The rain in Santa Fortuna did not wash things clean; it merely made the grime slicker. It coated the black tactical gear of the Corvini strike teams, plastered hair to foreheads, and turned the city into a blurring watercolor of neon and asphalt.
Pranav crouched in the mud outside the perimeter of the Industrial District Substation. He checked his watch. 02:00. The synchronization point.
In his earpiece, the static hissed, a rhythmic comfort. "Alpha in position," he whispered.
"Beta is breaching," Sanvi's voice crackled back, sounding tight, eager.
"Gamma is seated," Arpika said. Her voice was smoother, but thin.
"Delta... Delta is inside," Gautham squeaked.
Pranav looked at the substation. It was a monolith of rusting iron and humming transformers, surrounded by a chain link fence topped with razor wire. According to John's intelligence, according to the impeccable Corvini logic, this was the heart of Marco's darkness. Cut the power, and the emotional mob goes blind.
He used the bolt cutters. The snap of the metal link was swallowed by the thunder rolling overhead. He slipped through the gap, moving low, his boots sinking into the wet earth. He felt like a surgeon approaching a patient. Precise. Clinical.
Sanvi kicked the side door of the West Side Transport Hub. It gave way with a screech of tearing metal. She didn't wait for her team; she flowed into the space, her weapon raised, seeking targets.
The hub was massive, a cathedral of corrugated steel meant to house eighteen wheelers and fuel tankers. It should have been bustling. It should have been full of Vargo's men loading crates, shouting orders, fueling the blockade.
It was empty.
Sanvi skidded to a halt, her boots squeaking on the oil stained concrete. The echo of her entry bounced around the rafters, lonely and loud.
"Clear left," one of her soldiers whispered, his voice trembling slightly. "Clear right."
There were no trucks. There were no crates. There were no guards.
Sanvi walked to the center of the bay. She touched the hood of a forklift. It was cold. Dust coated the seat.
"This is wrong," she muttered, tapping her comms. "Command, this is Beta. The target is hollow. Repeat, target is hollow. There is no fuel here."
Arpika sat in the back booth of Le Bernadin, a neutral ground bistro that smelled of garlic and expensive wine. Across from her sat Silas, Vargo's lieutenant.
He was a man who sweated when he ate, but tonight he wasn't eating. He was staring at his hands.
Arpika arranged her face into a mask of professional concern. She leaned forward, the bruising on her cheek carefully concealed by concealer and the low lighting.
"Silas," she said softly. "You're a businessman. You know the numbers. Marco is burning cash he doesn't have. The Corvini are offering you a lifeboat. Stable routes. Guaranteed percentages. No war."
She waited for him to nod. She waited for the greed to flicker in his eyes, the predictable avarice that John Corvini relied on.
Silas looked up. His eyes weren't greedy. They were wet.
"You have nice eyes," Silas said. It wasn't a compliment. It was a eulogy.
Arpika froze. "Excuse me?"
"Marco told us about you," Silas continued, his voice heavy. "He told us how you act. How you use words like leverage and stability to hide the fact that you're owned."
He reached into his jacket. Arpika flinched, her hand dropping to the knife strapped to her thigh under the silk.
Silas pulled out a photo. It wasn't a dossier. It was a picture of his own family. A wife. Three daughters.
"Marco showed me this," Silas whispered. "And he asked me... if a man came into my house, a man in a silver suit, and hurt them... would I care about percentages?"
Arpika felt the blood drain from her face. The logic was failing. John's actuarial table didn't account for fathers.
"Silas, listen to me—"
"No, Arpika," Silas said. He used her name. Her real name. Not the alias she had given him. "You listen."
Gautham's fingers flew across the keyboard. He was huddled in the damp basement of the laundromat, the air thick with the smell of detergent and mold. The server rack in front of him hummed, the blue lights blinking in the dark.
This was the Russians' nerve center. John had been specific. Plant the loop. Delay the orders.
He jacked his deck into the primary port. The code scrolled across his screen, green, fast, accessible. It was too accessible. There were no firewalls. No encryption keys. It was like walking through an open door.
"I'm in," Gautham whispered, sweat stinging his eyes. "I'm executing the loop."
He hit enter.
The screen didn't confirm the upload. It went black.
Then, a single line of text appeared in bright, violent red.
WE SEE YOU, LITTLE MOUSE.
Gautham gasped, jerking his hands back from the keyboard as if it were hot.
"Pranav!" Gautham shrieked into the comms. "It's a honeypot! It's not a server, it's a trap! They knew I was coming!"
Pranav reached the main breaker box at the substation. He pried the panel open, his breath coming in short, sharp bursts. He had the schematics memorized. Cut the blue wire, bridge the red, overload the transformer.
He looked inside the panel.
There were no wires.
The box was gutted. Empty. Just a hollow metal shell housing a single, battery operated speaker taped to the back wall.
Pranav stared at it, his mind refusing to process the visual data. The intelligence was wrong. The map was wrong. The Corvini omniscience was a lie.
Then, static burst through the earpieces of all four recruits simultaneously. It wasn't the white noise of interference. It was a signal override. A broadcast.
"Command?" Pranav whispered, tapping his ear. "Asrit? Do you copy?"
A voice answered. But it wasn't Asrit. And it wasn't John.
"They think they are fighting a mob," the voice said.
It was rich, calm, and terrifyingly familiar. It was the voice of the man who had burned his own hand with a match.
Pranav froze in the mud. Arpika stiffened in the booth. Sanvi spun around in the empty hangar. Gautham began to weep in the basement.
"We are a memory," Marco's voice continued, haunting the Corvini frequency, broadcasting on their own secure channel. "And a memory is everywhere at once."
The speaker inside the breaker box in front of Pranav clicked on. A small red light blinked.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
"Run," Pranav whispered.
Sanvi heard the sound first. It wasn't a beep. It was the mechanical clank of heavy metal doors slamming shut.
The massive bay doors of the transport hub began to descend, sealing the exits.
"Ambush!" Sanvi screamed, her voice cracking. "Fall back! Now! Now!"
Floodlights, blinding, stadium grade LEDs, erupted from the catwalks above, turning the dark hangar into a blinding white kill box.
Gunfire rained down. It wasn't the spray and pray of street thugs. It was disciplined, suppressing fire from high ground. Two of Sanvi's soldiers dropped instantly, their chests erupting in red mist before they even raised their rifles.
Sanvi dove behind the forklift, bullets sparking off the concrete inches from her boots. She was pinned. She was blind. She was the rat in the bucket, and Vargo was pouring in the water.
"We're compromised!" Sanvi roared into the comms, the sound of automatic fire drowning her out. "They were waiting! They were waiting in the rafters!"
In the bistro, Silas didn't pull a gun. He just stood up and walked away.
"Silas!" Arpika shouted, standing up, abandoning the pretense.
The kitchen doors swung open. Four men stepped out. They weren't waiters. They wore heavy leather jackets and carried knives. Not guns. Knives. They wanted it quiet. They wanted it close.
Arpika scanned the room. The front door was blocked by two more men. The windows were reinforced glass.
She grabbed the wine bottle from the table, a vintage Pinot Noir, and smashed it against the edge of the booth. The glass jagged into a crude shiv, wine splashing onto her dress like premature blood.
"Come on," she hissed, her voice trembling with terror and rage. "Come and take it."
Marco's voice whispered in her ear. "You thought you could buy a father with percentages, Arpika? You thought grief had a price?"
Gautham scrambled for the stairs, his laptop forgotten on the floor.
The door at the top of the basement stairs flew open. A silhouette blocked the light. A massive shape.
"Little mouse," a deep voice rumbled. Russian accent. Thick and amused.
Gautham skidded to a halt, slipping on the damp floor. He looked around wildly. The dryer vents. The coal chute.
He scrambled toward the small, grime encrusted window at ground level. It was narrow, barely a foot wide. He didn't think; he just shoved himself into the opening, his expensive vest catching on the rough brick.
He kicked his legs, squeezing, scraping his skin raw, hyperventilating as he heard heavy boots thumping down the wooden stairs behind him.
A hand grabbed his ankle. A vice grip.
Gautham screamed, kicking wildly with his other foot. He connected with something soft, a face. The grip loosened for a fraction of a second.
He clawed at the pavement outside, dragging himself through the hole, tearing his shirt, scraping his stomach, popping out onto the rainy alleyway like a birthed calf. He didn't look back. He ran. He ran blindly into the rain, sobbing, the Russian laughter echoing from the basement behind him.
Pranav scrambled backward through the mud, slipping, falling, crawling.
The breaker box didn't explode. It wasn't a bomb. It was a message. It was Marco telling him that he knew exactly where Pranav would be.
The woods around the substation came alive. Not with gunfire, but with flares.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
Red flares ignited in a circle around the facility, bathing the rain in the color of blood.
Pranav was exposed. He was lit up like a stage actor.
"They know the plan," Pranav gasped into the radio, climbing to his feet, mud slicking his hands. "John! They know the plan! They didn't react to us. They anticipated us!"
He sprinted for the gap in the fence. He didn't care about stealth. He didn't care about dignity. He ran with the desperate, flailing gait of a man who realized he had brought a calculator to a knife fight.
Marco's voice returned, calm and final in their ears.
"John Corvini looks at a map and sees a grid. I look at the map and see my family's blood. You cannot out think a man who is already dead."
Sanvi burst through a side maintenance door, her shoulder dislocated from ramming it, dragging a wounded soldier. She fell onto the wet asphalt outside, gasping for air.
Arpika sprinted down the back alley of the bistro, her heels broken off, her feet bleeding, leaving the four men tangled in the overturned tables behind her.
Gautham cowered in a dumpster three blocks away, covering his ears, trying to block out the Russian's laughter.
Pranav dove into the back of the waiting van, slamming the door, his chest heaving.
He looked at the empty seats where his confidence used to be. The silence in the van was heavy, broken only by the static of the radio and the ghost of Marco's voice.
They hadn't just failed. They had been toyed with.
John's "surgical" strike had been parried with a sledgehammer. The structure had collapsed. The logic had failed. And as the van peeled away, sliding on the wet road, Pranav realized the terrifying truth.
The Corvini weren't the chess masters anymore. They were just pieces on Marco's board, and he was taking them off one by one.