The safehouse stank of ozone and old coffee. Fluorescents buzzed overhead like they were chewing on voltage. Maps blanketed the bunker walls—lines, pins, wires—a static war bleeding in slow motion. Laswell moved through it all like a storm in a suit: sharp, coiled, busy pulling the teeth out of ghosts.
Ethan stepped in first, still trailing Tunisian grit in his boots. Ghost followed, silent as always, visor down, unreadable. Neither saluted. Laswell didn't ask.
She didn't look up when she spoke—just slapped a hard drive onto the steel table with the force of a verdict.
> "You thought Voss was the monster," she said, voice clipped. "Valk just taught him how to hide the blood in statistics."
The drive label read: Echelon Vine Protocol Delta-3.
The monitor kicked on. Satellite feed cycled—grainy, cold, methodical. Peacekeeping camps: tents collapsed inward, equipment left in neat rows like someone had packed up everything except the people. No scorch marks. No shell casings. Just void.
Ghost's jaw shifted, a muscle twitching beneath the mask.
Laswell turned, eyes locked on the footage like it owed her something.
> "No rules. No uniforms. No flags," she said. "Valk doesn't wage war—he erases it."
Ethan leaned in, watching shadows that didn't move.
> "What's he after?"
Laswell didn't blink. Just tilted her head toward the screen.
> "A new doctrine," she said. "Total battlefield sterilization. No witnesses. Just peace… by subtraction."
The silence that followed wasn't empty. It carried weight.
Ethan exhaled through his nose. Cold. Steady.
Ghost didn't say a word.
But the table creaked under his clenched fists.
---
The room dimmed. Just the glow from the monitor, casting grainy flickers across their faces. Laswell keyed in the feed, and the footage bled onto the screen—helmet cam, timestamped, shaky with adrenaline.
A blue-helmeted soldier barked in French. Two others dragged a woman into frame—hands zip-tied, mouth duct-taped, eyes already hollow. She wasn't resisting. She just knew.
One shot. No warning. Clean.
Another.
Then another.
No firefight. Just procedure.
> "Tactical sterilization protocol," Laswell said, voice flat, too controlled.
No one moved.
The camera panned over scorched tents, med kits still open, rice bowls left steaming. Under a tarp, a child's drawing caught the lens—crayons, smiling stick figures, a UN logo scrawled in green.
Ethan flinched like someone had touched a nerve beneath scar tissue.
Then the frame shifted—walls painted black, steel doors, a coded lock he knew by feel.
Outpost Lamia.
He leaned in, pupils narrowing.
> "That's Outpost Lamia," he muttered. "We evac'd kids from there... little girl with a burn scar—Alaia. She kept grabbing my hand."
Laswell didn't turn from the screen.
> "Valk sterilized the site four days later. No trace. The kids were never on the record."
Ethan's throat tightened. Words caught, twisted, died before they reached air.
Ghost stepped back. Quiet. Too quiet. His boots dragged as he exited, breath sharp like he'd been punched low.
The door didn't slam. But it closed like a final word.
---
The safehouse garage reeked of diesel and old sweat. Fluorescents buzzed overhead like a dying insect. Ghost stood by the Land Rover, staring into the rearview like it owed him something. His mask dangled from one hand, limp, forgotten.
Ethan didn't announce himself. Just leaned against the workbench, watching.
> "Say it," he muttered.
Ghost didn't flinch. His reflection in the mirror looked tired—older than the war had any right to make him.
> "We built the damn thing," Ghost said. His voice was gravel. "And now he's using it without the leash."
Ethan lit a cigarette. Inhaled once, slow. The ember flared, a heartbeat in the dark.
> "We wore the leash too long," he said. "Maybe we let it slip."
Metal buckled under Ghost's fist. The car door caved slightly, just enough to say control had limits. He didn't apologize.
> "He's using the Ghost playbook," Ghost growled. "Only cleaner. Colder."
Ethan flicked ash onto the concrete, watching it scatter.
> "So we rewrite the rules," he said, voice low. "One shot at a time."
He offered the cigarette without looking. Ghost didn't take it.
Silence settled like a verdict.
They didn't need to agree.
They just needed targets.
---
Laswell didn't sit. She stabbed a marker at the screen like she was carving up a corpse.
A world map glowed red in bursts—Burkina Faso, Sri Lanka, parts of eastern Ukraine—each marked with a pulsing ring labeled: Sterile / No Further Action Required.
> "It's not targeting enemies," she said. "It's preemptive cleansing."
She clicked a key. New overlays bloomed—heatmaps stitched from drone scans, social media behavior, biometric drift pulled from aid camp medical logs.
> "The Vine's not surveillance. It's selection," Laswell continued. "An AI scrapes data, runs morality forecasts. Flags people who might resist. Emotionally unstable, ideologically volatile, sick, poor, angry—doesn't matter. If they're noise, they're subtracted."
Ethan stood behind her, arms folded, jaw locked. He watched a feed roll across: a girl's blurry photo. Then a label—Projected Escalation: 68%—and a blinking red X.
> "All that noise," he said, voice dry. "And it still reads like a death warrant."
> Laswell: "Aid fronts are just fronts now. Clinics log blood types, not treatments. Food drops map foot traffic. Valk doesn't need a reason. He just needs a rhythm."
Ghost moved closer to the screen. One dot after another. Villages, neighborhoods, entire districts—gone quiet.
He stared hard at one blotch in Mali. Then another in Sudan. His voice barely held together:
> "Every dot's a grave with no dirt on it."
No one corrected him.
Ethan stepped forward and circled a small site near the border—Ouahigouya.
> "That one's still pulsing," he said. "Not red. Not silent. Just waiting."
Laswell narrowed her eyes. Zoomed in. Thermal scan: residual heat. Low signals. A ghost camp.
> "Could be a lag in the system," she said. "Or…"
> "Or someone didn't stay subtracted," Ethan cut in. "Then we bury something that bites back."
No one smiled. The room didn't need hope—just coordinates.
---
The truck stopped half a click out. No lights. No engine noise. Just the wind brushing sand against the tires like it was trying to erase their tracks before they made any.
Ghost stepped out first. Rifle low, eyes higher. Ethan followed, boots crunching on dry earth that hadn't seen blood in days but still reeked of endings.
The camp looked abandoned by something smarter than panic. Tents still staked. Cots inside, perfectly folded. No drag marks. No footprints. No scorch patterns from thermite or fuel.
Just a silence that felt arranged.
Ghost knelt by a cold firepit. Rubbed ash between his fingers. Not wood. Synthetic. Burned clean.
> "Not a fire," he muttered. "An erasure."
Ethan drifted off-path, the sniper's lope—half curiosity, half instinct. He crouched near a collapsed tent pole. Hanging from the crossbeam, a rosary twisted in the breeze—each bead scorched but unbroken.
Beneath it, wedged in the dirt: a spent 7.62 shell. Packed tight with sand.
> "That's not a warning," he said. "That's a receipt."
Ghost didn't answer. He was digging beside a comms crate. Four inches down, his fingers hit metal. He pulled a beacon the size of a thumb out of the soil—its light dead, but the static still pulsing low through the receiver.
Encrypted white noise.
Not a signal. A loop.
> "This was bait," Ghost said, scanning the horizon. "They wanted someone to come looking."
Ethan turned the shell over in his hand, thumb running the ridge like Braille. No markings. No casing dent.
Cleaned. Planted.
> "Then let's give 'em what they want."
He tucked the rosary into his vest. Not reverent. Not sentimental. Just something that didn't belong buried.
Ghost stood, watching the ridgeline.
> "Stay low."
> "Always do," Ethan replied, already vanishing into the dark.
The camp behind them stayed quiet.
Too quiet to be done with.
---
The ops room in Algiers was quiet, lit only by the soft green hum of monitors and the sharp tick of Laswell's pen as it tapped the edge of the fake manifest.
> "One shipment. UAV parts. Humanitarian cover. Route goes Tangier to Djibouti via ghost base in Al Kufrah," she said, tone clipped, precise. "Attached clearance codes match NATO priority assets. Which they'll recognize. Which they'll chase."
Ethan stood over her shoulder, eyes scanning the file she'd built. Every line read clean—too clean. He could smell the bait even from here. But that was the point.
> "You think Valk sends his dog for a manifest?" he asked.
Laswell didn't look up. Just flipped to the next page—redacted overlays, old transit records spliced with real NATO signatures.
> "He won't," she said. "Gravehound will."
Across the room, Ghost loaded another magazine into his belt rig. Slow. Methodical. Each click louder than the last.
Laswell turned to him now.
> "He doesn't scout. He doesn't recon. He finishes."
Ghost didn't speak. His silence carried weight. Agreement. Resolve. A quiet threat.
Ethan stepped to the gear bench. Popped the seal on a matte black decoy case and pulled the foam back.
Thermal fakes inside—real enough on satellite, hollow up close. He slipped something personal beneath the top layer. An old NYPD badge, edges worn, still streaked with soot from the day he stopped being a cop and started becoming something else.
He closed the case. Snapped the latches.
> "Then let's see how he finishes when the dead don't stay buried."
Ghost's head lifted slightly. Not a nod. Just enough motion to mark the temperature change in the room.
Something old was being dug up.
And it wasn't done burning.