The rain had slowed to a reluctant drizzle, but Lahore's streets still glistened under the dim streetlights. Arif Khan's phone buzzed on the dashboard of his Hilux as he sped past the Liberty Market roundabout. He didn't need to look to know who it was. Sara never called unless something was on fire, figuratively or literally.
He pressed the Bluetooth button.
"Talk to me."
"Arif…" Sara's voice was taut, each word clipped, as if she was trying to keep it from cracking. "It's gone."
"What's gone?"
"The Daastaan file. Every single encrypted copy. Vanished from the server. Even my offline backup is corrupted."
Arif's foot slammed the brake harder than necessary, and the car skidded slightly on the wet road. "That's impossible. It had triple-layer encryption."
"Not if someone knew the backdoor."
Arif's eyes narrowed. There was only one man alive who knew the backdoor key a man they had buried in Bahawalpur four years ago.
He turned the steering wheel sharply and took a side street toward Gulberg. "Stay put. Lock the lab. I'll be there in ten."
Sara was pacing when Arif arrived at the converted warehouse they used as their "research lab." It wasn't really a lab it was a hybrid of a tech bunker and safehouse. Banks of servers lined one wall, their LEDs flickering in nervous rhythm. The faint hum of cooling fans filled the air.
On the main monitor, an error message flashed in bright crimson: ACCESS DENIED .... FILE MISSING.
"I checked the access logs," Sara said without waiting for him to speak. "The last access point wasn't local. It came through a ghost node in Karachi… and then bounced to Dubai."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning," she swallowed hard, "whoever did this has the resources of a state actor."
Arif stared at the code fragments scrolling on the screen. There was a strange familiarity in the pattern a kind of digital fingerprint. He leaned closer, squinting at the hex data.
"No," he muttered.
Sara frowned. "What?"
"This… this signature… it's Sadiq's."
Sara froze. "That's not possible. Sadiq is....."
"Dead. Yes, I know. I watched the coffin go into the ground."
They stared at each other, both silently calculating the same possibility. If Sadiq was alive, the game had just changed entirely.
Two hours later, Arif was back on the road. His contact in Karachi a jittery hacker named Faisal had agreed to meet in an old tea house on Burns Road. It was the kind of place where you could buy samosas, chai, and a brand-new identity, all in the same transaction.
Faisal looked like he hadn't slept in a week. His hoodie was stained, and his laptop bag looked like it had been through a minor war.
"You didn't hear this from me," Faisal said before Arif had even sat down. "But your ghost node in Karachi? It's being run by a group calling themselves 'Black Crescent.'"
"Never heard of them."
"You wouldn't. They don't exist in public. Think of them as a freelance digital army. Their jobs are… selective. Expensive. Very expensive."
Arif sipped the chai and waited. Faisal fidgeted with his phone, glancing around the tea shop. "The thing is," Faisal lowered his voice, "I think they're not freelance anymore. Someone bought them. A lot of them. And they're moving operations offshore."
"To Dubai?"
Faisal's eyes flickered with something between fear and curiosity. "Exactly."
Meanwhile, back in Lahore, Sara wasn't alone anymore. She had heard a faint creak in the warehouse's back hallway the one they never used because it was blocked with crates. Her hand instinctively went to the Glock in her desk drawer.
She moved slowly, each step silent, until she reached the corner. The hallway was empty… except for a small black envelope on the floor. No footprints. No signs of forced entry.
Sara picked it up and slit it open with her thumb. A single USB drive fell into her hand, along with a note written in bold Urdu script:
Stop digging. Or you'll join him in the ground.
She didn't need to ask who "him" meant.
When Arif returned from Karachi, he found Sara sitting in the dim light, the USB drive on the table between them like an unexploded bomb.
"We plug it in, we die," she said.
"We don't plug it in, we still die." Arif reached for a separate air-gapped laptop and inserted the USB.
A video file popped open instantly. The screen showed a man, hooded, his face mostly in shadow but the voice was unmistakable.
"Arif. Sara. If you're watching this, then you've realized I'm not dead. I had to disappear for reasons you'll soon understand. But now, the Daastaan file is in the wrong hands. If you want it back, you'll have to come to me. And trust me—getting here won't be easy."
The screen went black, and then a single GPS coordinate appeared: 24.4539° N, 54.3773° E.
Sara looked at Arif. "That's… Abu Dhabi."
Arif leaned back in his chair, running a hand over his face. "So much for a quiet month."
By midnight, their plan was set. They would fly separately, use fake identities, and meet at a safe contact's flat in Khalidiya. But even as they prepared, neither of them could shake the feeling that they weren't the hunters this time ,they were the prey.
And somewhere, in the shadows of an unknown city, Sadiq was waiting.