Langley Blackroom, Northern Virginia
No windows. No echo. Just the hum of filtered air and the weight of unasked questions.
The vault door hissed shut behind Simon Riley. He dropped into the steel chair without a word, balaclava still on, elbows on the table like a man bracing for recoil.
Across from him, Kate Laswell didn't bother with pleasantries. She slid the folder forward. Manila edges bruised with use.
Inside: a grainy still of Lara Seneca in a Tunisian alley. Wind in her coat, face half-turned, unaware. Another photo—sat ping from Sfax. Dated six days ago. Already cold.
Laswell's tone matched the room—flat, utilitarian.
> "Officially, Lara Seneca never entered Tunisia. Unofficially... she got too close."
Riley flipped to the next sheet. A CIA intercept—partial. Redactions like burn scars across the page. At the top, stamped hard: OPERATION VORONOI. Beneath it, a name seared into the header:
VALK.
He didn't blink.
Laswell tapped the file, voice low now, like the room might bleed secrets if she raised it.
> "Voss died dirty. Valk didn't. She found the difference. Then vanished."
Silence stretched. Riley leaned back, the creak of his chair the only protest. Mask didn't move. Eyes sharp.
> "Spectre tried to warn us. They scrubbed his mouth, now they're burying hers."
Laswell didn't argue.
---
The sat phone looked like it had been dug out of a fire pit—melted casing, antenna half-gone, battery housing warped. Still, the blackfield agent handed it over like it mattered.
Ghost didn't flinch. He turned it in his gloved hand, thumb tracing the warped seam until something shifted inside—click. A ceramic keycap slid loose, tucked where the battery should've ended.
Small. Off-white. Burned along one edge.
Ghost held it up. The light caught the engraving—tight serif font etched into clay:
47 Names. One circled: VOLKNER.
Laswell leaned in, voice unreadable.
> "Same phrase Lara used in her last transmission. The list was real."
No one moved.
—
FLASHBACK – TUNIS, TWO WEEKS EARLIER
A back-alley café, shadowed and cracked. Ceiling fan spun slow, useless against the heat.
Lara leaned in across the table. Hair pinned back. No press badge. Just the stare of someone with too many pieces and no full puzzle.
The fixer—scar over one eye, fingers stained from documents and diesel—fidgeted under her focus.
> "You don't want Volkner. He's old dust. No one bleeds for ghosts."
Lara didn't blink.
> "Voss did. I don't care who Volkner was. If Voss bled for him, I want the whole vein."
She slid a flash drive across the table. The fixer palmed it like it burned.
—
BACK TO PRESENT
Ghost tucked the keycap into his glove. Not for safekeeping—just so it wouldn't vanish.
> "You don't leave something like that unless you want it found."
Laswell said nothing.
---
The room held its breath.
No hum. No server blink. Just silence and the slow flick of schematics on Laswell's secure tablet.
Ghost tapped the table with one gloved knuckle—once. His version of a demand.
> "Why'd the Mosul logs surface after Spectre went cold?"
Laswell didn't blink. "Timing isn't coincidence. It's orchestration."
She rotated the screen toward him—encrypted logs, layered like onion skin, each file stitched with conflicting metadata: dates out of order, location tags pulled from ghost sites, redactions over redactions.
> "Someone's laundering old sins. These aren't records. They're a narrative—fabricated and fed."
Ghost leaned closer. Not at her. At the files. One line of code blinked blue, nested in audio channel six. He zoomed in. A single call sign embedded in the comms layer.
STAR | D-915.AZ
Drake's old field signature. Dead protocol. Buried years ago.
Ghost didn't speak. He just looked up.
Laswell exhaled through her nose, already bracing for the next question.
> "Someone re-skinned Spectre's logs with modern encryption. Layered the rot. Your sniper's caught in the dragnet."
Ghost's voice dropped, flat as a hammer falling.
> "No way Drake touched that op. He was still NYPD. Desk-bound, back then."
Laswell nodded. "Exactly. And now he's somehow echoing inside a war crime he never saw."
She didn't offer a theory. Didn't have to. There were only two explanations: Drake was compromised—or being framed.
---
Ghost sat in the comms chair like it owed him blood. Gloved fingers flew over encrypted nodes, hunting green lights and live channels. Found none.
He keyed Price first—triple-scrambled, ghost-spiked relay through GCHQ deaddrops.
One ring. Two.
> "Line unsecured. Do not proceed."
Then silence. Not even static. Just dead space where a warfighter should've been.
Ghost didn't curse. Didn't blink. He hit the next protocol—Soap's backup frequency, buried under Laswell's own lockstack.
It didn't ring.
Nothing.
Just that flat, mechanical click of a severed line.
Laswell leaned in from the doorway, her voice edged with grit.
> "They've scattered. Not by choice. Someone's rerouting Ghost assets."
She crossed her arms.
> "You're not the only one feeling the shake."
Ghost stared at the dead terminal, then at the floor, like it might peel up and tell the truth.
He stood.
Grabbed his balaclava from the hook.
> "Someone's redrawing the map."
He paused at the door, glanced back at the satphone wreckage, the field bag, the fragments of Lara's chase.
> "And they're using her blood as ink."
---
Ghost locked the gear locker with a click that echoed finality. Standard loadout—custom Kilo, fallback M1911, Kevlar rig tight enough to bite. But he slid one thing different into the chest plate pouch: a frayed NYPD precinct tag, edges smoked, numbers half-eaten by time. Drake's old shield.
Laswell entered behind him, holding Lara's field bag like it might still bite.
> "Recovered from the ambush site. Outside Sidi Mansour. Didn't make the intel drop."
He took it. No ceremony.
Zippers stuck. Cloth stiff with soot. He peeled it open and laid the contents out like evidence.
First, the notebook page—charred on three corners, Lara's shorthand barely intact. The kind of scrawl meant for no one but herself.
Next, a Polaroid, blurry from heat warp—Drake on a Mosul rooftop, scope up, stance textbook. But the silhouette didn't lie. That shoulder scar, ghost of a bullet long healed.
Ghost tapped the image once.
> "I know that scar."
Laswell didn't speak. Just nodded.
Last, a metal card. Warped, edges curled like dried leaves. But the etching held—"STAR," and beneath it, the Ursa Minor constellation. Drake's mark. His truth, if he ever left one.
Ghost slid the card into his inner pocket. Glanced toward the flight board scrolling behind Laswell.
> "Wheels up in twenty?"
She didn't answer. Didn't have to.
He left the room with the bag slung low, patch stitched to his vest like a challenge coin to fate. Whatever Lara found, whatever Drake ran from—it started in Tunisia.
---
The Tunisian sun hit like a hammer. Ghost stepped off the cargo ramp and clocked Farid leaning against a rusted Peugeot, sleeves rolled, cigarette halfway gone.
> "Room's a tomb," Farid said. "Gasoline, precision ignition. Someone cleaned house, not a junkie job."
They drove in silence. Tunis blurred past—dust, market chaos, streets too narrow for truth.
Lara's hotel used to be four stars. Now it looked like it had been fed to fire. Charred signage sagged over busted glass. Third floor was a blackened jaw, teeth punched out by controlled burn.
Inside, Ghost moved slow. Boots crunched over ash and blistered tile. Farid stayed by the door—habit.
Ghost found the room by instinct. No number left, just heat-stained hinges and silence.
He stepped inside.
The burn had started near the desk. Purposeful. Not rage—surgical. Whoever torched it wanted memory erased, not just lives.
Near the bedframe, something metal caught light. He knelt. A compass, cracked like bone under pressure, blackened edges curling inward. He pried it open—inside, tucked behind the warped needle, a microdrive no bigger than a fingernail.
> "What'd she hide in you?" he muttered.
He pocketed it. Then scanned the walls.
A sweep with his UV pen lit up the smoke-streaked plaster. Lines blinked into existence—tight, angled handwriting, familiar.
> "HE BLEEDS STARS. FOLLOW CONSTELLATIONS."
Lara's code. Her voice, even now, burned into drywall and ultraviolet ink.
His eyes drifted to the mirror, shattered in the center—glass webbed out from a single hole. Bullet entry, dead center between where eyes would've been.
Ghost stared at it a moment too long. Saw his own reflection, fractured and ghosted.
No prints. No shell casing. Whoever did this, they cleaned like they'd done it before.
He turned to Farid.
> "I'll need secure uplink. This drive goes to Laswell."
> "And after?"
Ghost exhaled once. Steady. No answer. He was already out the door.
---
The microdrive ticked as it transferred—some old-school encryption, proprietary, almost smug in how hard it resisted. Laswell had a full blacksite suite grinding through its guts now. Ghost didn't wait around.
He sat cross-legged in the back of Farid's dim storage unit—concrete walls, smell of diesel and dried blood—and pulled out Lara's photo again. Mosul. Rooftop dust thick like gunpowder frosting. Ethan Drake, mid-frame, blurred from the camera's motion—but Ghost wasn't looking at the pose.
He zoomed in. Left shoulder. A split in the sleeve, skin darkened where a bullet had once asked questions.
Same scar.
Same man.
Same eraser.
Ghost's breath barely left his lungs.
> "STAR wasn't just cleanup," he muttered. "He was the eraser."
Wiped targets. Wiped names. Maybe wiped Lara.
A low crackle broke into his earpiece—secure channel, barely. Local comms still jittery from the fire.
> "Source in Sfax," Laswell said. "Civilian. Says there's a man near the docks—draws constellations in the sand. Keeps saying he's looking for ghosts."
Ghost stood, grabbed his gear. Farid raised an eyebrow but didn't speak. He knew the look—a hunt warming up, predator eyes locking forward.
As Ghost stepped out into the dying light, he clipped the NYPD patch tighter on his vest.
---
The alley narrowed, walls chipped by time and stray gunfire. Sand dragged at Ghost's boots, fine as ash. He didn't rush.
At the end of the passage, the coast opened up—black sea swallowing the horizon, wind cutting low and hard through rusted shipping containers. A stray dog barked somewhere inland, then silence.
Ghost paused beneath a skeletal archway of bent rebar and broken tile. Overhead, the stars had arrived.
He looked up.
Cassiopeia. Clear. Stubborn.
Five sharp points carved into the dark like a stitched wound—same as the one Ethan always sketched into his notebook margins. Same as the one Ghost once saw drawn into frost on a safehouse window at 9,000 feet.
He tilted his head, eyes tracing the pattern. A compass of someone who'd stopped trusting maps.
Laswell's voice filtered in, low and measured in his ear.
> "If STAR's alive, he holds the next piece. But be careful. He never plays by the chart."
Ghost didn't answer.
---
[This is extra chapter]