Raymond approached the desk with measured steps, the tension between them crackling like static. He pulled up the chair across from Marcus without breaking eye contact—without blinking—and sank into it with the casual grace of a predator at rest. His fingers drummed once on the armrest before stilling.
"You know my capabilities by now," Raymond said, every syllable deliberate. "I can be persuaded to do a job for the Table."
Marcus's expression didn't flicker, but his assessing gaze sharpened—evaluating, probing. His grip on the coffee mug tightened fractionally, then eased. A deliberate show of control.
Raymond leaned back, studying the subtle shift in Marcus's breathing—just slightly faster—the tension coiled beneath his tailored suit. They both knew the truth: Raymond had infiltrated his sanctuary undetected. Had watched him, unseen, for half an hour.
Marcus leaned forward slightly, fingers steepled. "The Table has no shortage of operatives with expertise. Why should we want you?" His tone was smooth, testing, measuring the weight of Raymond's response before it even left his lips.
Raymond didn't blink. His hands rested motionless on his thighs—then, without preamble, his right hand twitched.
The Vector-7 materialized in his grip, suppressor already threaded. One breath. Two. The barrel didn't waver.
Marcus stiffened—eyes locked on the weapon that hadn't been there a heartbeat ago. His lips parted, less in fear than raw fascination. "Quantum compression?" The words rushed out before he could bite them back, pulse jumping in his throat. His fingers twitched toward the panic button under his desk.
Marcus exhaled slowly, eyes flicking from the suppressor to Raymond's face. "Who are you really working for, Reese?"
Raymond's lips curled—not a smile, but the baring of teeth. The Vector-7 vanished from his grip, dissolving into nothing.
A beat. Two. Marcus stilled.
Raymond leaned forward, elbows on knees. "Here's the deal. You need a problem solved. I solve problems. But you don't get to ask why."
Marcus's jaw tightened. "And if I insist?"
Raymond's grin was knife-sharp. "Then this conversation ends."
Marcus drummed his fingers once on the desk, studying Raymond with cool calculation. The silence stretched between them—a tactical standoff. Finally, Marcus exhaled, shaking his head with a wry twist of his mouth.
"You drive a hard bargain, Reese." He tapped a sequence into his console.
The wall monitor flickered to life, projecting a city map and a stack of dossiers.
Raymond studied the map—warehouses clustered near the docks, sparse patrols, blind spots in the surveillance grid. Marcus tapped the console, highlighting two dossiers.
"Sultanate operatives," he said. "Nominal allies, so I can't touch them. You can." His finger hovered over the biometric scans—two men with cybernetic ocular implants. "Advanced recon systems. They'll detect any stealth tech the instant you're within twenty meters."
Marcus leaned forward. "Kill them silently. If they feel threatened, their implants transmit everything to Sultanate handlers in real-time."
Raymond's fingers twitched.
Marcus smiled. "Do this cleanly, and I'll have real work for you."
Raymond leaned in, his movement deliberate. Predatory.
"So I get the raw deal?" His voice was sharp. "You want me to clean up your mess—a black op against allies—and all I get is a maybe for future work?"
He paused, letting the words hang.
"That's not balanced, Mr. Chen."
Marcus's smirk widened. "You sought me out, if memory serves. The desperation was not subtle, John. The reverse is not true."
Raymond remained planted on the seat's edge, unmoving. His posture radiated stubborn refusal to yield.
"That may be," he countered. "But desperation doesn't negate professionalism. I don't do jobs for free."
A deliberate pause.
"I could walk out right now. You know your people can't find me unless I want them to." The implication hung heavy—his ability to disappear, his untraceable skills.
"Then you lose your perfect deniable asset, the window closes, and the failure is yours. You waste the time."
Marcus's smile faded. His fingers drummed once—a deliberate tap against the polished ebony table—before stilling. The office's hum of climate control faded beneath the weight of his deliberation. Air molecules seemed to thicken between them.
"Alright, fine." He measured his words, crafting each syllable from bedrock, and adjusted his cuffs before he posed a question. "How about this?"
A pause underscored the concession. "You do this, and we will lift the bounty on you." He paused for another half-second. "And your associate."
Cool air brushed Raymond's neck as Marcus leaned back, the leather sighing beneath his weight. "We feel that shows enough interest in your... expertise from our end." The unspoken for now lingered like gunsmoke.
The stench of rust and brine clung to the warehouse district like a second skin. Raymond moved through the maze of container stacks, his boots silent on the cracked pavement. The glow of distant neon signs cast long shadows between the steel monoliths—stripes of garish pink and sickly green cutting through the industrial gloom.
Ten meters. The number clicked in his head as he spotted camera mast fifteen, its lens sweeping left in a predictable forty-five-second rotation. Raymond tugged his collar higher, letting his shoulders slump into the easy shuffle of the dock workers filtering toward the night shift. Sweat gleamed on his forehead—just another laborer wiping grime from his eyes.
A group of maintenance techs passed, arguing over a rigged betting pool. Raymond fell into step behind them, matching their sluggish pace until the next camera blind spot. Then he was gone—ducking right into the gap between two oxidized shipping containers. Corroded metal scraped against his jacket as he squeezed through.
[Basic Sneak] thrummed through him. His breathing slowed. His footsteps became imperceptible—heels rolling to toes with the precision of a man who'd infiltrated Taliban compounds under moonlight.
East storage block. Marcus had marked it in red.
Raymond paused behind a forklift, its forks raised like skeletal fingers. Two men in security vests smoked by a floodlit checkpoint. Beyond them, the target warehouse loomed—windows dark, but the telltale flicker of holographic displays leaked through the seams of a loading bay door.
He palmed a half-empty bottle from a discarded crate. He let his head loll.
"Oi! Move along, mate," one guard barked.
Raymond staggered into the light, slurring something about lost work chits. The guards exchanged disgusted glances as he veered left, deliberately stumbling into a stack of pallets. The crash brought laughter, not scrutiny.
"Fuckin' lightweights," the second guard muttered, turning back to his cigarette.
While the guards laughed, Raymond melted into the shadows beside Warehouse 47B.
Raymond crouched behind a corroded exhaust vent, studying the patterns.
Three men loitered within his sightline. The first leaned against a utility pole near a junction of alleys, head angled toward the warehouse approach. His posture read casual—shoulders relaxed, one boot crossed over the other—but his eyes swept regular arcs across the loading zone. Every forty seconds. Predictable.
The second man sat on an overturned crate twenty metres left, smoking. He hadn't moved in three minutes, but his gaze tracked every vehicle that passed the perimeter road. Not the behavior of someone killing time between shifts.
The third occupied a narrow gap between stacked pallets, nearly invisible unless you knew where to look. That one worried Raymond. Positioned to watch the first two as much as the warehouse itself.
Layered surveillance.
Raymond ran the math. None of them carried themselves like professionals—no tactical gear, no earpieces visible, no synchronized movement patterns. But their positioning wasn't random either. Someone with decent field craft had placed them to cover blind spots and overlapping fields of fire.
Locals. Paid watchers, most likely. The kind who'd alert their employers but wouldn't engage directly.
Raymond's eyes traced the roofline of Warehouse 47B. A fire escape clung to the eastern wall, barely visible in the sodium-vapor glare. Rusted metal, probably groaning under weight. But it reached a maintenance catwalk that ran along the rooftop.
That's the angle.
He mentally plotted his approach. Circle wide through the container stacks, use [Basic Sneak] to close the gap between him and the fire escape's base. Thirty metres of exposure—manageable if he timed it between the first lookout's sweeps. The second man's attention stayed locked on the road, not the warehouse itself. The third...
Raymond's jaw tightened.
The third lookout stood directly beneath the fire escape's lowest platform, leaning against the warehouse wall with a datapad casting blue light across his weathered features. He wasn't watching the other sentries or the perimeter.
He was guarding the only viable access point.
Raymond weighed the geometry.
The third lookout occupied a blind spot—positioned to monitor the other two sentries rather than to be monitored himself. Neither of the outer watchers had line of sight on the fire escape's base. The man with the datapad wasn't coordinating with them. He was checking on them.
Handler, not sentry.
That changed the calculus. Taking him first meant no alarm to the others. The two outer watchers would continue their sweeps, oblivious, until Raymond was already inside.
Risk assessment: thirty metres of open ground. Seven seconds of exposure if he timed the approach between the first lookout's visual sweep. The handler's attention remained fixed on his datapad—scrolling through something, probably rotation schedules or communication logs.
Do it.
Raymond let his shoulders slump. He took out the empty bottle from his coat and stumbled into the open, weaving toward the fire escape with the shambling gait of a man three drinks past functional. His free hand clutched his stomach. A low groan escaped his lips.
The handler's head snapped up.
"Oi." The man straightened, one hand dropping to his belt. "This area's restricted. Piss off."
Raymond lurched closer, mumbling something incoherent about needing to sit down. The bottle dangled loosely from his fingers. Five metres.
"I said—"
Raymond closed the distance in two steps. His left hand shot out, catching the handler's wrist before it reached the holstered sidearm. His right hand came up simultaneously, fingers positioned at the base of the skull.
[Basic Concussive Strike].
The skill pulsed through his palm—a focused, percussive impact that bypassed muscle and bone to rattle the brainstem directly. The handler's eyes rolled back. His knees buckled. Raymond caught the body before it hit the ground, lowering the unconscious man silently against the warehouse wall.
Raymond held his breath. He counted to five.
The first lookout continued his sweep, head turning left. The smoker on the crate flicked ash from his cigarette, gaze still locked on the perimeter road. Neither reacted.
He exhaled slowly.
Raymond dragged the handler behind a stack of wooden floorboards leaning against the warehouse, wedging the body into the gap where shadows pooled thickest. The man would stay hidden for hours—longer if Raymond was lucky.
The fire escape groaned under his weight despite his careful placement. Raymond ascended in silence, testing each rung before committing, distributing his mass across the corroded metal. Rust flaked beneath his boots.
At the rooftop, he pulled himself over the lip and dropped prone onto the tar-papered surface. Heat radiated through his clothing—residual warmth from the day's sun, trapped in the dark material.
Raymond crawled to the edge overlooking the warehouse interior. A row of filthy skylights punctuated the roof, their glass clouded with years of industrial grime. He found one with a crack running through the center, the pane warped enough to offer a narrow viewing angle.
There.
Two figures sat twenty feet apart in the warehouse's central clearing, surrounded by portable computer terminals and holographic displays. Both wore dark tactical clothing. Both had the distinctive chrome rings around their eye sockets that marked high-grade ocular cybernetics—the kind that recorded everything, transmitted in real-time, and could identify a face from two hundred metres in pitch darkness.
The operatives typed rapidly, their attention fixed on scrolling data. Sultanate intelligence officers, just as Marcus described.
Operative Farid scrolled through the surveillance data on his terminal, cross-referencing shipping manifests with known smuggling routes. The warehouse's industrial lighting hummed above him, casting harsh shadows across the rows of holographic displays. His partner, Nazir, worked at the adjacent station, running facial recognition algorithms against the dock's security footage.
Twelve hours into their shift. Six more to go.
Farid rubbed his eyes, feeling the familiar pressure of his ocular implants adjusting to the gesture. The chrome rings around his sockets warmed slightly—the cybernetics compensating for the interruption in visual input. Everything his eyes saw transmitted in real-time to Sultanate Intelligence headquarters in the capital. Every face. Every document. Every anomaly.
A soft thud from somewhere above.
Farid's hand drifted toward his sidearm. Probably rats in the ceiling ducts. This district had plenty of them.
He returned to his screen. A cargo ship from the northern territories had docked three hours ago, its manifest claiming agricultural equipment. The thermal imaging told a different story—dense metallic signatures clustered in the lower hold. Weapons, almost certainly.
"Nazir, pull up berth seven's—"
The words died in his throat.
Nazir slumped forward onto his keyboard, a dark hole punched through the back of his skull. Blood pooled beneath his face, spreading across the holographic interface.
No sound. No warning.
Farid spun, drawing his pistol in a single motion. A figure stood fifteen metres away, near the warehouse's side entrance—young, dark-haired, holding a suppressed handgun with the casual grip of someone intimately familiar with the weapon.
Farid fired.
The shot should have hit centre mass. Instead, the figure shifted, his body sliding sideways with impossible fluidity, leaving the round to pass only through empty air.
Farid adjusted and fired again, but the figure found cover behind the boxes, and his bullets bounced off the edge.
Too fast.
He fired three more shots, but the figure anticipated and evaded each one, using minimal movement between the crates and containers. The figure shifted, calculating each precise step and angle so he deliberately avoided Farid's bullets.
Five metres.
Headquarters is receiving this. They'll see—
Farid's implants recorded everything. The young face, unmarred by fear or hesitation. The cold assessment in those eyes—measuring Farid the way a surgeon might study an x-ray.
"Shit—" He intended to turn and escape.
The figure's free hand snapped out, and it caught Farid's gun wrist. He executed a sharp twist, and Farid's fingers opened involuntarily; the pistol clattered to the concrete floor. His attacker swept his legs before Farid could react, and the move drove him onto his back.
Farid hit the ground hard, air rushing from his lungs.
The suppressed muzzle pressed against his forehead.
Farid's mouth opened—to beg, to curse, to demand answers. The young man's expression didn't change.
"It was a good dance."
The Vector-7 barked once.
Farid's ocular implants captured every detail in the final millisecond—the flash of the muzzle, the young man's face filling the frame, clear and unobscured.
Then nothing.
Raymond stood over the body for three seconds, ensuring the implants had sufficient time to transmit their final footage. The chrome rings around the operative's eyes flickered once, twice, then went dark.
He holstered the Vector-7 and walked toward the side exit, leaving both bodies where they lay.