2025-08-06 09:59:07Manchester’s rain wasn’t like London’s. It came down faster, harder, and without apology. Each drop sounded like a tap on the windowpane of fate, and for Kabri, fate had always knocked before it kicked in the door.
The van rolled to a stop outside a derelict paint factory in the outskirts of Manchester’s Redbank district. Once a center of trade and machinery, now a wasteland of rusted iron and wet concrete. The kind of place the world had forgotten, and criminals remembered fondly.
Kabri turned off the ignition and looked over at Jamil in the passenger seat. The sling was gone now, but the bandages remained under his jacket. His eyes were sharper again. The adrenaline that had been dulled by pain in London had returned.
“You remember the route?” Kabri asked, voice steady.
Jamil pulled out a sketch of the factory layout, traced the route from memory. “Left gate entrance, down through the first hallway. Delivery’s in Bay 3. We make the handoff, confirm the crates, and bounce.”
“No mistakes.”
“Never.”
Behind them, two more vans pulled up. The convoy was lean—three vehicles, six men total. But this wasn’t a war zone. This was what Fred had promised: a quiet job, a clean transaction, and a golden handshake.
They’d be delivering a shipment of Eastern European rifles—Bulgarian-made, polymer-based, unregistered—to a shell buyer linked to Interpol insiders. The real buyer, no doubt, was someone higher up the crime food chain who needed to make sure his name didn’t surface in the fallout. But none of that mattered to Kabri.
All that mattered was that Fred had made the call himself. And if this went clean, it meant two things: one, Fred was still feeding them real jobs; two, they were back in the inner circle.
Kabri opened the back doors of the van. Inside, nestled in crates lined with foam and blankets, lay thirty-seven rifles. AK-200s, some new, others freshly reassembled. Each one was marked in Cyrillic, registered under a false arms license out of Zagreb.
“Looks tidy,” Jamil said, nodding.
Kabri clicked the safety on one of the weapons. “Tidy is how we walk out alive.”
As they moved into the warehouse, boots echoing against the damp concrete, Kabri’s mind did not rest. Something about this felt too simple. The job had been approved too quickly. No resistance, no tail, no encrypted calls—just a courier message dropped at their safehouse, signed with Fred’s real initials.
In their world, the simpler a job looked, the more teeth it had hidden beneath.
Inside the factory, the overhead lights flickered like they hadn't been used in a decade. Water dripped from steel beams, falling onto crates and old forklifts. A stench of oil and mildew hung in the air.
The meeting point was an old loading bay—Bay 3—still intact with rusted rails for trolleys and an office window shattered from the inside.
Two men were already there.
One wore a long black coat and dark gloves, his face angular and expressionless. The other was shorter, stockier, dressed in a Manchester United hoodie and black boots. They stood like men who didn’t need introductions.
“Right on time,” the tall man said in a posh but hollow British accent. “That’s rare these days.”
“Better to be early and live,” Kabri replied.
The shorter man stepped forward and held out a scanner. Kabri motioned toward the van, and two of their crew began unloading crates.
As the scanner blinked green across each metal box, Kabri watched the tall man’s every movement. There was something unsettling about how calm he was. Not cautious. Not curious. Just… calm.
“Thirty-seven pieces,” the short man confirmed. “Clean tags. Looks good.”
“Payment?” Jamil asked.
The tall man gestured toward a briefcase resting on a trolley nearby. “Digital wire. Vault wallet. You’ll get access code once we leave the area.”
Kabri stepped closer, hand extended.
“No offense,” he said, “but digital keys can be corrupted. Let’s confirm the unlock first.”
The tall man smiled faintly. “A cautious professional. Fred was right about you.”
That stopped Kabri.
He didn’t respond. Not outwardly. But something tightened in his gut.
“You speak to Fred recently?” Kabri asked, voice low.
“Just last night,” the man said, eyes cold. “Said you two were his best. Like sons, he said.”
Jamil glanced at Kabri. The exact words Fred had used just days earlier.
Kabri moved to the briefcase, flipped it open, and activated the encrypted keypad. A small screen blinked red, then green.
Balance: €1,000,000 – Available Now.
Clean.
Kabri shut the case and nodded. “Looks solid. You can take the gear.”
The men wasted no time. In under five minutes, the rifles were loaded into a black SUV that had been idling around the corner. No logos. No plates. The two strangers didn’t linger.
As they left, the tall man gave Kabri one last look.
“You know,” he said, “Fred may be paranoid, but he’s rarely wrong about people.”
Then they vanished.
Outside, under the cloak of nightfall, Kabri and Jamil lit cigarettes and stood near the first van.
“That guy,” Jamil said, “he was Interpol.”
Kabri nodded slowly. “Or someone who wants us to think he is.”
“He didn’t blink once the whole time. That’s trained behavior. Not street. Agency maybe.”
“Doesn’t matter. The payment was clean. That’s what we came for.”
Jamil looked over the horizon, where the dim glow of Manchester bled into the sky.
“You still thinking about London?”
“Always.”
“Still think Fred played us?”
Kabri didn’t answer right away. He watched the drops fall from the broken eaves above them. Each one echoed like a second ticking down to something worse.
“I don’t think,” Kabri said finally. “I know.”
The debrief happened back in London, three days later.
Fred sat at a red mahogany desk in a Chelsea townhouse safehouse he rarely used. Clean walls. No pictures. The air smelled like whisky and ink.
Kabri and Jamil stood across from him.
“You pulled it off,” Fred said, his voice warm. “The buyers were impressed. Said you handled it like old-school smugglers.”
“They were quiet,” Kabri replied. “Professional.”
Fred looked pleased. “That’s because they’re not buyers. They’re shadows. The type that walks between governments and cartels. I’ve been courting them for five years. This was your audition.”
“Why now?” Jamil asked.
Fred shrugged. “Because things are moving. Europe’s changing. Borders aren’t just maps anymore. They’re business lines. And we need players I can trust.”
He stood, walked around the desk, and clapped both men on the back.
“You two? You’re not just muscle anymore. You’re part of the core.”
Kabri remained still.
Fred didn’t notice.
Or he pretended not to.
That night, Kabri sat alone in the apartment above their safehouse, reading the encrypted file Jamil had copied from the SUV’s transmission antenna during the Manchester handoff. A risky move—one Kabri hadn’t approved but secretly appreciated.
The file was a log. An ops record. And in it was a single name that made Kabri’s blood run cold.
Jamil – flagged. Red Zone. Watch for divergence. High-value, low-trust.
Below it: Kabri – possible flight risk. Dispose if compromised.
Kabri’s fingers hovered over the keyboard.
His mind moved through everything they had done—the heists, the bloodshed, the loyalty. All of it carefully documented… and none of it protected them.
Fred’s “sons in crime” were nothing more than tools.
And Jamil?
Marked for disposal.
The rain hit the window harder now. Manchester had been a test. Not for trust. For compliance.
And Kabri was already failing.
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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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