Ghost Directive

Chapter 2: The Shadow of Voss

Damien Voss hadn’t worn a tie in fourteen months.

He used to keep them aligned by color—navy to charcoal, silk to linen, a little trick he picked up from an MI6 station chief in Jakarta. That man was dead now. Bomb in a rented motorbike. Wrong place, wrong time. Or right time, depending on who you asked.

Voss hadn’t spoken to anyone from the Service since London burned him. A botched extraction, a blown safe house, and three agents dead. Officially, it was called a “strategic miscommunication.” Unofficially, Voss became a liability. They didn’t fire him. They just stopped returning his calls.

Now he taught tactical fieldwork to private contractors and war tourists who paid too much for the illusion of danger. Istanbul was cheap, warm, and full of people trying to forget things. He fit right in.

But the voice on the phone—that clipped, familiar tone—dragged him back like gravity.

“Who is this?” Voss had asked.

“You don’t need to know. You just need to get on a plane.”

“Give me one reason.”

“Because someone’s about to do something very loud. And very final. You’re one of the only people who’s seen this type of ghost before.”

---

Six hours later, Voss stood at a private terminal in Zurich, wind tugging at his coat. A black sedan pulled up. No plates. The window lowered.

“Get in,” the driver said.

They drove in silence until the hills grew steep and the trees started thinning.

“You’re not from Langley,” Voss said.

The driver didn’t look at him. “No one is anymore.”

---

The safehouse wasn’t labeled, but Voss could smell it a mile off—plain on the outside, paranoid on the inside. Steel reinforcements under drywall. Sensor grid around the perimeter. The kind of place you built when you were waiting for someone to find you.

Inside, a short man with an analyst’s posture and a soldier’s haircut slid a folder across the table.

“Three days ago, we intercepted traffic on a closed channel. Encrypted to hell. Took a ghost key to unlock part of it.”

“Who decrypted it?”

The analyst didn’t answer.

Voss opened the folder.

One photo. Grainy. Taken from a rooftop. A man in a long coat, back turned, head tilted just enough to catch a sliver of his face.

No name. No tags.

Just one word beneath the image, typed in all caps.

SPECTER

Voss stared for a long time.

“I thought he was dead.”

“So did we.”

---

Back in Geneva, Specter moved like vapor.

He wasn’t just casing the summit—he was shaping the environment. He rerouted a scheduled maintenance crew by compromising a supervisor’s inbox. Had a "pipe leak" reported in a restricted floor. Replaced a floral delivery company’s database with forged manifests. Small things. Subtle.

The illusion wasn’t invisibility. It was normality. Appear unimportant, and no one looks twice.

In Room 414 of the Hôtel du Mont, Specter laid out his gear on a bed made with military precision.

A map of the summit venue. Blueprints of emergency exits. Rotating schedules of private security. The heat map of Wi-Fi signals in the area.

He wasn’t planning a kill.

He was planning a message.

---

In Zurich, Voss stepped outside the safehouse for air. Snow dusted the railings.

He lit a cigarette he hadn’t tasted in over a year.

Specter.

It had to be him. The man was a whisper, a myth. No one ever confirmed a single photo. No footage. No prints. Just aftermath—bodies, collapse, headlines.

Voss had crossed paths with him once. Not directly. Not close enough to stop what happened. But close enough to remember what it felt like when someone removed a high-value target as if they were deleting a file.

“Why now?” Voss asked aloud.

Behind him, the analyst appeared.

“Because this time,” he said, “Specter’s not just killing a person. He’s trying to kill an idea.”

In a sterile underground garage in Paris, a man sat alone in a black sedan. He wore a wire and a heart monitor.

Through his earpiece came a distorted voice: calm, unreadable.

“You will enter Geneva under the name Markus Klein. There will be a package in your hotel safe. You will not open it. You will deliver it to the Grand Ballroom coatroom at precisely 8:14 p.m.”

The man swallowed hard. “And after?”

There was a pause.

“You’ll either be remembered as a hero… or no one will ever find your body.”

The line went dead.