Raymond Reddington was many things — a thief, a broker, a murderer when business demanded it — but he wasn't easily surprised.
So when the ledger fragments he'd been tracking suddenly went dark, disappearing from every black-market auction within seconds of a Bureau-issued trace, surprise gave way to irritation.
He turned to Dembe. "He's faster than I expected."
Dembe nodded once. "Aram's code triggered him."
Reddington's mouth curved in faint amusement. "Ah, Agent Mojtabai. A clever boy, but this one's been dancing longer than the Bureau's been breathing."
At the same time, in a private datacenter buried under Arlington, Revenant watched the trap unfold.
They'd planted it perfectly — a counterfeit auction seeded with just enough credible metadata to tempt him. A fake buyer out of Dubai, a traceable token escrow, even a "secure" chatroom behind layered encryption.
Too perfect.
He'd seen this before.
Lines of code drifted across his screen, self-modifying patterns twisting in real time as Aram's intrusion protocol tried to open a path. Revenant let it in — just enough to see the signature.
"Agency standard," he muttered. "CIA playbook. You people never learn."
He ghosted the signal, splitting it into a dozen false connections. Within seconds, the Task Force's servers showed the Exchange collapsing into random IPs — Moscow, Lagos, Dubai — each spitting out fake auction data.
Aram blinked at his monitor, confused. "It's… adapting again. I've never seen code do this. It's rewriting my trace as I type."
Cooper frowned. "Meaning?"
"Meaning it's learning from me."
Ressler muttered, "So the trap failed."
Reddington's tone was calm, almost admiring. "Of course it did. That code was written by someone who's seen a trap like this before — and survived it."
Flashback — Two Years Earlier
The desert base had no name. Just a grid on a satellite map, one of dozens of CIA-run deniable sites used for "foreign asset containment."
They thought they'd caught him in Istanbul — an anonymous contract killer who'd taken out four handlers in two months. They didn't know he was a someone who has brought an entire lifetime of experience and a supernatural mastery of ninjitsu into their world.
They moved him into a concrete cell, blindfolded, zip-tied, surrounded by ten men with suppressed rifles.
When the door closed, he moved.
Not fast — efficient. Silent.
A twist of the wrists dislocated the plastic cuffs. A step forward — the first guard fell without a sound, throat crushed under two fingers. Another blink, and the second guard's carotid opened like a zipper.
The others didn't even realize they were dying until their lungs filled with blood.
He moved through them like smoke, every strike economical, no wasted motion, no sound. By the time the lights cut out, eight men were dead. The last two tried to run — he let them. Fear spreads faster than bullets.
When the extraction team arrived an hour later, the cell was empty. Only a line of blood across the wall, drawn with surgical precision, spelling a single word:
"Don't."
That night, the CIA scrubbed the entire incident. The official report called it a "containment failure." Unofficially, they called him The Revenant — because the dead weren't supposed to walk away.
Present Day
Aram stared at his frozen monitor. "He just erased the trap. Like it never existed."
Ressler swore under his breath. "How the hell do you fight a ghost?"
Reddington folded his hands. "You don't chase him. You make him curious."
"Curious?" Cooper echoed.
Reddington's smile was thin. "He's pragmatic. Efficient. But even killers like him have patterns — a logic to their work. He doesn't kill for pleasure. He kills for value. So we offer him something valuable enough to bring him to us."
"And if that doesn't work?"
"Then," Reddington said, "we pray he keeps selling to my enemies before he decides to come for me."
Meanwhile, in the darkened apartment, Revenant closed the terminal and sat back. His pulse hadn't changed once during the entire exchange.
They'd found him before. They'd failed before.
And if Reddington thought he could bait him into the open, he'd soon learn — ghosts don't take meetings.