Prague, Czech RepublicRain fell in a cold drizzle as the team stepped off the unmarked cargo van, blending with the early morning bustle of the capital. Street vendors opened stalls. Tourists snapped photos. No one noticed the four operatives disappearing down a narrow alley near the Vltava River.
They arrived at a rusted iron door, scrawled with old graffiti and newer warnings. Tanya rapped on it twice, then once more—an old code.
A peephole slid open. Sharp blue eyes peered through.
"You've got some nerve showing up here," came the accented voice from within.
Tanya smirked. "Good to see you too, Hana."
The door creaked open. Inside stood Hana Drakova, lean, mid-40s, ex-intelligence fixer turned information broker. Her expression soured when she saw Grimm and the others behind Tanya.
"You brought company."
"They're family," Tanya said. "And we're not here to cause trouble."
Hana sighed. "Trouble finds you, Volkova. Always has."
They followed her inside. The interior was a converted safehouse filled with encrypted servers, stacks of burner phones, and maps marked with coded ink. A cat lounged on one of the monitors, completely unbothered.
"I'm guessing this isn't a social call," Hana said, pouring tea none of them touched. "What are you after?"
"A ghost," Grimm replied. "Call sign: SIGMA."
The name changed Hana's face. She didn't flinch, but her eyes lost focus for a second—calculating, remembering.
"You're digging up deep bones, Captain. Bones that don't stay buried."
Grimm leaned forward. "We're already being hunted. SIGMA is the thread that unravels Phantom. We need to find him."
Hana hesitated, then crossed the room and pulled a file from a metal cabinet. "Last known sighting was fifteen months ago. A signal pinged from Brno—south of here. He was using a burner drone network to scramble his digital presence. Brilliant stuff. Then... nothing. Went cold."
Reyes flipped through the file. "This is deep. These nodes aren't civilian. They're military-grade."
"He was Phantom's architect," Hana said. "Or at least part of its neural core team. After the program went private, he disappeared. My guess? He went underground after seeing what Kessler did with his work."
Bull cracked his knuckles. "So he's running scared."
"Or waiting," Grimm muttered. "Which means we draw him out."
"How?" Tanya asked.
"Simple," Grimm said. "We make enough noise that he has to look."
That night, the team split up. Reyes set up a pirate signal broadcast from an abandoned telecom relay just outside the city—coded with references only Phantom's original team would recognize. Hidden messages. AI code strings. Digital breadcrumbs.
Meanwhile, Tanya and Bull tracked old Phantom shell companies operating in Prague—any sign of movement, drone surveillance, or Helix proxies.
Grimm returned to Hana's safehouse. He found her alone, feeding the cat and sipping bitter liquor.
"You ever regret it?" he asked. "Walking away."
Hana didn't look at him. "Every day. But regret doesn't mean you go back. It just means you learn to carry it differently."
Grimm understood that too well.
"SIGMA," she said finally, "wasn't like the others. He didn't kill for it. He believed in the math. That it could stop wars before they started."
"And when it didn't?"
"He broke. Like the rest of us."
A silence stretched between them.
"I'll help you, Grimm," Hana said. "But just know—Phantom's reach is longer than you think. If you pull this thread too hard…"
"I'm not here to pull threads," Grimm said quietly. "I'm here to burn the whole damn web."
Elsewhere, deep in the catacombs beneath an old cathedral, SIGMA stood watching an array of monitors. He hadn't gone by that name in years, not since the walls came down around Project Phantom.
He saw the broadcast. He decoded the message.
Mercer was alive.
And he was coming.
For the first time in years, SIGMA felt the stirrings of conscience.
He turned to the shadows.
"She'll be here soon, won't she?"
From the dark stepped Operative Nyx—Kessler's personal specter, clad in black tactical gear, face hidden behind an opaque visor.
"She's already watching," came the flat reply.
SIGMA exhaled. "Then the game begins again."
Nyx didn't speak. She merely raised her hand and pressed two fingers to her earpiece.
"Target has made contact with broker. Orders?"
Kessler's voice came through: "Let them find him. But only just. I want Mercer to taste hope... before we kill it."