Rain carved silver veins across the windshield, wipers smearing light into smudged halos. The sedan coasted past Langley's final checkpoint, silent but for the low rumble of tires on wet asphalt. Guard towers watched from behind bulletproof glass—dead eyes behind lenses.
Ghost rode in the back, balaclava loose around his throat. No mask tonight. Just skin, scarred and sharp under the cabin's dull lighting.
Briggs didn't look back. Hands steady on the wheel, voice flat. "You know she won't say it."
Ghost leaned his temple against the cold glass. "She doesn't have to."
He tugged the zipper on his jacket, just enough to reach the encrypted data key tucked inside.
"The file will."
The gate ahead buzzed open with a heavy metallic clunk. Ghost didn't blink. Langley Cold Storage loomed beyond it like a bunker carved out of guilt and steel.
They weren't here for answers. Just proof no one else had the balls to dig up.
---
The elevator ride down felt like descent through an oubliette—no sound but the hum of hydraulics and Ghost's own pulse ticking against his neck. Concrete walls, fluorescent buzz, and cold steel—Langley's underbelly wasn't built for comfort. It was built to forget.
Briggs keyed the panel beside the final door. A retinal scan, a blood prick, a spoken phrase: "DUSKPOINT clearance. Level Black."
The vault answered with a hiss. Cold bled out like a morgue cracked open. Inside, rows of server towers stood in metal coffins, lights blinking like dying heart monitors.
Ghost stepped in without pause. His boots echoed off the walls. Frost clung to the corners of the racks. These weren't just data stores—they were graves.
Briggs gestured toward the center shelf. "Top row. Tag ends in zero-one-nine."
Ghost found it fast—black casing, government seal, barcode scan, and one line beneath it in sharp stencil font:
RILEY, S. – AUTH CONFIRM: SIGMA ZULU
His own name, burned into a file that wasn't his.
He pulled the hard drive loose. It clicked free with a mechanical sigh, like it had been waiting for him.
Briggs broke the silence. "You sure you want to see this?"
Ghost slid the drive into his satchel.
"No one wants to see it." He turned toward the exit. "But I need to know what they buried me with."
---
The secure terminal blinked to life with a whine—no interface, no welcome screen, just a void that devoured color and comfort. Ghost slotted the drive, eyes locked on the cold text that populated like a report typed by a dead man's hands.
> FOLDER: PROJECT DUSKPOINT
SUBFOLDER: ASSET – VOSS, ALARIC
STATUS: ABANDONED
CONTENTS: AUDIO / VISUAL / METADATA LOGS
He clicked play.
The speakers spat static, then came his voice—gritted, clipped, half-buried under gunfire.
> "Raven team is hot. Civilians compromised. We need immediate evac."
Another voice—calm, detached, higher up the chain.
> "Denied. Burn the op. Wipe the source."
He hadn't remembered it that flat. That final.
Then his voice again, sharper now, panic hidden under anger:
> "They're still inside. One of them's mine."
Silence answered.
He scrubbed forward. Footage replaced the audio—Mosul's rooftops, scorched alleys, IR tags blinking red over heat-shimmering streets. Voss's silhouette dragged a wounded contact into cover. A child. Small enough to carry one-handed.
The frame froze. Timestamp: 2018.06.19.13:47:21Z.
The feed glitched—then resumed. No Voss. No child. Just fire.
Ghost leaned in. Jaw tight. Muscles locked.
Briggs stood behind him, silent.
> "They killed the line," Ghost muttered. "Scrubbed the op, let it rot."
He clicked open the metadata on the final file.
One confirmation order.
His digital signature stamped on it like a brand.
Timestamp didn't match.
Briggs shifted. "That's a clean insert. Whoever did it had access to Tier-One permissions and black-box authoring tools."
Ghost didn't move. Didn't blink.
"That signature got Raven buried," Briggs added.
Ghost's hand hovered over the keyboard. His voice came out low, iron-flat:
"They made me the nail. Drove me through his spine."
The screen reflected in his eyes—one folder, one order, one lie sealed in steel.
---
Ghost didn't breathe—just tracked the cursor as it hovered over the file. A line of metadata unraveled like a confession in binary.
CONFIRMATION ORDER – OPERATION DUSKPOINT
SIGNATORY: RILEY, S. (TIER-ONE OVERRIDE)
TIMESTAMP: 2018.06.19.13:51:06Z
VERIFIED: ENCRYPT SHA-256 / LEVEL BLACK
But his original transmission ended at 13:47. He remembered the clock, the gut-punch of silence after that last call. This wasn't a bad memory—it was precision. Burned into him.
He clicked deeper. Real-time forensic scan rendered an ugly truth: the signature was layered over the original with a ghost author tool—software locked to Director-level clearance.
They hadn't just buried Voss. They'd used Simon's name to shovel the dirt.
He stepped back from the screen, arms loose at his sides, like he'd just been shot and hadn't decided whether to fall yet.
Briggs stood in the doorframe. Shadows etched hard lines into his face.
"They needed someone close enough to believe it," he said, voice low. "Someone dirty enough to look complicit but clean enough to carry on."
Ghost didn't answer. The room pressed in—metal walls, recycled air, that cold hum of machines designed to remember things no one should.
His eyes fixed on the digital stamp. His name. His guilt.
His voice came out sandpaper dry: "They rewrote the kill order and signed it with my skin."
Briggs stepped closer, wary. "What're you gonna do?"
Ghost looked down at the hard drive. That whirring tick again—like a clock, or a bomb, or a heart that had stopped pretending.
"First?" he said. "I make sure Laswell looks me in the eye when she lies."
He shut the terminal down. Not with a keystroke, but a violent yank from the port.
The screen died. But the truth didn't. It sat there. Heavy. Undeniable.
He turned toward the exit. Footsteps silent. Rage coiled under his calm like a blade under a sleeve.
---
Langley's rooftop glistened under the sodium haze. Rain hadn't started yet, but the air carried that static tension—like the moment before a trigger pull.
Laswell stood alone, cigarette burning slow between two fingers. Civilian coat. No security detail. No comms. Just smoke and altitude.
Ghost didn't announce himself. His boots were silent across the wet concrete.
She spoke without turning. "You found the order."
His answer came flat. "It wasn't mine."
She turned then. Eyes narrowed, not surprised—just tired. "You were the only one who could've signed it and walked away."
He stepped into the light. No mask. No unit patch. Just Simon Riley, with too many dead behind his eyes.
"You left Voss behind," he said. Not a question. A sentence.
Laswell didn't flinch. "He went off-script. Broke containment. Tried to broker peace with tribal assets that weren't cleared by command."
"He saved lives."
"He compromised the op. And you were still viable. He wasn't."
Ghost's jaw flexed. Rain began in spits. He didn't blink.
"I heard him die in that feed," he said. "He thought I'd left him."
Laswell's voice stayed calm, professional, but a tremor threaded through it. "You were never meant to hear that."
"You buried him. Then you used my name to do it."
Her silence confirmed it.
"You tell yourself it was strategy. A necessary cut," he said. "But it was cowardice. Dressed in a clearance badge."
She took a long drag, exhaled hard.
"You think you're the only one carrying ghosts?" she asked.
Ghost moved closer—close enough to see the reflection of himself in her eyes.
"No," he said. "But I'm the only one who's stopped pretending they're still alive."
He stepped back. Rain thickened.
---
Ghost didn't back down. Rain slicked his jaw, but he didn't wipe it. His breath cut short in the cold, sharp like a blade edge.
Laswell held his gaze, cigarette forgotten between her fingers. The ember hissed as rain kissed the ash.
"You think dragging this into daylight will fix it?" she asked, voice clipped. "It'll burn the entire agency to ash."
"That's the point."
She scoffed. "You'd torch every op, every agent in the field—just to make a point?"
"I'd burn the whole bloody map if it's drawn in lies." Ghost leaned closer, voice dropping. "He built a doctrine out of our silence. I'm done playing priest to your graveyard."
Laswell stepped back, blinking rain, blinking regret. "You're not a martyr, Simon. You're a weapon. You always have been."
"I was." He let the words settle between them. "Now I'm the consequence."
Lightning flared behind the clouds. Neither moved.
"You go through with this," Laswell warned, "you'll be hunted. Disavowed."
"I've worn worse labels."
A gust tore across the rooftop. The last of her cigarette tumbled, ember eaten by wet concrete.
"Don't make this personal," she said.
"It always was," he replied, and walked past her like she was already part of the wreckage.
---
The incinerator unit hummed—low, industrial, final.
Ghost stood over it, drive in one hand like a loaded confession. The red glow beneath the grate pulsed, hungry.
Laswell caught on too late. "Don't—"
He didn't blink. Just dropped the drive. A soft thunk, then a flare of orange as the heat swallowed it whole.
Laswell surged forward, arm outstretched. "What the hell are you doing?"
"You wanted silence." His tone didn't rise. It didn't have to. "Now you've got it."
Her boots scraped wet concrete as she stopped just short of the incinerator. "That was evidence."
"That was leverage," Ghost corrected. "A tool. For someone else to bury him again."
She looked like she wanted to hit him. Instead, she stepped back, fists clenched. "You think this erases what happened?"
"No," he said, turning his back to her, the rain returning in sheets. "It just keeps it from happening again."
Laswell's voice followed him, raw and thin in the storm. "You think you're honoring him by burning the truth?"
Ghost didn't slow. "I'm not giving Voss a martyr's story. No paper trail. No orders. Just ghosts."
He vanished down the stairwell, boots hitting metal like a war drum. Behind him, the fire roared on.
---
Soap stirred when the door creaked open—half-asleep, half-triggered. His hand drifted toward the pistol tucked under the pillow, but paused when the silhouette hit the threshold.
Ghost stepped in, rain still clinging to his jacket, boots squelching against the concrete floor. No words. No nod. Just the scrape of metal on wood as he tossed a burner phone across the table. It spun once, landed screen-up.
Soap sat up, eyes narrowing at the screen. A single text glowed beneath a NATO header:
TARGET CONFIRMED. PRICE HELD—ZONE 9. CLOCK'S TICKING.
"Christ," Soap muttered. "Is that real?"
Ghost peeled off his jacket, tossed it over a chair. "It's live. Thirty-six hour window, max."
Soap rubbed sleep from his face, tension settling in fast. "Aziz?"
Ghost nodded once. "Zone 9's his. Price is in a cage. Hooded. Breathing, barely."
The room thickened with silence.
Soap stood. "You find what you needed at Langley?"
Ghost didn't answer right away. He slid into a chair, leaned forward, elbows on knees.
"No," he said finally. "But I know where to go next."
Soap glanced down at the message again. "Then what are we waiting for?"
Ghost's eyes locked on the burner, jaw flexing.
"Nothing."
---
Soap slammed the mag home, the sharp click slicing through the stillness of the safehouse. He didn't look up—his hands moved on instinct, years of habit etched into muscle.
Ghost stood across the table, stripping down his sidearm. Slide, spring, pin. Each motion crisp. Mechanical. Surgical. The silence between them wasn't empty—it brimmed with the weight of dead friends, bad orders, and the cage waiting in Istanbul.
Soap glanced up. "We pulling Price out?"
Ghost reassembled the pistol, racked the slide, and holstered it with a finality that didn't need words. He looked at Soap, eyes unreadable behind the war paint.
"We bury this in blood," Ghost said, "or not at all."
The door creaked open as they stepped into the night. Wind kicked up dust, whispering through alleyways like a warning. The helipad blinked in the distance—just a dull red light in the dark, waiting to lift them into hell.
Cut to grainy satellite footage:
A compound along the Bosphorus, floodlights sweeping the perimeter.
A metal cage.
Inside—John Price. Shackled. Head low. Beard matted. Breathing.
---
[This is extra chapter]