Smoke filled the underground garage.Sparks flew as bullets ricocheted off concrete pillars. The flash of headlights cut through the haze. Engines roared. Specter’s men moved with precision—military, disciplined, silent. There was no yelling. No chaos. Just the clinical march of death.Voss dove behind a column, firing off three rounds. Two missed. One clipped a biker, sending him sprawling into a stack of metal drums.Malik crouched beside Rehn, reloading. Her voice was urgent but steady. “We have to split. If they catch him, it’s over.”Rehn’s hands shook. “I can’t—”“Yes, you can,” she snapped. “Stick to the plan. We go dark, rendezvous at fallback site Echo.”Voss gave Rehn a final look. “Take the keystore. Disappear.”“Voss—”“Now.”Rehn ran.Malik rolled across the garage floor, taking out a second attacker. She turned to Voss. “This is bad. He’s bleeding us. Specter’s not trying to kill us—he’s isolating us.”Voss’s eyes narrowed. “Then we flip it.”They moved as one, cutting a

Rome.The sun rose quietly over St. Peter’s Basilica, casting gold across the cobbled streets and rooftops of the ancient city. Tourists crowded the square, cameras clicking. Pilgrims whispered prayers. All oblivious to the war humming just beneath their feet.Because below the holy heart of the Vatican… was a server room.Built decades ago during the Cold War. Meant to protect Vatican secrets from nuclear catastrophe. Retrofitted years later into a private node of encrypted communications—officially for archiving centuries of documents.Unofficially?A perfect blind spot in global surveillance.Inside the Chapel, Specter’s agent moved like a ghost.He wore a cassock. Held a rosary. But in his eyes? Cold calculation.He knelt beside the altar, right above the trapdoor that no one else knew existed.The floor beneath the Sistine Chapel creaked open.The agent descended.Below, blinking quietly in the dark, rows of servers came to life—air-cooled, zero-signal leak. An island in the sea

Nairobi, Kenya. United Nations Digital Archives Facility.Malik walked through rows of climate-controlled vaults buried three stories beneath Nairobi’s city center. It smelled like dust and cold steel. Every wall was embedded with drives containing decades—centuries—of unedited historical footage, scans, records.Until recently, these archives were considered infallible.Now?She wasn’t so sure.The message had come encrypted through a dead MI6 relay:“Archive breach. Level Zero. Project Timelock. You’ll want to see this.”She reached the core chamber.A single server, isolated from the global web. Surrounded by four armed guards and a nervous technician shaking in his badge and lab coat.He looked up when she entered.“You’re the one from Paris?”She nodded. “Show me.”He led her to a workstation and queued a file labeled:“Operation Medusa // 1972 // Classified: Ultra Black”The footage began. Old analog. Military cam.A jungle. Soldiers. Smoke. Screams.A prisoner, shackled and bli

Casablanca, Morocco. 4:22 A.M.The city beneath stirred in dreams and shadows, bathed in the sleepy amber of halogen streetlamps and the distant flicker of minarets. Rooftops glimmered with the dew of the Maghreb night, and the call to prayer hadn’t yet broken the silence. The world seemed to hold its breath.On the rooftop of a forgotten hotel that no longer appeared on any map, Damien Voss sat alone, elbows on his knees, spine hunched like a man who had stopped fighting gravity. A plastic bottle of water rested between his fingers, half-empty and sweating in the cool air. His eyes were hollow. Not tired—exhausted. Beyond exhaustion. Past fear, past fury. What he felt now wasn’t grief. It was absence. Silence so vast it threatened to consume him.No nightmares. No voices. No flashbacks of broken missions or lost comrades. Just blank static between his ears.Until a door creaked open behind him.Malik stepped into view, no preamble, no small talk. She didn’t have to say anything. Her

Geneva, 1969. Flashback.The sound of clicking keys filled the sterile, fluorescent-lit room. Scientists, dressed in lab coats, bustled around the machines—relics from a time when the world still thought it could control the future.At the center of the room, a tall glass pod sat suspended by mechanical arms, reflecting the dim light. Inside, a man. Younger. Barely thirty. His eyes wide open, staring into nothingness.Voss.He was hooked into countless wires, his body trembling as the machines whirred to life.One of the lead scientists, Dr. Marcelin, adjusted a dial. “Activation complete. The anchor is ready,” he said, turning to his colleagues. “We are about to synchronize human consciousness with the timeline. History will be… corrected.”Present day, Geneva.Voss staggered back from the terminal, his pulse racing. The truth was unbearable, yet it clicked into place with terrifying clarity.He wasn’t just part of the timeline. He was the timeline.Every life he had lived. Every war