2025-08-06 09:59:27The London rain had turned to sleet by midnight, whispering against rooftops and alley bricks like a confession from the sky. In the dim-lit backroom of a Turkish barbershop in Kilburn—long since closed for the night—Jamil crouched beneath a floorboard, his breath measured, hands moving carefully through dust and old nails.
This place had once belonged to Farouk, a retired gunrunner who owed Fred favors that no one ever detailed aloud. Fred used it now as a rotating dropbox—a safehouse for codes, stolen IDs, and data drives too dangerous to keep in central caches. Kabri had never liked it. The smell of burnt shaving cream and mold made him twitch.
But tonight, Kabri wasn’t here.
And Jamil needed that.
He had told Kabri he was heading out to secure the next meet location. It wasn’t a lie. It just wasn’t the only thing he planned to do.
Jamil lifted a steel box wrapped in thick duct tape from the hollow beneath the floor. Dust clung to its sides like dead skin. He laid it on the cracked linoleum tile, pried it open with a switchblade, and exhaled slowly.
Inside: a burner phone with three saved contacts, two memory cards labeled “OBELISK,” and a small folded envelope—aged, creased, but still sealed with wax.
He didn’t touch the letter. Not tonight.
Instead, he pulled the phone apart, took out the SIM, and slotted it into his current burner. After a few seconds of buffering, a series of encrypted messages lit up the screen.
Sender: GHOST_8
Subject: 2019 JOB – Sarajevo
1/3 – “Jamil. They never knew you flipped. But Fred found out. RUN.”
2/3 – “You kept the disk. You should’ve burned it.”
3/3 – “You won’t survive this war. Neither will he.”
Jamil’s jaw tightened.
The Sarajevo job was supposed to be buried. Deep. Four years ago, when he and Kabri were still climbing Fred’s ranks, they’d been sent to intercept a warlord in Bosnia with ties to rogue NATO operatives. Fred’s instructions were simple: eliminate the target, secure the ledger, leave no witnesses.
They had done just that.
At least, Kabri thought they had.
What Kabri never knew was that Jamil had made a second copy of the ledger—a digital backup—and sent it to an anonymous source tied to Interpol.
It was the only time Jamil had ever lied to Kabri.
And it was the only reason Fred hadn’t killed them both.
He remembered Sarajevo in flashes. The snow. The hill where they set the ambush. The flame grenade Kabri tossed into the warlord’s van. The moment the laptop inside burst into sparks and Jamil thought, for a second, that maybe the evidence had been destroyed.
But it hadn’t.
Because Jamil had already cloned the drive a day earlier—back when he had doubts. Back when Fred started referring to people like “cargo” and “currency,” not humans.
He hadn’t planned to betray Fred. Not originally.
But he had planned for an escape.
And now, the messages proved Fred had finally found out.
Back at the safehouse, Kabri leaned against the windowsill, scanning the dark street below. He’d noticed Jamil had taken the longer route back from their last job. It wasn’t like him. Jamil didn’t detour. He didn’t waste fuel or time.
He worked with precision.
But something had shifted since Manchester.
And Kabri could feel it.
He moved back to the map of England pinned to the wall. It was covered in red threads, black dots, and yellow circles. Their targets. Drop zones. Exits.
And Fred’s empire.
Every string led back to him.
Kabri had been slowly charting it for months. Fred didn’t know. Yusuf didn’t know. Not even Jamil.
It wasn’t betrayal—not yet. It was insurance.
Insurance for the day someone decided that Kabri, too, had become expendable.
His phone buzzed.
A message from Fred.
“Need you and Jamil in Soho tomorrow. Warehouse 47B. Time-sensitive.”
Kabri stared at the screen a long time.
Then typed:
“We’ll be there.”
Three hours later, Jamil entered the apartment silently, soaked in sleet. Kabri didn’t turn from the window.
“You look like hell,” Kabri said flatly.
“Storm hit harder than expected.”
“Storms don’t make people late.”
Jamil walked to the kitchenette, poured a glass of water, and leaned against the counter. “You checking my clock now?”
Kabri finally looked at him. “When I don’t hear from my brother for four hours, yeah. I start checking.”
Jamil didn’t answer. Just drank.
Kabri crossed the room and stood in front of him.
“You still keeping things from me?”
Jamil met his gaze. “What kind of question is that?”
“The kind that keeps people alive.”
Jamil laughed once, dry and short. “No secrets. Just ghosts.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
Kabri nodded. But something in Jamil’s eyes was wrong. A flash of regret, maybe. Or fear. Maybe both.
Kabri turned away.
“Fred wants us in Soho. Warehouse 47B. Something urgent.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Early. Be sharp.”
Jamil exhaled. “He ever feel like a leash to you?”
“Every day.”
“Why do we still wear it?”
Kabri didn’t respond.
That night, as Kabri slept with his pistol under the pillow, Jamil took the steel box from his backpack, stared at the “OBELISK” drives, and considered throwing them into the Thames.
But he didn’t.
Instead, he rewrote the message logs and set a delay trigger—five days. If he didn’t cancel it in time, the contents of the Sarajevo ledger would be sent to every major law enforcement channel across Europe.
Insurance for Kabri.
Just in case the ghost of Sarajevo rose again.
In Sarajevo, 2019 – FLASHBACK
It was snowing sideways when the van exploded, and Kabri’s scream still echoed in Jamil’s ears. The flames reached the third floor of the nearby building, lighting up the evening like a cursed sunrise. Blood stained Kabri’s shoulder—cut from shrapnel—and Jamil pulled him behind a stone wall, breathless, stunned.
The warlord had died instantly. But the laptop inside—that ledger—was reduced to ash.
Or so Kabri believed.
Jamil had already cloned it the day before during recon. Because he’d overheard Fred speaking on a secure call. Speaking not about the warlord, but about the families being trafficked. Children being traded as assets. And Fred’s laughter when he said, “Their tears are just receipts.”
That night, Jamil made his decision.
He told Kabri they had done their job.
And that lie would follow them for the rest of their lives.
Back in London, the wind howled through the alley outside their flat. Kabri’s eyes fluttered open in the dark, instincts sharper than dreams.
For a second, he thought he heard Jamil talking in the other room.
But when he checked, Jamil was asleep on the couch, face turned toward the window, fingers twitching as if grasping for something in his sleep.
Kabri stood there, silent, watching his brother.
He didn’t know yet.
But something was unraveling.
And blood had memory.
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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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