2025-08-06 09:58:11Rain bled from the London sky like a warning, soaking through the cobbled alleys of Shoreditch as
if the city itself wanted to wash away what was about to happen. Kabri crouched in the back of the unmarked black van, his gloved hands calmly reloading a matte black Glock-19. Across from him sat Jamil, sharpening his signature combat knife with quiet precision. The van's interior was dimly lit, but even in the half-light, their eyes gleamed—not with fear, but with a cold, shared focus born from years of survival and bloodshed.
This wasn’t just another job.
This was Fred’s job.
And that meant two things: it would be high-risk and high-reward.
“Warehouse has two main guards on rotation, third one sits near the vault control with a Remington pump. Cameras in the southeast corner are decoys. Real feed goes upstairs to the office. I’ve got the jammer,” Jamil said without looking up, his voice low but steady.
Kabri gave a nod. "No names, no noise. In and out."
"Same as Berlin," Jamil added.
"Cleaner than Berlin," Kabri corrected.
Fred had tapped them for the diamond lift only four days ago, pulling them into a clandestine briefing in a Kensington wine bar that stank of oak and lies. The score was massive—over twenty million pounds in raw, uncut diamonds, discreetly stored at a private vault owned by a Belgian syndicate. No alarms. No sirens. No mistakes. Fred had made it clear: you either brought the gold or you paid in blood.
The van jerked to a stop behind an abandoned shoe factory. Jamil killed the lights. Silence. Not even a whisper of breath.
Kabri pulled down his balaclava, his features disappearing beneath the black wool. In that moment, the man known to the world became a ghost—no identity, no past, no conscience.
They moved like shadows.
Through the alley, past the broken fence, over the loading dock, each step rehearsed to precision. Kabri took point, disabling the keypad with a cold, electric flick. The heavy door gave with a soft groan, and they slid inside like smoke.
The warehouse interior was dim, half-lit by overhead fluorescents that flickered like dying memories. The diamond vault was buried behind a series of steel-enforced rooms, motion sensors, and retinal scanners. But they weren’t going through the front.
They were going under.
Kabri led Jamil down a service tunnel hidden beneath an old cargo elevator. The tunnel had been mapped by Jamil the week before, using stolen blueprints and two nights posing as a janitor. Everything had been planned—down to the millimeter.
They reached the junction where power lines and old drainage pipes formed a man-sized crawlspace. Kabri dropped first, his body moving silently through the dark tube, until he emerged in a small service room directly beneath the vault’s control panel.
Above him, two guards laughed at something over a shared phone screen.
Kabri climbed up the utility ladder and signaled with two fingers.
Jamil answered with one.
Three seconds.
The door burst open.
Kabri moved first, a swift strike to the throat of the closest guard, whose body crumpled silently against the filing cabinet. Jamil’s knife danced once, slicing through the jugular of the other before he could blink. The floor welcomed their silence with a wet kiss.
The vault was ahead.
Kabri knelt at the keypad, slipping the cracked card reader Fred had provided into the access slot. The green light blinked once.
“Ten seconds, max,” Jamil murmured.
The door unlocked with a low groan, and the air beyond was dry and sterile, the kind of artificial cold found only in banks and morgues. Inside were rows of silver cases stamped with barcodes, each one holding a treasure that could fund wars or buy governments.
Kabri pulled the list from his inner pocket. “Box 31B, 44A, 12C. Don’t touch anything else.”
Jamil was already stacking the correct containers in the reinforced duffel bags. Each case weighed nearly twenty pounds, but neither of them grunted. These men didn’t sweat. They were weapons built in silence, trained not to feel the weight of what they carried.
They were in and out in six minutes.
On the way back through the tunnel, Kabri paused.
Something felt wrong.
He stopped moving and raised a hand.
Jamil froze.
A faint clicking sound echoed above them—too rhythmic to be rain.
“Motion sensors weren’t supposed to be active,” Kabri hissed.
Jamil's expression tightened.
Kabri scanned the ceiling grid. A small dome rotated slowly in the dark. New. Hidden. Fred’s blueprints hadn’t included this.
“Trap?” Jamil asked, fingers tightening on his weapon.
Kabri didn’t answer.
He already knew.
They moved faster now, every footstep burning with urgency. The exit door was in sight when it happened—metallic thunder shattered the quiet.
Gunfire.
Kabri spun around as bullets chewed through the doorframe. Jamil dove for cover behind a pallet of crates, returning fire in sharp bursts.
“Back route!” Kabri yelled.
“No time!” Jamil barked.
A bullet tore through Jamil’s shoulder. He stumbled, groaning, but kept shooting. Kabri returned fire, dropping two masked shooters near the catwalk.
These weren’t cops.
These were Fred’s men.
Clean gear. No identifiers. No sirens.
Kabri dragged Jamil back behind a forklift. Blood pooled around his friend’s boot. Jamil was pale, but his jaw was clenched tight.
“They knew,” Jamil muttered. “Fred sold us out.”
Kabri didn't speak. His eyes were already cold with understanding.
The warehouse was a kill box.
He’d seen it before.
Fred had done this once in Naples—eliminated three of his own crew after they demanded a cut of a side deal. Kabri hadn’t believed it then. He believed it now.
Jamil coughed. Blood speckled his lips.
“Go,” he said. “I’ll cover you.”
“No.”
“I’m not walking out of here, brother. You know that.”
The look they shared wasn’t one of defeat—it was recognition. A silent oath remembered. Kabri nodded once.
Then he moved.
The next few minutes blurred—gunshots, flames, screams. Kabri used every shadow, every blind angle, every lesson learned in years of war to escape. He climbed through ventilation, slid through sewage channels, and disappeared into the London night like a memory being erased.
By the time the authorities arrived, the warehouse was nothing but fire and smoke.
Three bodies burned beyond recognition.
Fred's version of the truth would say Kabri died too.
But that was the first lie in a long line of many.
Kabri survived.
Jamil did not.
And somewhere beneath that dark London sky, a ghost was born.
A man with no name. No country. No past.
Just blood... and the memory of a brother who bled for gold.
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Chapter 53
Smoke curled into the morning sky like a ghost rising.The small village on the edge of Hodeidah was nothing more than a cluster of broken stone homes and sand-caked shanties. The silence was eerie, shattered only by the occasional creak of metal or the distant whimper of something too scared to cry.Saeed—once Kabri—moved like a shadow through the alleyways, rifle low, every step a calculated breath.The intel had been clear: Fred was using the route to smuggle both weapons and “messengers” across the Red Sea. But what they’d found here wasn’t just another hideout.It was a human cage.The militia had scattered the moment Saeed’s squad breached the perimeter. Yusuf’s men swept through buildings with ruthless precision. The ground was littered with empty bullet casings and shouts in Arabic, English, French. Commands. Pleas.But it wasn’t the resistance that caught Saeed’s eye.It was the small figure chained to a rusted pipe in the back of a crumbling shed.A boy.Maybe ten.Maybe you
Chapter 52
The desert was merciless at night.It didn’t chill. It stung. The wind came dry and quick, hissing over rusted fences and broken walls like it remembered the battles once fought on this land—and demanded more blood to water it.Saeed Al-Rai—once Kabri—knelt beside a cracked mud barrier, scanning the horizon through a pair of military-grade thermals. The convoy was late.Too late.Behind him, Yusuf crouched, tapping commands into a rugged satellite pad, the screen dimmed to avoid attention. Around them, six other fighters—lean men from Yusuf’s elite squad, all draped in sand-washed keffiyehs—lay silent in the dust, rifles aimed toward the narrow dirt road that split the wasteland in two.“It’s him,” Saeed whispered.Three heat signatures had just turned the corner, barely visible on the feed. Two box trucks, armored underneath. And a Land Rover—Fred’s signature for high-value ops.Fred wasn’t in it. Of course not. He never touched dirt.But his money was.And his future.Yusuf turned,
Chapter 51
The wind tore through the courtyard of Evelyn's ancestral home, thrashing against the stone like a scorned ghost. She stood at the window, arms crossed, eyes lost to the faraway gray that blanketed the hills.She’d heard it from Yusuf’s men.Kabri—dead in an explosion outside Dundee. Nothing left but flame, twisted metal, and silence.They said he was chasing a lead on Fred’s supply routes when the building collapsed.They said it was quick.They said he was gone.She didn’t believe a word of it.Evelyn Fredrickson hadn’t survived a life raised under the shadow of a man like her father without learning to smell lies. And everything about Kabri’s “death” reeked of the same stench that had clung to Fred her whole life—suspicion hidden beneath a shroud of theatrics.Kabri was smart. He was quiet. Too calculated to die in an unannounced blast.No body. No prints. No CCTV.Just silence—and a burned patch of land.Evelyn had read this play before. It was a ghost’s story. Kabri was no ghost.
Chapter 50
Saeed Al-Rai arrived in Inverness wrapped in mist and silence.The Scottish Highlands loomed beyond the city in quiet majesty—dark pine ridges stretching toward the heavens like frozen green waves. But Saeed wasn’t here for the view.He was here to bleed a kingdom from the inside.And to do that, he had to slip into its veins.The residence was a towering 19th-century manor on the outskirts of town—stone walls, wrought iron gates, a forgotten jewel once used for trade delegations during oil summits between the Gulf and the British state.Now, it belonged to Fares Al-Mustaan, a minor Bahraini diplomat who fancied himself a kingmaker in exile.Saeed had no interest in oil or politics.But Al-Mustaan hosted monthly salons—gatherings of old arms dealers, ex-intelligence ghosts, European aristocrats with scandals buried beneath ivy—and every now and then, a whisper from Fred’s Scottish network passed through his walls.Saeed would be there when it did.His invitation came sealed in wax, de
Chapter 49
The air in the Naples clinic reeked of antiseptic and hidden truths. In the underground operating room of Dr. Vinko Marelli—a ghost surgeon who didn’t exist in any legal database—Kabri lay still under the cold lights, his eyes covered with surgical gauze, heart steady.The room hummed with quiet steel. Vinko, a former army medic turned identity sculptor for the underworld’s elite, didn’t speak unless necessary. He had worked on arms dealers, cartel defectors, and even a fallen prince from Oman.Now he was working on a ghost who used to be Kabri.Two weeks had passed since the staged explosion in Split. Every news outlet covering the Balkans had run some version of the same story: Interpol confirms identity of Algerian mercenary killed in coastal explosion. Photos. Forensics. Obituaries. Anonymous quotes from a neighbor.Fred’s people bought it. So did Yusuf’s. Even Evelyn—he assumed—had mourned him briefly, then folded back into the shadows of her own family mystery.But Kabri wasn’t
Chapter 48
The night was colder than usual for late spring in Split. Wind swept in off the Adriatic like whispers of ghosts. The kind of ghosts Kabri had been collecting for years—and now needed to bury.Only this time, he would be one of them.The plan was simple in theory. Brutal in execution.Fred’s Balkan logistics cell was storing shipments in a run-down fish processing plant on the southern edge of town—built into the cliffs, with access to sea tunnels for fast export.Kabri, or Saeed Al-Rai as he was now known, had infiltrated it under the identity of a Croatian-Algerian explosives consultant. The alias had cost him €12,000 and two months of pre-planted digital footprints.Tonight, that investment would pay off.He had one goal: make Kabri disappear.For good.Inside the cold chamber, where swordfish once hung on steel hooks, Kabri wired six barrels of fertilizer-based fuel to a set of detonators. Two were real. Four were forensics candy—designed to convince Interpol and Fred’s spies that
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