parka who glanced once at Ghost's forged bill of lading, then waved him toward the waiting freight.
Soap climbed in first, dragging his leg slightly, the injury stitched but still raw. The false-bottom container sat in the center of the boxcar, matte-black, bolted down like it held something volatile. It did.
Inside: Arctic warfare kits vacuum-sealed in mylar, two custom M4s with short barrels, a satcom case fingerprint-locked to Ghost, and a handheld jammer for field blackout ops.
Ghost popped the lid, ran a hand along the weapons. "Cold's coming. Pack tight."
Soap pulled on a thermal liner, grimaced. "Last time I needed this much gear, we were freezing our bollocks off in Goražde."
Ghost didn't answer. He was staring at the small, weather-stained screen embedded in the wall—a hacked sat terminal rigged to a military GPS unit. It flickered once. Then coordinates pulsed on the display in low-res green:
48.0042° N, 82.8594° E — Oblast-7.
A red dot blinked at the edge of a whitewashed digital map, surrounded by nothing but topography lines and snowfield data. No towns. No roads. Just a scar in the earth.
Soap leaned against the crate, watching Ghost. "Still think Ward was bluffing?"
Ghost's voice came quiet, iron-flat. "No bluff. Just regret."
The boxcar shuddered. Brakes hissed. The train rolled slow out of Budapest under the cover of dark.
Outside the window: silence. Cold. And the dark smear of forest that gave nothing back.
Inside, Ghost stood motionless in the dim light, the reflection of the blinking coordinates flickering across his skull mask.
He didn't blink.
"If Spectre buried his past there," he said, barely above a murmur, "we'll exhume every inch."
---
[This is extra chapter]