The elevator did not hum. It descended in a perfect, curated silence, a vacuum-sealed tube dropping us through layers of rock and reinforced concrete beneath the placid face of Zurich. I stood beside Anja Petrova, my hands empty, my senses raw. We had been stripped of everything at the surface—weapons, the Aegis Conduit, the clothes we arrived in. Now we wore simple gray fatigues, the uniform of prisoners or supplicants. I felt the weight of the gazes from the two guards, men with the dead eyes of institutional loyalty, but their thoughts were smooth, polished stones. Unreadable.
The doors opened onto a space that was the antithesis of the Hamburg sewers. It was a circular chamber, the air cold and sterile, smelling of ozone and chilled electricity. The walls were polished black marble that drank the light from a single, recessed fixture overhead. In the center of the room stood a round table of the same light-devouring stone. Around it sat the ghosts who ran the world.
He knew them by file, not by face. Robert Thorne, his former handler from the CIA, looking crisp and annoyed, a man whose world of clean lines had been soiled. To his left, a heavy-set man with a chest full of medals beneath his uniform jacket, General Arkady Volkov of the KGB. Beside him, a thin, bloodless Englishman from MI6 Sineus knew only as Cromwell, who looked like he’d been carved from old parchment. The others were shadows, representatives from the French DGSE and the West German BND, their faces masks of professional neutrality. They were the Black Parliament, a council of apex predators forced into one cage by a threat to their hunting grounds.
— You have our attention, Sineus, — Thorne said, his voice cutting the silence. He made it sound like an indulgence. — You burned a legend the Agency spent a decade building to get it. This had better be worth the price.
Sineus felt a flicker of something cold. The price was already paid. He was a ghost now, a name on a burn notice. He moved to the head of the table, Petrova a step behind him. There was a projector, a simple concession to the business of showing, not just telling. He nodded to Petrova. She inserted a slide.
The first image clicked into place on the far wall: the schematic fragment the terrified courier had given him in Vienna. A diagram of interlocking spheres and resonant frequencies.
— It’s called the Echo Protocol, — Sineus began, his voice flat, devoid of emotion. He was not here to persuade. He was here to inform. — It does not erase memory. It overwrites it with a chaotic amalgam of weaponized trauma. It turns people into puppets animated by the last moments of dead soldiers.
He gestured to Petrova. The next slide showed a grainy photograph of Kholodny-12. The empty streets. The silent, identical apartment blocks.
— Two days ago, this was a town of fifty souls. Now it is a choir of screaming ghosts. They are not dead. They are trapped in other people’s wars, reliving deaths that are not their own. We witnessed it.
A low murmur went around the table. Volkov of the KGB leaned forward, his eyes narrowed. This was a perversion of Soviet research, and the stain was spreading.
— The architect of this is a man you all have in your files as deceased, — Sineus continued, his gaze locking on Thorne. — He was my partner. His name is Kestrel.
Thorne’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. To be told his intelligence was four years out of date, in this room, was a sharp and deliberate wound.
— Kestrel does not operate for a state, — Sineus pressed on, driving the point home. This was the pivot. — He leads a nihilist cult. The Chorus. Their goal is not victory for East or West. Their goal is to force the entire world to share a single, unified consciousness of pain. They are a non-state actor with a weapon of mass destruction that targets the mind. They are a threat to the board, not just the pieces.
The air in the room shifted. Greed and suspicion warred with a cold, pragmatic fear. A weapon that powerful, in the hands of a madman answerable to no one, was a problem. A problem that could not be solved with spies and border skirmishes.
— What do you want? — Cromwell, the Englishman, asked, his voice a dry rustle.
Here was the turn. Sineus was no longer a fugitive begging for help. He was the man with the clearest view of the fire, telling the arsonists their houses were next. He was moving from a position of subjugation to one of command, forcing them to acknowledge a truth that served none of their individual ambitions.
— I am not asking for anything, — Sineus said, his voice dropping, each word a carefully placed stone. — I am telling you what you will do. You will declare an immediate, 24-hour operational stand-down in the northern sectors. You will pool all intelligence related to Kestrel, The Chorus, and their resources. You will give us a clean corridor to the weapon's location in the Urals.
The audacity of it hung in the sterile air. A rogue agent, a ghost, dictating terms to the most powerful intelligence agencies on the planet.
Thorne laughed, a short, sharp bark of disbelief. — This is absurd. We don’t take orders from a compromised asset with a clear personal vendetta. You’re emotionally involved, Sineus. You always were. You’re using this global threat to justify your own hunt. The answer is no. We will handle Kestrel. And we will handle you.
The deal was on the verge of collapse. The old lines of the Cold War were reasserting themselves.
Then, an unexpected voice cut through the tension.
— Your ‘asset’ is irrelevant, Thorne. — General Volkov’s Russian was thick, but his meaning was perfectly clear. He fixed Thorne with a look of cold dismissal. — The physicist, — he nodded toward Petrova, — is a deserter from a Ninth Directorate project. The weapon is a perversion of our research. And the man controlling it is an American ghost you failed to bury. This is a mess that touches all of us.
He looked around the table, his gaze lingering on each spymaster.
— A rabid dog is loose in our shared kennel. Do we argue about whose leash it slipped, or do we put the dog down?
The logic was brutal and undeniable. The Englishman, Cromwell, gave a slow, deliberate nod. The Frenchman shrugged, a gesture of reluctant agreement. Fear of the weapon falling into a rival’s hands was great, but fear of it remaining in the hands of a nihilist was greater. It was bad for business.
— A 24-hour corridor, — Volkov stated, looking at Sineus. It was not a question. — You will have it. All intelligence will be forwarded to a neutral drop here in Zurich. After that, you are on your own.
The consensus was reached, a fragile truce born not of trust, but of mutual terror. For a brief moment, the suffocating mental pressure in the room seemed to ease, the psychic static of their competing plots clearing into a single, sharp signal of intent. They had been forced to acknowledge a reality outside their own making.
Thorne sat back, his face a mask of fury. He had been overruled, outmaneuvered.
As the meeting broke, the guards returned to escort them out. General Volkov stood, his heavy frame seeming to fill the room. He did not look at Sineus. His eyes were fixed on Anja Petrova.
— The state does not forget its property, Doctor, — he said, his voice a low rumble. — This truce is temporary. Enjoy your freedom while it lasts.
The threat was a promise, a hook for a future that was already closing in. The fragile truce was agreed upon, but the KGB does not honor truces for its defectors.
