2025-08-06 09:59:48The Hollow Bridge job came with no standard playbook. No detailed maps, no recon intel. Just a black envelope, a location, and a time.
Midnight.
That was Fred’s favorite hour—when London blurred between shadow and steel, and even the law moved slower, blinking under the weight of its own fatigue. That night, the city lay drenched in mist and menace. The Thames was a dark vein pulsing beneath the bridge, sluggish and swollen from autumn rains.
Kabri checked the time: 11:52 PM.
He and Jamil sat in a black BMW M3, engine off, parked along a fenced service road fifty meters from Hollow Bridge’s underpass. Their job was simple, according to Fred: clean up the mess left by a failed courier. The guy had apparently flipped mid-run, tried to sell intel to a third party. Fred found out and “corrected” the problem.
Now it was on Kabri and Jamil to erase the trace.
But something already felt off.
Fred was never vague about cleanup. He didn’t do grey areas. He gave names, times, bullets. Tonight, he had only said:
“Burn the corpse. Leave no teeth. Deliver the metal case if it’s still intact. And for God's sake, don’t open it.”
Kabri tapped his foot.
Jamil lit a cigarette and rolled down the window. “You nervous?”
Kabri kept his eyes on the bridge. “When Fred says, ‘don’t open it,’ what’s the first thing that comes to your mind?”
“Open it.”
Kabri smirked. “Exactly.”
They stepped out of the car and crossed the wet tarmac silently. Kabri had the Glock, suppressed. Jamil carried a small crowbar and a waterproof duffel bag. They reached the stairwell beneath the bridge—the iron steps rusted, half-swallowed by weeds. The only sound was the occasional hum of tires overhead and the wind kissing the steel beams above.
They moved fast and quiet, like wolves bred for back alleys.
Beneath Hollow Bridge, the underpass sprawled wider than expected. Broken cement pillars stood like gravestones, graffiti bleeding across them like tribal war paint. And there, against the far pillar, slumped a body wrapped in plastic.
Kabri approached first.
Male. Mid-thirties. Shot twice in the chest, once in the throat. Dried blood crusted over a shattered jaw. He was still warm.
“Fresh,” Kabri murmured.
“Too fresh,” Jamil added. “We’re not cleaners. This isn’t our timing.”
Kabri crouched and peeled open the plastic just enough to inspect the corpse. The man’s ID hung from a blood-smeared lanyard.
Name: Ramin Asfour
Alias: Sparrow
Clearance: Internal – Fred’s Circle
Kabri stared at the badge, then back at Jamil. “He was one of Fred’s inside men.”
Jamil frowned. “Then why is he dead?”
They looked around.
No metal case in sight.
“I don’t like this,” Kabri said. “Something stinks.”
Jamil searched the area, flashlight sweeping across concrete and moss. He found a trail of fresh footprints leading behind a broken barricade, where a small steel case sat wedged between bricks.
He knelt.
Clean exterior. Heavy. Double-locked.
Jamil brought it to Kabri.
“He said don’t open it.”
Kabri snorted. “So?”
Jamil placed it on the ground and wedged the crowbar into the seam. “You think he’s testing us?”
“Or setting us up.”
The lid popped open with a hiss of released pressure.
Inside, padded in gray foam, sat two things:
A microdrive.
And a severed thumb.
Both stared up at them like artifacts from a darker world.
Jamil recoiled. “Jesus…”
Kabri looked at the microdrive. It had a red insignia on it—one he hadn’t seen before. A circle within a triangle. Government? Private military? Unknown.
“Not your typical courier drop,” Jamil muttered.
Kabri closed the lid. “We take this straight to Fred. No copies. No detours. No errors.”
But his gut told him they were already too late.
Back in the car, they drove in silence.
The rain had thickened, drumming hard against the windshield.
At 12:43 AM, Fred called.
Kabri answered on speaker.
“Status?” Fred asked, flat and cold.
“Body found. Double-tap execution. We retrieved the case. Intact.”
“Was the drive inside?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” Fred said. “Bring it to Dock 17. South Gate. Burn the body and ditch your clothes.”
“Roger that.”
Fred hung up.
No questions.
No curiosity.
And that confirmed it.
Fred knew more than he said.
They reached Dock 17 an hour later. A shipping container site by the docks, shielded from cameras and police routes by paid-off logistics crews. Fred had owned it for years. When they arrived, the gates were already open.
An SUV idled near the edge of the shipping lane.
A man stepped out—face hidden under a beanie, coat collar raised. Kabri recognized him. Lionel. Fred’s “postman.” When something needed disappearing—fast, quiet, forever—Lionel handled it.
He didn’t speak.
Just opened the SUV’s trunk.
Kabri placed the case inside and shut it without a word.
Lionel handed him a burner phone.
Kabri glanced at Jamil. “Why the new device?”
Lionel only said: “Protocol.”
Then drove away.
Later that night, as Kabri burned their clothes in a barrel fire near an abandoned rail yard, he watched Jamil from the corner of his eye. His friend looked distant. Distracted.
“Something’s eating you,” Kabri said.
Jamil stared at the flames. “It’s this whole job, man. You ever feel like Fred’s not cleaning up loose ends, but manufacturing them?”
Kabri raised a brow. “You saying Ramin didn’t flip?”
“I’m saying he might’ve been silenced. Maybe he knew too much.”
Kabri didn’t respond immediately.
Then: “You trust Fred?”
Jamil’s answer came too slow.
“More than most.”
“But not completely.”
“Do you?”
Kabri’s eyes stayed on the fire. “I don’t even trust us.”
Unbeknownst to them, back at Dock 17, Fred stood in a darkened control room inside the main container office. His personal terminal showed a video feed of Kabri and Jamil at Hollow Bridge—recorded via a hidden lens embedded in the underpass.
He watched as they opened the case.
Saw their expressions.
Watched how Kabri’s hands trembled ever so slightly before they closed the lid.
A man stepped in behind Fred.
Yusuf.
“You were right,” Yusuf said. “They opened it.”
Fred didn’t take his eyes off the screen.
“And they saw the thumb.”
Yusuf chuckled. “Think they suspect?”
“Jamil might.”
Fred turned, eyes cold. “Keep watching him. But Kabri? He still believes.”
Yusuf poured a drink. “For now.”
Fred reached into his drawer, pulled out a second case.
Identical to the one Kabri had delivered.
He opened it.
No thumb.
No drive.
Just a single note:
“One betrays for gold. The other for truth.”
Fred smiled.
“They just don’t know which is which.”
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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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