The smell of boiled cabbage and Misha’s blood, not yet spilled but psychically present, clung to the inside of my coat. I walked out of the apartment building and into the cold Viennese rain, a ghost leaving a house of ghosts. The streetlights were yellow smears against the wet dark, bleeding into puddles that shivered with each passing car. Every shadow was a threat. Every doorway, a potential grave. The city was a board, and I was suddenly a piece with no color.
I needed a secure line. The rage from what I’d seen in Misha’s apartment was a cold, clean thing, a piece of sharpened steel in my gut. It demanded action, not grief. Grief was a luxury for men with time. I had none. Kestrel was alive. Kestrel had a weapon that turned minds into screaming charnel houses. And Kestrel had left a trail, a faint psychic signature that felt like a deliberate taunt. It was a thread, and I intended to pull it until the whole rotten tapestry came undone.
My objective was clear: report to Langley, get sanction, and begin the hunt. The CIA, the sprawling, many-headed beast I served on a leash of convenience, had resources I did not. They had eyes and ears in every city, safe houses stocked with currency and weapons, and the political weight to make borders disappear. I needed them. For now.
I bypassed the first two phone booths I saw. They were too exposed, too close to main thoroughfares. I found what I was looking for on a quiet side street, a glass and steel box standing alone under a sputtering fluorescent light. It was an island of shabby privacy in the downpour. I stepped inside, the door closing with a heavy sigh, muting the sound of the rain to a dull drumming on the roof. The air inside was stale, thick with the ghosts of a thousand hurried conversations.
He let his satchel drop to the floor and fed coins into the slot. The metal was cold against his fingertips. He dialed the memorized number, a gateway to a series of encrypted tumblers that would bounce his call across three continents before landing it on a specific desk in Langley, Virginia. After a series of clicks and whirs, a synthesized voice spoke a single, random word.
— Kerosene.
I spoke my own one-time code into the receiver. — Trinity.
The line went quiet for fifteen seconds, a dead space of electronic verification. Then, a new sound emerged. Not a dial tone, but a low hum, threaded with the faintest crackle of static. It was the sound of a secure connection, a tunnel carved through the noise of the world. And then, another voice. Cold, clipped, and utterly devoid of warmth. The voice of Robert Thorne.
— Report.
I kept my own voice flat, a simple conduit for information. I gave Thorne the facts, stripped of all emotion. I was a physicist reporting an observation. — Asset Orlov is compromised. Non-responsive. Catatonic state.
— Cause?
— A new form of psychic weapon. It doesn't cut. It overwrites. The effect is designated Echoing.
A pause on the other end of the line. The static seemed to grow louder for a moment, a faint hiss like sand on glass. — Hostile operator?
This was the pivot. The name that would change everything. — The operator has been identified. The psychic signature belongs to Kestrel.
The silence that followed was heavier than a tombstone. Thorne, a man who ran a global network of spies and assassins from a polished desk, was processing an impossibility. A ghost was back on the board. When Thorne finally spoke, the bureaucratic chill in his voice had sharpened to a razor's edge.
— That is not possible. Kestrel is deceased. Your assessment is compromised by your personal history with the subject.
— The signature is a positive match, — I stated. It wasn't an argument. It was a fact.
— Your asset is compromised, — Thorne repeated, his voice like chipping ice. — And the official position is that you are emotionally involved. The loss of a handler, especially one with whom you had a… personal connection, can affect judgment.
I felt the cold steel of the agency’s logic closing around me. I was not an operative anymore. I was a problem to be managed. A variable to be contained. The subjugation of memory wasn't just a weapon Kestrel used; it was the foundation of the world Thorne lived in. A world where inconvenient truths were filed away as emotional compromises.
— I need sanction to pursue, — I said, cutting through the bullshit. — Kestrel is active. The weapon is in play.
— Negative, — Thorne’s voice was absolute. The static on the line seemed to flicker, and for a bare instant, Sineus thought he heard a snatch of a distant song, thin and reedy, before it was swallowed by the hum. — Your orders are to stand down. Return to the designated safe house and await instructions. We will handle it.
— You don't know what you're handling. This isn't a file to be closed. It's a plague.
— Your orders are clear, Sineus. Stand down.
The choice was laid bare. Obey, and let the men who saw the world as a ledger of acceptable losses handle a threat they couldn't comprehend. Let Kestrel continue his work while Thorne’s committees debated the political fallout. Or defy, and be cast out. The price was clear. His cover. His resources. His official existence.
Thorne delivered the final sentence, the words precise and deadly, the verbal equivalent of a burn notice being signed. — Disobey, and you're a ghost yourself.
The line clicked dead.
I stood there, the receiver still pressed to my ear. The hum was gone. The static was gone. There was only the dead, empty silence of a severed connection. I had been cut off. There was no debate in my mind. No weighing of loyalties. Loyalty to an agency that saw my friend as a compromised asset was a fool’s game. My loyalty was to the man on the floor, and to the truth of the ghost who had put him there.
I placed the receiver back in its cradle. The click was soft, but it felt as final as a cell door slamming shut. I was a rogue agent. My resolve was absolute, a solid core of certainty in a world of lies. I had no agency. No backup. I was alone.
He pushed the door of the phone booth open and stepped back out into the rain. The city hadn't changed, but his relationship to it had. He was no longer a piece on the board. He was a third player, an anomaly with nothing to lose. The cold felt cleaner now, the rain washing away the last vestiges of his allegiance.
He pulled up the collar of his coat, the water dripping from the brim of his hat. He had his mind, his skills, and the rage that burned cold in his gut. It would have to be enough.
He started walking, his steps purposeful. Kestrel’s psychic trail, the signature he had left in Misha’s apartment, had been more than just a fingerprint. It was a vector, a faint line of decaying energy pointing northeast. A taunt, and an invitation.
The trail didn't just have a signature. It had a destination.
Berlin.
