2025-08-11 04:55:16The rain returned that night, hard, fast, relentless, But Robert didn’t flinch as it pelted the windows.
Each strike echoed his thoughts, Jason Ford, Vanessa Shaw, Derrick Wolfe, The man in the cage. The bullet in the box. The war had begun. And he was done waiting. At dawn, a secure alert buzzed across the penthouse’s private server.
Target Identified: “Echo Facility.”
Owner: Undisclosed. Location: 14 miles outside city limits.
Function: Extraction, Surveillance, Disposal.
Robert sat in front of the screen, jaw tense. The note was signed: "Courtesy of C. Let’s play."
A digital map pulsed, highlighting a facility behind electric fences and buried in forested hills, Robert looked at Thomas. “Get the SUV. We’re going hunting.”
By noon, Robert stood at the edge of the woods, black tactical coat pulled tight, eyes locked on the distant outline of steel fencing beyond the trees.
Beside him, Thomas held a tablet connected to a drone sweeping the perimeter. “The place is real,” Thomas said. “And illegal. No public records, no ownership trail. You were right. Whoever’s running this is serious.”
“Good,” Robert replied. “So am I.”
They broke in at 1:12 PM.
No alarms. No resistance, Which made it worse. Inside, they found evidence rooms. Rows of lockers with coded files, flash drives, surveillance photos, names and faces Robert didn’t recognize. Until he did.
On one wall, pinned beneath a map of Kingsbridge, was a photograph of himself, Next to it: his apartment, Then his bus stop, Then… his mother’s grave, His stomach dropped.
“Whoever did this has been watching for years,” Thomas muttered, grim.
Robert’s fists clenched, Then they found the freezer room, Six bodies. Cold. Preserved. Nameless. A few still with IDs. Tech workers. Whistleblowers. One woman in a Clarion PR badge. Vanessa’s firm.
Robert backed out slowly, eyes dark. “This isn’t just about me,” he whispered. “This is a machine.”
“And you just stepped on its power cord,” Thomas said quietly.
Outside the facility, the convoy was waiting. Rain pouring. The engines idled like growls, Robert sat inside and stared at the forest for a long time.
Then turned to Thomas. “Leak the location. Anonymously. Tip off the press. And the authorities.”
“Won’t that draw attention to you?”
“I want it to.”
Thomas raised a brow. “I want them to know I found it,” Robert said. “I want them to panic.”
By 6 PM, the internet exploded.
SECRET FACILITY RAIDED – WHO’S BEHIND ‘THE BLACK GATE’?
CORPSE STORAGE, ILLEGAL SURVEILLANCE, AND CORPORATE COVERUPS EXPOSED
Anonymous Whistleblower Destroys Hidden Power Network
Within the hour, phones rang across the city. Executives disappeared from dinners. Clarion PR shut down its website. Derrick Wolfe’s investment fund pulled back a major acquisition. Politicians fumbled for comment.
The fear Robert saw in the headlines was real. And intoxicating. He wasn’t just rising now, He was unstoppable. But someone was watching.
Far away, behind a monitor wall, the same mysterious woman from before stood facing a table of seated figures. All in shadows. All silent. “We underestimated him,” she said coolly.
One man leaned forward. “Then remove him.”
The woman nodded once. “We’re initiating Protocol Cinder. Tonight.”
Back in Kingsbridge, Robert was reviewing documents in his study when Thomas burst in, without knocking. “Sir. You need to see this.”
He turned the screen toward Robert. Footage. Live, His penthouse. Now, Cameras ones Robert didn’t install, flickering. Distorted. Then a new feed cut in. His mother’s grave, A single red flower laid on the headstone, And standing next to it… was Vanessa.
Vanessa’s hands trembled as she placed the flower on the grave, A voice behind her said, “He knows you’re here.”
She turned slowly, Derrick Wolfe stood in the rain, And beside him… a woman with silver eyes and a scar across her neck. “He’ll come for her,” the woman whispered. “Then we’ll burn his empire to the ground.”
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Chapter 13 – The Other One
In a lab hidden far beneath the streets of Singapore, the red vial hissed as it was injected into a motionless figure on a metal table. Muscles twitched, Eyes snapped open, void black. No whites. No iris.The doctor stepped back, Sarai Quinn watched from behind reinforced glass. “Vitals stabilizing,” the technician said. “Subject is waking up faster than expected.”The being on the table sat upright without aid. A pulse monitor exploded from the surge. Without a sound, it tore the restraints from its wrists and looked straight at the camera. “Subject Theta is active,” the tech muttered.“Not ‘Theta,’” Sarai corrected, stepping forward.“Call him Zero-One.”Meanwhile, in Kingsbridge, Robert sat beside Nine in the vault-secured penthouse command center, She hadn’t slept. Didn’t seem to need it.She spent hours staring at security feeds, code streams, encrypted chatter across the dark web. It wasn’t just surveillance.She was listening. “You’re filtering data from every Consortium node,”
Chapter 12 – The Fuse That Walks
Four hours after the Vault K breach, Robert sat alone in the jet, staring at his own reflection in the window, His coat was scorched. Blood crusted the corner of his mouth. His right wrist was bandaged from the hallway explosion.Thomas sat across from him, typing rapidly, face pale, And Mira, She hadn’t said a word since they lifted off. She was staring into space, knuckles white on her holstered sidearm.“She was right in front of me,” she whispered. “She didn’t breathe. She didn’t blink. The lights… she spoke to them.”Robert finally turned his head. “Where is she now?”Thomas looked up from the terminal. “We don’t know. She disabled the satellite tracking. Then… just vanished.”“She’s alive,” Robert said. “She said she was coming to me.”Mira’s head snapped toward him. “You’re not seriously waiting for her to just show up?”“She’s not dangerous.”Mira leaned forward, furious. “She disabled an entire level of the base without touching anything. She shut down electronics. She hijack
Chapter 11 – She Speaks My Name
Somewhere in the chaos of gunfire, alarms, and blood, A child woke up, Her eyes opened slow, pale silver-blue, glowing faintly in the half-light of Vault K, She blinked. Once. Twice. Then sat up without assistance, even though she’d been unconscious for years.The machines still connected to her didn’t beep, They obeyed, One by one, the vitals dropped to zero. Then the systems flickered. She looked at the security camera in the corner. And smiled.Robert slammed the vault access shut behind him, breath ragged. Mira hadn’t followed, still locked in combat above. Thomas’s voice was in his earpiece, scrambled, panicked.“They breached the surveillance chamber, Sarai’s inside the mainframe, she’s trying to reroute the protocol.”“Robert, whatever’s in that vault, it’s coming online.”Robert stood alone in the control room now, weapons abandoned, the weight of his father’s legacy pressing down like concrete, The console blinked. The vault was still sealed.But a new window opened on the te
Chapter 10 – Ghosts of the Vault
Two days later... Robert stood on a wind-blasted tarmac in northern Norway, The cold was bone-deep. The sky above was an endless wall of steel-gray cloud. Behind him, the private jet’s engine idled as Mira Rhodes adjusted her earpiece and gave the all-clear.“This is it?” Robert asked, Thomas, beside him, nodded. “Coordinates match the black vault signature. We’re two miles from the outer perimeter. No satellite feed. No communication trace. Just snow, wind, and dead radio signals.”Robert zipped up his coat and started walking. No more waiting, They hiked across a stretch of frozen wilderness, past dead trees and buried power poles. Then they found it.A single black door half-sunken into a mountainside. No markings. No locks. Just a keypad with a scanner that blinked once as they approached.Thomas handed Robert the encryption tablet. “Your biometric. Your father’s encryption key. This thing was literally made for you.”Robert placed his palm on the scanner.Beep.Processing…Author
Chapter 9 – The Zero Protocol
The words echoed in Robert’s head like a distant gunshot: “They’re after the last thing your father protected. Something called, The Zero Protocol.”He stood motionless by Vanessa’s bedside, rain crackling softly against the window. She had fallen unconscious again, exhausted, fragile. But the bomb she’d dropped didn’t fade with her breath.Robert turned to Thomas. “Have you ever heard of it?”Thomas’s eyes darkened. “No. But anything your father went to that much trouble to hide… it won’t be in the official files.”“Then find the unofficial ones.”Thomas nodded and left the room with urgency, Back at the penthouse, the storm hadn’t let up, Elena Blake arrived soaked and fuming, clutching a USB drive like a loaded gun. She slammed it onto the coffee table. “This just came in from our deep net operatives,” she said.Robert picked up the drive and slotted it into the encrypted tablet. A secure file opened. One document only.PROJECT: ZERO PROTOCOLStatus: DormantAuthorization: Robert E
Chapter 8 – The Girl in the Hospital Bed
Kingsbridge Memorial was quiet at night. The kind of silence that felt wrong. Robert strode through the back corridor in a dark hoodie, flanked by Thomas and a female security agent named Mira Rhodes, former MI6, eyes like daggers, fingers twitching near her concealed pistol.They stopped at the restricted ICU room. A nurse nodded to Mira, unlocking the door, Vanessa lay in the bed.A tube in her nose. One arm wrapped in a sling. IVs in both arms. Her once-golden hair now matted and streaked with blood. Her lips were cracked. Pale. But she was alive, Barely, And someone wanted to change that.Robert stepped inside, his pulse tight, He hadn’t seen her like this since, Never. Not even in his lowest moments had he imagined her so broken, Thomas handed him a sealed envelope.“She was delivered here by a masked courier. No name. No trace. The hospital was threatened. If she dies… you die. They’re tying you to her fate, Robert.”Bastards, Smart bastards, Vanessa stirred weakly. Her eyes flu
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