2025-08-06 09:58:32The air inside The Garrison felt ten degrees warmer than it should. The pub was half-lit and half-silent, the kind of old London joint where conversations stuck to walls like cigarette smoke. It was the kind of place where men talked in murmurs, where every pint glass came with a secret, and the mirrors behind the bar watched more than they reflected.
Kabri sat across from Jamil in a back booth, their duffel bags tucked beneath the table. No one looked at them. No one dared. Wordless tension hung between them like a curtain. Jamil’s shoulder was freshly stitched, patched up in the back room of a Turkish clinic an hour earlier, his arm now bound in a sling made from a ripped scarf.
Fred hadn’t said where he’d be. He never did. He just said to meet here at midnight—“business finished, then family drinks.” That’s what Fred called it. Family. A word that had lost meaning long ago.
Kabri leaned back, eyes moving over the pub’s entrance like a hunting hawk. His face was still unreadable. Every time Jamil tried to speak, he stopped. Nothing felt right anymore. Not after that night.
"You still thinking about the trap?" Jamil finally asked.
Kabri didn’t answer.
Jamil tapped the table lightly. "I know what it looks like. But maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe someone else knew about the lift."
Kabri’s jaw tensed. “It was Fred’s job. Fred’s codes. Fred’s decoy blueprints.”
Jamil shrugged, though the pain flickered through his face. “Still. We walk in, walk out, and walk into bullets? Someone else might've tailed the info.”
Kabri didn’t believe in coincidences. Not in their line of work. Especially not when Fred had spent the last three years grooming them like attack dogs—training them, refining their skills, pushing them into harder and bloodier assignments across Europe. For what?
Fred liked to say he built men. But men built from pain and silence don’t last forever.
The pub door creaked open, breaking Kabri’s thoughts.
In stepped Fred.
He was older than most bosses you'd find running a crime empire—pushing fifty, with a taste for custom wool coats and a limp earned from some bar fight in Marseille years back. But his eyes still cut through glass and steel. Dark. Cunning. Always calculating.
Tonight, he wore a pinstriped suit under a heavy coat and walked with that same deliberate confidence—the kind that made weaker men shift in their seats. Behind him trailed Mason, one of his enforcers, a brick of a man with no eyebrows and an ever-present toothpick.
Fred reached the booth with a slow grin and slid into the seat opposite Kabri. Jamil gave a short nod. Fred responded with a mock salute.
“Bloody hell,” Fred muttered, flicking his lighter. “You two look like you crawled out of a war zone.”
Jamil smirked, though he winced as he did. “Just your usual Saturday night in the city.”
Fred lit his cigarette and exhaled slowly, watching the smoke curl toward the ceiling like it had something to say.
“And yet…” Fred reached beneath the table, pulled the duffel bags into his lap, unzipped one. His eyes gleamed at the sight of the silver cases inside.
“You boys did good.”
Kabri said nothing. He watched Fred closely.
Fred zipped the bag shut and pushed it aside. “That vault job was clean. Cleaner than Naples. Cleaner than Antwerp. Jesus, even I didn’t think you’d make it out alive.”
Jamil shot Kabri a look. The sarcasm wasn’t missed.
Fred leaned back and signaled the waitress. Two whiskeys and a lager. He turned back to them, the fatherly warmth in his voice as fake as the teeth in his mouth.
“You know what I like about you two?” he asked.
Kabri didn’t respond.
Fred tapped the table with his cigarette. “You’re loyal. Old-school. No phones, no leaks, no loose ends. Just bullets and results. Sons in crime, you two. That’s what I call you.”
Jamil raised an eyebrow. “That why we got lit up on the way out?”
Fred didn’t blink. “What are you talking about?”
“Three men. Waiting. Not police. Professional gear. They weren’t guessing. They were sent.”
Fred’s face turned still. Not defensive. Not surprised. Still.
“If I wanted you dead, Jamil,” Fred said calmly, “you wouldn’t be sitting here drinking Lagavulin with a stitched arm.”
“Not dead,” Kabri said. “Just scared. Maybe shaken.”
Fred turned to him. “I don’t deal in ‘maybe.’ Either you think I sold you out, or you don’t.”
“I don’t deal in belief,” Kabri replied. “I deal in facts.”
Fred smiled coldly. “Then get your facts straight, mate. I don’t cut my sons off mid-job.”
The drinks arrived. Fred took the whiskey and downed it in one shot.
“Listen,” he said, wiping his mouth. “Word on the wire is that the Belgian syndicate knew something was up. You boys moved fast, but info travels faster. We’ll trace the source. Could’ve been Mason, could’ve been the Turks, could’ve been some greedy bastard who sold us out. But it wasn’t me.”
Jamil stirred his drink. “So what now?”
Fred leaned in. “Now we celebrate. Diamonds will be moved by Friday. Payouts will be sorted by Sunday. After that, I want you boys on a job in Marseille. Light work. Arms shipment transfer. Easy pay. You’ve earned it.”
Kabri was quiet.
Fred raised his glass again. “To the code. To the brotherhood.”
Jamil hesitated, then clinked glasses with him.
Kabri didn’t move.
Fred’s eyes lingered on him. "You’ve got questions. I see that. Ask."
Kabri finally spoke. “If we’d died in that warehouse, would you have buried us, or just replaced us?”
Fred’s lips curled into a smirk. “Both, probably. But I’d have cried. Swear to God.”
The table laughed, but the laughter rang hollow.
Later that night, after Fred and his guards left, Kabri and Jamil stood in the alley behind the pub. London’s sky was dark again, heavy with secrets.
“You believe him?” Jamil asked, lighting a cigarette with shaky fingers.
Kabri didn’t answer immediately.
“I don’t trust belief. I trust patterns. And Fred’s pattern… is survival.”
“You saying he’s planning something?”
“I’m saying we need to watch the watchers.”
Jamil exhaled smoke. “I’ve bled for that man.”
Kabri turned to him. “So did the three who burned in Naples. You think they didn’t?”
Jamil was silent for a moment.
“Then why not walk away?”
Kabri looked out across the black river where the city lights shimmered like broken promises.
“Because this isn’t over. It’s just started.”
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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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