Location: Hell's Kitchen, New York City
4 Months Later
The rain in New York tasted different than the snow in Siberia. It tasted of diesel, stale coffee, and old money. It slicked the cobblestones of Hell's Kitchen, turning the neon reflections of dive bars into wavering ghosts on the pavement.
Agent 47 stood on the precipice of an unfinished high-rise, forty stories above the street. He was a silhouette against the gray, weeping sky.
The wind whipped his trench coat—a bespoke piece tailored in London, paid for with funds siphoned from a Cayman Islands account belonging to a now-deceased arms dealer—but he remained perfectly still.
To the city below, he was nothing. A shadow. To the underworld, he was a whisper.
In the four months since fleeing the Red Room's northern facility, 47 had not been idle.
He had become a ghost in the machine of the modern world.
Without the ICA, without Diana Burnwood's cool, British alto in his ear, he had to be both the handler and the executioner.
He had constructed his own network, a web of encrypted servers and dead drops.
He vetted his own contracts.
He only targeted the cancers. Not out of morality—47 did not deal in morality—but out of pragmatism.
Criminals, terrorists, and corrupt oligarchs were chaotic variables. Removing them restored order.
And order was comfortable.
Tonight's target was Anatoly Ivanov.
A mid-level vor v zakone brokering a deal to sell decommissioned Stark Industries guidance chips to Ten Rings insurgents.
Ivanov was paranoid, surrounded by ex-Spetsnaz mercenaries, and currently inspecting the foundation of his new money-laundering front: The Skyline Towers.
47 adjusted his cufflink. It wasn't jewelry; it was a high-frequency jamming device.
He stepped back from the ledge and turned toward the construction elevator.
He was no longer the Hitman in the suit.
He was 'Frank', the weary union foreman working the graveyard shift to catch up on delayed pouring schedules.
He wore the hard hat, the reflective vest, and the tool belt scuffed with concrete dust. His posture had slumped, his gait heavy with imaginary fatigue.
He passed two guards at the perimeter. They were smoking, huddled under a tarp.
"Hey, Frank," one grunted, barely looking up. "Thought you clocked out."
"Pump 4 is jamming again," 47 said. His accent was perfect—Queens, blue-collar, annoyed. "If I don't fix it, the concrete sets in the lines, and we're all out of a job."
"Whatever. Just don't trip the sensors on the upper deck. Boss is up there."
"Yeah, yeah."
47 walked past them. Social stealth. The art of being so boring, so utterly mundane, that the brain refuses to register you as a threat.
He ascended.
As the elevator rattled upward, 47's mind drifted to the dossier he had compiled on his "home" in this reality. He had spent weeks in internet cafes from Berlin to Boston, digging through the darkest corners of the dark web.
The Red Room was deep underground. Literally and metaphorically. Considered by many to be a Cold War relic, mostly defunct.
47 knew better. He had seen the active funding streams. He had seen the chatter. He had been in one of their many facilities and even escaped from it.
And he had seen the name Romanoff.
The one who had supposedly destroyed the Red Room.
Natasha Romanoff. The Black Widow.
She was someone else's asset now. Who? Unknown.
But 47 saw some breadcrumbs; he had tracked her movements through public sightings and leaked mission reports. She was the success story of the program he had been bred to complement.
If their paths were to cross, it would be... complicated.
The elevator dinged. The penthouse floor.
The wind was louder here. The floor was an open skeleton of steel girders and wet concrete.
Ivanov was standing near the edge, flanked by three guards. He was shouting into a satellite phone, gesturing wildly at the skyline.
"I don't care about the timeline!" Ivanov screamed in Russian. "I want the chips in Kandahar by Tuesday! Use the tunnels!"
47 stepped out of the shadows. He picked up a pneumatic torque wrench from a pile of tools. He didn't need a weapon. The environment was the weapon.
He moved to a stack of I-beams suspended by a heavy-duty crane chain. The load was secured by a locking pin. A safety mechanism.
Ivanov walked directly under the load, pacing.
"What do you mean 'customs'? Pay them? We own the fucking port!"
47 calculated the trajectory. Wind speed: 15 knots NW. Load weight: 2.5 tons. Target velocity: Walking pace.
He needed a distraction to clear the guards from the immediate splash zone. Collateral damage was messy.
It reduced the bonus.
47 picked up a loose bolt and tossed it against a sheet of corrugated metal twenty feet to the right.
Clang.
The guards spun around, weapons raised. "Who's there?"
Two of them moved to investigate the noise, stepping away from Ivanov. The third stayed close, but looked away.
Perfect.
47 moved.
He didn't run; he flowed. He reached the crane's control box.
He didn't hack it; that would leave a digital footprint. Instead, he used the torque wrench to manually shear the hydraulic line holding the tension on the locking pin.
The fluid sprayed out, hissing. The pressure dropped.
The pin slipped.
Gravity took over.
The chain unspooled with a scream of metal on metal. The 2.5 tons of steel beams plummeted.
Ivanov looked up. He didn't even have time to scream.
CRUNCH.
The impact shook the entire floor. Dust and concrete powder exploded outward in a blinding cloud. The sound was like a bomb going off, but distinctively structural.
"Boss!" the guards screamed, rushing into the cloud.
47 was already gone.
He slid down a suspension cable to the floor below, his gloved hands protecting him from the friction.
He stripped off the vest and hard hat, tossing them into an incinerator chute.
Underneath, he wore a dark turtleneck and slacks.
He walked out of the service entrance on the ground floor just as the sirens began to wail in the distance.
Police. Fire.
He walked down the street, blending into the crowd of onlookers gathering to stare at the tragedy at the construction site.
"Terrible," 47 muttered to a woman standing next to him. "Safety standards in this city are a joke."
"It's a tragedy," she agreed, clutching her purse.
47 nodded solemnly and turned a corner into an alleyway.
His phone vibrated. A burner, disposable.
He answered. No greeting.
"The funds have been transferred," a synthesized voice said. His current client, an anonymous entity that preferred voice modulation. "The accident looked... unfortunate."
"Gravity is a harsh mistress," 47 replied flatly.
"We have another potential contract. High priority. AccuTech is releasing a promotional video for the upcoming Stark Expo. Their CEO, Charles Healey, is introducing the HazTech Exoskeleton."
"I am not interested in corporate PR," 47 said, walking toward the subway.
"You will be interested in this," the voice countered. "There is a leak in their R&D department. A senior engineer named Julian Ashford. He has stolen the blueprints for the weaponized variant of the suit. He intends to sell them to a warlord operating out of Sokovia."
47 paused at the entrance to the subway station.
"Ashford is boarding a flight to London tonight. First Class. He has the data on his person. We need the data retrieved and the leak plugged. Permanently."
"A mid-air extraction," 47 mused. "High risk."
"Double the usual rate. Half up front."
47 looked at the poster on the wall. Tony Stark posing with the Iron Man suit. The Future is Now.
"Triple it." 47 added.
The voice on the other side grew silent for a few seconds before 47 heard a sigh, "Fine, triple. But make sure to make it appear to be an accident. Not an assassination. We don't want to alert his buyer, at least not while you're on the plane."
"Then consider it an accident... waiting to happen," 47 said.
He hung up and snapped the phone in half, dropping the pieces into a sewer grate.
He swiped his MetroCard and vanished into the underground.
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Hey, guys! What chu' think! Comment below on what you think. Let's get some engagement in here!
By the way, after Chapter 5, I'll upload on the normal schedule, three chapters per week.