Rain sheeted off the van's windshield in diagonal slashes, masking the glare of sodium lights and flickering shopfronts. Neukölln moved like any other Berlin night—clubs thumping two blocks over, taxis cutting through puddles, late-shift smokers loitering under broken awnings. No one noticed the matte-gray NATO van idling near the curb, not even the drunk couple stumbling past with half a kebab between them.
Inside, Ghost adjusted the velcro on his gloves, eyes fixed on the structure across the street: clean Bauhaus lines, dull concrete, glass façade dark after hours. Three stories of lies stacked above a false front. Draugr Systems. Looked like a tech bro's vanity project. Didn't move like one.
Price sat beside him, checking the action on his sidearm. "Quiet block. Too quiet."
Soap leaned forward from the rear seat, tapping through a tablet feed. "Thermals show four in the lobby. Two pacing the mezzanine. Not techs. Posture's wrong—mil trained."
Laswell crackled through comms. "They're not on any security roster. No business license filed. The building's registered to a shell firm routed through Estonia, dissolved last year."
Ghost opened the side door. Cold air slapped his mask.
"Hard target," he said. "Minimal noise. No ID if we go down."
Price zipped his jacket to the collar. "No one's coming to save us anyway."
Soap popped the van's rear, slipped out, and vanished into the alley shadow without a word.
Ghost waited a second, then stepped into the downpour. Rain beaded on his gear but didn't stick. Price followed, coat collar raised, fingers ghosting near his sidearm.
They moved fast but unhurried. Locals didn't spare them a glance.
---
Soap crouched in the runoff gutter behind a telecom utility box, fingers numb from the rain but steady on the splice. He'd pried open the city's maintenance port with a knife, wedging his tap into the fiber like a surgeon threading a nerve.
"Line's hot," he muttered. "Feeding now."
Ghost's HUD flickered to life—grainy infrared, then crisp internal schematics overlayed from Laswell's Langley feed. Hallways lit up in dull red, moving blobs blinking with heartbeat telemetry.
"Building's live," Ghost said. "Five in the upper floors. All armed. No uniforms."
Price, crouched at the adjacent service door, swept a side street with his SIG drawn low. "Contractors?"
"PMC profiles," Laswell confirmed. "But no logs, no pay stub, nothing on NATO watchlists."
Soap cycled to a thermal overlay. A red-hot knot pulsed deep beneath the building's footprint—too concentrated to be HVAC or basic servers.
"Basement's lit up like a furnace," Soap said. "That's no VR rendering farm."
Price leaned in. "What're we looking at?"
"Core node," Ghost replied. "Armored. Cooled. Probably isolated on a subgrid. Not city-listed."
"Of course it's not," Laswell cut in. "Draugr's ghost-routing signal forks through five NATO satellites and dead shell proxies. But that basement? That's where the pulse lands."
Price snorted. "Startup my ass. That's a bloody command node."
Soap sealed the splice box and stood, flicking water off his gloves. "We going loud?"
Ghost shook his head. "Clean and cold. They think they're off radar. We keep it that way."
The team vanished into the rain again, black shapes ghosting toward the glass façade of a company no one had ever heard of—until now.
---
Ghost slid a bypass dongle into the access panel. Sparks spat once, then the lock clicked.
"Go," he muttered.
Price took point, sweeping left with a suppressed SIG. Soap ghosted right, rifle low, camera jammer active. They entered Draugr Systems' lobby like a shadow falling—clean, quick, and silent. No alarms. No motion sensors pinged.
The place didn't feel like a tech startup.
Desks were cleared. Fridges unplugged. One wall of monitors ran code loops, black backgrounds vomiting raw network logs in Cyrillic.
"Startup, huh?" Soap muttered. "Looks more like a bunker in denial."
Second floor—two guards. Streetwear, masks up, suppressed MP7s. One blinked and dropped before his finger touched the trigger. Ghost's round punched clean through the eye socket. The other turned too slow—Price put two in the chest and caught him on the way down.
Third floor—empty. Offices stripped. Conference table gutted for parts. Price held rear while Soap cut camera lines with a punch tool, feeding each node a static loop. No chance Voss could see this in real time unless he had another angle.
Ghost cracked a door at the end of the hallway. Motion. He raised his weapon—paused.
Dev team. Four men, duct-taped and face-down in a puddle of cold coffee and blood from a nose someone broke sloppily.
One twitched. Ghost yanked the gag.
"He locked himself in the core," the man rasped. "Told us we had fifteen minutes before everything changes."
"Time?" Ghost asked.
"Seven ago."
Price stepped in, checked the bindings. "They're real. Poor bastards."
Soap moved to the far stairwell. "Basement's next. He's cornered."
Ghost chambered a fresh round. "Cornered doesn't mean caught."
--
Concrete stairs led down into black. No signage. No exit lights. Just the hum of buried circuits and something colder, mechanical, lurking beneath the startup gloss.
Ghost flicked his IR. The basement lit up in blue ghosts—steel beams, cabling, a vault door tucked into the far wall like the entrance to a fallout bunker. Not listed on city plans. No elevator access.
Soap ran a gloved hand over the door's surface. "Mag-locked. Titanium bolts." He rapped it with a knuckle. "We'd need thermite or a warhead."
Ghost leaned in. "Options?"
Soap shook his head. "Only one. Bang on it and hope they open it."
Price pulled security up the stairs. "Laswell, we're at a vault. No entry without melting the thing."
Her voice cracked through their comms, clipped but focused. "Send me the power routing. I can ride the city's maintenance grid—Berlin's smart systems are about as secure as wet tissue."
Soap jacked in through a wall port, rerouted diagnostics to Langley. Seconds passed. Lights flickered. Something groaned behind the wall.
Then the locks snapped.
Click.
The vault cracked open an inch, hissed like a breathing lung, and slid wide.
Inside: a wire jungle. Server towers glowed faintly, blinking in rhythm like a machine heartbeat. The temperature dropped. No fans—just liquid-cooled coils humming against thick concrete.
"He's in there," Soap whispered.
---
Ghost stepped forward. Slow. Rifle aimed center mass.
The man in the chair didn't flinch.
Alaric Voss sat in a throne of data—bundles of fiber optics snaked around his legs like vines feeding a digital god. Six monitors bathed him in cold light, lines of code cascading like falling ash. His fingers never stopped moving.
Thin. Gaunt. Forty, maybe. But sharp. Controlled.
He turned his head, not startled, not rushed—just aware. Like he'd heard a familiar voice in a crowd.
"You should've left me in Mosul," Voss said. His voice held no tremor, only weight. "Like they told you to."
Ghost froze mid-step.
The name hit like a rifle butt. Alaric Voss. A name buried in a black folder under a dozen clearance levels. Supposed to be dead. Ghost had seen the blast crater himself.
Price moved into position, rifle angled low. "That you, Spectre?"
Voss offered a thin smile—more tension than warmth. "I'm everyone you scrubbed from the After Action Reports. Spectre... just a symptom. I'm the wound."
Soap tightened grip on his weapon. Blood still dripped from his left sleeve where glass had sliced through during the breach. "You're just another lunatic in a chair full of screens."
"No," Voss replied, fingers dancing across the keyboard like a concert pianist. "I'm what happens when the system eats its own and forgets to bury the bones."
The hum of the servers deepened, like the room inhaled with him.
Laswell's voice broke over comms, hushed but urgent: "That's him. Facial match confirmed. Alaric Voss. Spectre is real."
Ghost's jaw tightened. He didn't lower the rifle. "You died in Mosul."
Voss glanced toward one of the monitors—images flashing of drone footage, topographical maps, encrypted command logs.
"Everyone else did," he said. "You signed the authorization. Tasked me in. Burned me out."
Ghost's finger hovered on the trigger, but didn't squeeze. Not yet.
"Why Berlin?" Price asked. "Why now?"
Voss leaned back in the chair, bones creaking louder than the steel beneath him.
"Because the shadows you walk in?" He looked directly at Ghost. "They don't hide you anymore. They spotlight you."
The air in the server core thickened, heat rising from the cables. Somewhere, something clicked. Not mechanical—philosophical. A fuse lit. A reckoning started.
---
Ghost didn't blink. He kept the muzzle steady, center-chest. But his finger hovered just off the trigger. Not hesitation—calculation.
Across the server bay, Voss kept typing. No flinch. No rush. Like he'd already accounted for this moment in his algorithms.
Ghost's voice cut through the hum. "What happened in Mosul?"
The clack of keys slowed, then stopped.
Voss didn't look up. "Mosul was protocol. Phase one of an asset denial op. I was the asset."
"Bullshit," Soap muttered, still holding the flank, blood soaking through his sleeve.
Voss turned, finally. Those eyes—flat, dead pixels. "Sanctioned betrayal. Collateral by design."
Price stepped closer. "And you crawled out of that crater just to play digital messiah?"
"No." Voss stood now, careful, measured, the wires slithering down from his lap. "I crawled out and listened to the silence. The kind that follows classified detonations. The kind Langley doesn't log."
Ghost didn't answer. He didn't need to.
Voss took a step forward—one only. Just enough to be heard clearly, intimately. "They told you it was clean. One drone, one kill. I was in the sublevel. Everyone else was ash."
"You were dead," Ghost said.
"No." Voss raised his voice, quiet but venomous. "I was archived. Like a corrupted file too dangerous to delete."
Laswell came over comms. Tight, clipped. "He's not lying. I'm seeing CIA dispatches. Redacted ops. Ghost, your name's all over it."
Ghost's grip tightened. Jaw locked.
"You think this war ends with bodies?" Voss sneered. "It ends with reputations. They buried mine. I'll exhume theirs."
Price's tone darkened. "What's the play? Some manifesto?"
"Not revenge," Voss said. "Legacy. I'm not targeting flesh. I'm targeting memory. When they dig for 141... they'll find terror. And burn the evidence to save themselves."
Ghost lowered his rifle an inch. Not in surrender—just to see him better. To really see him.
"You think you're a martyr," he said.
Voss smiled faintly. "No. I'm a mirror."
Then the monitors behind him spiked with motion—lines of red text blinking. SOAP TRACE ENGAGED.
Ghost's gut turned cold.
Voss whispered, "And the ghosts you wear, Riley... they scream in binary."
---
A shrill chirp snapped through Ghost's comms. Laswell: "He's spooling a trace. Multiple nodes lighting up—he's bouncing."
Voss's hand moved—too fast, too rehearsed.
Click.
The server room screamed with klaxons. Emergency lights bled red across the walls. The air snapped sharp with ozone.
"Deadman's switch!" Laswell barked. "He's scrubbing the drives."
Ghost surged forward.
Flash.
The flashbang cracked open the room like a lightning strike. Soap threw himself across the floor, shoulder-first into Voss. They hit the deck hard. A blade flashed—jagged, makeshift. Soap howled. Blood sprayed across the floor tiles.
Ghost blinked through the afterimage. Voss writhed under Soap's weight, steel biting into Soap's ribs.
"Knife!" Soap grunted. "He's carving me up!"
Price stepped in, muzzle snapping down. "Non-lethal. We need him alive."
Two shots, sharp thuds—compressed air rounds. Voss jerked, spasmed. Muscles locked. He slumped under Soap, twitching.
Ghost knelt, ripped the blade from Voss's hand, tossed it across the room.
Soap rolled off, groaning. "That bastard cut deep."
Blood oozed down his side, soaking through Kevlar and fleece. Ghost grabbed a compression patch from his rig and slapped it over the wound. No time for finesse.
Laswell's voice cut through again—frantic, typing echoing behind her. "He had a trace piggybacked into the purge. He's not just scrubbing—he's uploading."
"To where?" Price demanded, eyes scanning the monitors.
A pause. Then: "Node's bouncing across encrypted tunnels. Final jump just triggered. Location... Slovakia. Tatra Mountains."
Ghost stared at the monitors—half were blank, wiped clean. The rest flickered static.
Laswell continued, grim. "He pushed the final op protocols. And the kill switch."
Soap coughed, voice ragged. "That trace isn't just a deadman... it's a roadmap."
Ghost stood over Voss, who twitched on the ground, barely conscious. Face pale, chest heaving.
"He wanted us to follow," Ghost muttered.
Price: "Then we finish what Mosul didn't."
---
Ghost didn't wait for a green light. He yanked Voss upright, zip ties biting into pale wrists, and slung him over his shoulder like dead weight. The bastard groaned, half-conscious, blood dripping a slow metronome onto the server room floor.
"Soap?" Ghost barked.
"I'm mobile," Soap wheezed, clutching his side. He moved with a limp, but his sidearm stayed steady in his hand. "Stings like a bastard, but I'm good."
"Clock's running," Laswell cut in. "Berlin PD's responding to a fire alarm. Ten minutes tops before you've got a stack of guns outside."
Ghost moved first. The corridor stank of burnt circuits and ozone, air heavy with static discharge. Emergency lights pulsed red, painting the hall in strobes.
They climbed.
Price took point, clearing corners with mechanical precision. Soap held the rear, jaw clenched, sweat slicking his temples. Ghost carried Voss, whose deadweight shifted with every step, breath rasping like a broken fan.
Third floor. Offices empty. Fire alarm still howling.
Laswell: "Simulated gas leak triggered the evac. You've got a two-block perimeter ghosted. NATO van's inbound. Two minutes."
"Hope the driver's got balls," Price muttered, checking a side hall. "Not many stick around for a fake hazmat call."
They punched out into the alley behind Draugr Systems.
Rain sheeted down. Neon signs flickered against wet brick. Tires screeched—NATO van fishtailed into view. Civilian shell, armored underneath.
Side door slid open. Laswell's voice returned, filtered through a drone mic overhead: "Border checkpoint's hot. You'll exfil to the Polish side. Medical drone convoy will intercept on Route E36. Keep Voss alive. That trace dies with him."
"Copy," Ghost grunted, tossing Voss into the van's floor. The hacker groaned, cheek smacking steel.
Soap slid in, grimacing. Blood soaked his jacket. "I better get a medal. Or at least morphine."
Price climbed in last, slammed the door shut. "Drive."
The van peeled away, fishtailing on slick asphalt.
Inside, Ghost knelt over Voss, checking his pulse. Faint, but there.
"He dies," Ghost muttered, "and we're blind."
Voss stirred, lips parting in a broken grin. "Then I hope your medic's faster than your bullets."
Ghost didn't answer. He just stared at him.
---
The van thumped over tram tracks, suspension groaning under the weight of silence. Fluorescent citylight spilled in slats through rain-smeared windows, slicing across Voss's face—blood caked to one side, the other pulled tight in a smirk.
He lay cuffed on the steel floor, cheek pressed to metal, body limp like a discarded puppet. But his eyes stayed sharp. Watching.
Ghost crouched beside him. No mask now. Just the stare—cold, unblinking. Voss met it with a faint chuckle that rattled in his throat.
"You're late, Riley," he rasped. "I told them you'd follow the trail. Eventually."
Ghost didn't blink. "Where's the server farm?"
Voss rolled his head back, exhaled slow like it pained him. "Where the Soviets buried their monsters."
Ghost leaned in, voice a rasp: "You want to be buried with them?"
"No," Voss said, eyes drifting toward the ceiling. "I want them to dig me up. Decades from now. Scared of what I left behind."
Laswell's voice broke in over comms—flat, clinical. "Confirmed. Former radar station, Tatra Mountains. Hardened site. Cold War bones, NATO flagged it as decommissioned in '97. That was a lie."
Price checked his mag, slid it home with a mechanical clack. "Then that's where we cut the head."
Ghost stood, jaw clenched. Rain thudded harder against the van's roof.
Soap shifted in his seat, wincing, blood still seeping through gauze. "No way this ends quiet."
Ghost glanced at him, then back down at Voss—still smirking, still bleeding.
"No," Ghost muttered. "But it ends."
---
[This is extra chapter]