The Vieux-Port of Marseille shimmered in the midday Mediterranean sun, a chaotic, vibrant mosaic of life. Tourists ambled along the quay, fishermen mended their nets, and the air was thick with the scent of salt, diesel, and grilling fish. Colonel Dubois moved through this world as its king, a brutish, swaggering monarch in a kingdom of his own making. He felt untouchable, invincible, a man who had successfully bent the world's most powerful industrialist to his will.
He had just concluded a highly profitable meeting in a discreet waterfront bistro. The agent representing the rival American oil tycoon had been sweating, nervous, but the money was good. The down payment, a briefcase heavy with Swiss francs, now sat in the armored Mercedes waiting for him. The deal was simple: for a fortune, Dubois's Fire Brigade would orchestrate a series of catastrophic "accidents" at Prentice Standard's refineries in the Middle East. Dubois smiled. It was so easy. The old man in Kykuit had given him an army, and now he would rent it out to the highest bidder.
As he stepped out of the bistro and into the blinding sunlight, basking in the glow of his own treacherous success, the world erupted into chaos.
It began not with a bang, but with a series of quiet, efficient movements. Three men, dressed like ordinary dockworkers, converged on his position. There was no warning. One moment, Dubois's two bodyguards were scanning the crowd; the next, their throats were opening in bright red blossoms of blood, cut down by silenced pistols fired from point-blank range. They collapsed without a sound.
Dubois, whose survival instincts were honed in the back alleys of a dozen colonial wars, reacted with a beast's speed. He didn't hesitate. He didn't look back. He drew the heavy pistol tucked into his waistband and opened fire, roaring a curse as he dove for the cover of a fishmonger's stall.
The marketplace, a scene of idyllic calm seconds before, became a maelstrom of screaming civilians and shattering stalls. The KGB wetwork team, five of them in total, moved with a cold, terrifying precision. They were not brutes like Dubois's legionnaires; they were surgeons of violence. They ignored the panicked crowd, their focus entirely on their target.
Dubois was a formidable fighter, a cornered bear, and he managed to take one of the assassins down with a lucky shot to the chest. But he was outnumbered, outmaneuvered, and outclassed. A bullet tore through his shoulder, spinning him around. Another caught him in the leg, sending him crashing to the stone pavement. He tried to raise his pistol for one last shot, his face a mask of furious disbelief. The last thing he saw was the calm, impassive face of the team leader, who stood over him, leveled a Makarov pistol, and fired two rounds directly into his head.
The KGB team melted back into the pandemonium of the crowd, disappearing as quickly and silently as they had appeared. They left behind a scene of carnage: three dead bodies, pools of blood mixing with the melted ice from the fish stalls, and a profound, ringing silence that was slowly being filled by the approaching sirens.
At Kykuit, Ezra received the news via a coded message from Baron von Hauser, who was monitoring the situation from a safe house in Nice.
"The Dubois problem has been… solved," the Baron's telex reported, the words stark and clinical. "Our Russian friends were remarkably efficient. The target is confirmed eliminated. The French authorities are in chaos."
A flicker of cold satisfaction. The immediate, festering threat of his rogue mercenary was gone. The KGB had, as planned, taken out his trash. He had successfully aimed his greatest enemy at his most dangerous employee and watched them annihilate each other. It was a perfect, elegant solution.
But the Baron's report continued, a chilling addendum that immediately soured the victory. "There is a complication. The firefight was public, witnessed by dozens of civilians. The police have locked down the port. And worst of all, the agent representing the rival oil tycoon, the man Dubois was meeting with, was discreetly observing the deal from a nearby cafe. He escaped in the chaos. He is now a loose end of the highest order."
Ezra felt a familiar, cold knot tighten in his stomach. This witness knew that Dubois, the man the KGB now believed to be a deep-cover CIA asset, was actively taking money to attack Ezra Prentice. It was a single, devastating fact that, if it ever reached the ears of the KGB, would completely contradict and shatter the entire "CIA asset" story.
The final part of von Hauser's report was even more troubling. "The nature of the attack itself… it was not a clean, professional liquidation. It was a public execution. A gangland-style hit. It was a message, designed to be seen. I fear we may have underestimated our Russian friends. Or, perhaps, they are beginning to question the nature of the information we are feeding them."
Miles away, in his cavernous office at the Lubyanka, Colonel Ivan Volkov was celebrating. He read the after-action report from the Marseille operation with immense satisfaction. The rogue CIA asset, Dubois, had been successfully liquidated. He had cut off a dangerous tentacle of the American intelligence apparatus. He promoted the team leader and accepted the praise of his superiors, his own position within the KGB now more secure than ever.
But later that day, in the vast, silent archives of the First Chief Directorate, Major Dmitri Orlov read the same report with a growing sense of deep unease. The details didn't add up. The sheer, public brutality of the hit felt wrong. A professional intelligence agency, seeking to eliminate a rogue asset, would have arranged a quiet "accident"—a car crash, a heart attack, a disappearance. This was loud. This was messy. This was a message intended to be seen and understood.
And the intelligence from their own surveillance in Marseille confirmed that just before his death, Dubois had been meeting with a known agent of another major American industrialist—a rival of Ezra Prentice. Why would a secret CIA asset, tasked with undermining Prentice, be taking money from Prentice's corporate enemy? The pieces of the puzzle did not fit the perfect narrative that Kessler had provided.
Orlov's initial doubts, which had been brutally silenced by Volkov, now resurfaced with a vengeance. He began to suspect that he was not looking at a chaotic American civil war between the CIA and a private industrialist. He was looking at the work of a single, unseen puppet master of unimaginable skill, a man who was playing the KGB, the CIA, and his own rivals against each other like pieces on a chessboard.
His face grim with a new, dangerous resolve, he made a decision. Quietly, secretly, using a low-level security clearance that would not attract attention, he began a new, personal investigation. He started by pulling the old, dusty, and long-forgotten procurement files on the Swiss telex manufacturer, Crypto AG. The thread of his doubt had not been severed; it had become a burning fuse.
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