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CHAPTER 40: A Devil’s Bargain
The night air in Zain’s fallback bunker was sharp and metallic. Beneath the earth’s crust, where light didn’t reach and the walls felt like a tomb, the last fragments of his empire tried to hold form.Zain stood in front of the flickering holographic table, jaw locked, eyes scanning the tactical reports that streamed in from the activated Protocol Shadow units.Lines of red blips blinked and vanished. One by one. Base after base. Node after node.Failure.Again.“Shadow team Delta gone silent. No trace.”“Echo unit terminated on insertion. Mansion defenses were already primed, like they knew”Zain didn’t wait for the last operator’s full sentence. He slammed his fist into the control panel, and sparks shot out with a hiss. The holo-map glitched and dimmed.“They knew, damn it! They were waiting.”Harper. Silvana. Aiden.Somehow, they were always one step ahead.The Cold Units from Helsinki had been expected to sweep through Romanov’s last strongholds, cutting through Harper’s digital
Chapter 156
The silence in Zain’s war room was suffocating.Not a soul moved. His top analysts stared at their darkened screens in disbelief. One after another, key communication terminals flickered and died, followed by system-wide failures cascading through Stavos’ encrypted servers. Zain stood at the center like a man watching his empire disintegrate in slow motion—except it wasn’t slow. It was swift. Ruthless. Surgical.“What the hell is happening?” he growled, pacing in tight circles. “Run diagnostics on the black protocol cache! I want a full systems sweep NOW!”One of his top tech specialists, Arvo, was already drenched in sweat. “Sir… Protocol Crimson was designed to erase all data trails, but this… this is something else. We’re not just blind we’re disconnected from everything. Every financial conduit, every black channel, every vault account”Zain’s hand struck the nearest console, smashing its surface and sending sparks flying. “We designed Protocol Crimson to protect us in case of exp
chapter 155
The hum beneath the Romanov estate turned into a distant vibration—low, menacing, rhythmic. At first, it was barely noticeable. But as the seconds ticked by, it intensified, causing the reinforced lights in the eastern control corridor to flicker once… twice… then stabilize in a dim red glow.Silvana’s hand froze over the keyboard. Her breath caught.“Harper, what is Crimson?” Aiden demanded, stepping forward, eyes darting toward the live monitor where the alert still blinked:“PROTOCOL CRIMSON: INITIATED”Harper’s voice was terse over comms.Crimson isn’t a purge—it’s sabotage. It’s Zain’s fallback protocol meant to collapse physical infrastructure connected to compromised data lines. If he believes a facility is lost, he triggers Crimson to destabilize and erase it—physically.Silvana’s pupils dilated.Are you telling me he just set off a failsafe beneath our feet?A beat. “Yes.”Deep in the substructure of the Romanov estate, old ventilation shafts began to groan. Behind sealed se
chapter 154
The air inside Zain’s war room crackled with a quiet, manic energy. The walls—steel-plated and lined with secure monitors—flickered with rapidly shifting data, command-line scripts, and blinking red security alerts. Zain stood at the center, his right hand clenched into a fist, the other hovering over the digital command panel.He pressed his palm onto the biometric scanner."Initiate BLACK PROTOCOL – Level 9 authorization – Executor Z."The system paused.A moment later, a sterile voice responded.> “Black Protocol confirmed. Commencing purge of all linked assets and communication lines. This cannot be undone. Are you certain?”Zain’s eyes narrowed, heart pounding as he gave the word that would alter the entire battlefield:> “Execute.”In an instant, the screens went dark.From offshore shell corporations to private bank vaults in Dubai, from falsified board records to illegal fund transfers through dummy foundations—all vanished. Encryption wiped, servers fried, backups purged.It
chapter 153
The safe house remained cloaked in eerie quiet, save for the constant hum of surveillance equipment and the muffled footsteps of rotating security personnel. In a back room heavily fortified and dimly lit, Harper sat across from Bryden, a monitor glowing between them with shifting schematics—maps, bunker layouts, and encrypted diagrams all fed from Romanov’s intelligence banks and Zain’s tapped channels.Bryden looked worn. Though no longer in handcuffs, the weight of betrayal and abandonment etched deep lines across his youthful face. His eyes flickered from the monitor to Harper.“He’ll activate the Black Protocol,” he said, voice taut. “If he feels even the slightest tremor of collapse, Zain will wipe every asset tied to him—Stavos, the financial shell corps, server backups, even loyalists. He’ll turn the entire board to ash if it means no one walks away with anything.”Harper leaned forward. “We figured he might, but tell me how. What triggers it?”“There’s a kill-switch, metaphor
chapter 152
Detective Harper sat alone in the secured ops room, the blue glow of multiple monitors painting shadows across his focused expression. With Braise still in custody and Bryden stashed in a safehouse, it was time to follow the next thread—Amelia Reyes.Harper's fingers moved quickly over the keyboard as he pulled up decrypted metadata from previously stored communication logs. Thanks to a deep sweep initiated through Romanov's internal network, they had gained access to transmissions that had bypassed the mansion's firewalls disguised as maintenance pings, wellness app updates, and file sync requests. Someone had been clever. But not clever enough.“Encrypted traffic… origin traced to the mansion’s east wing. Outbound signal spikes between midnight and 3 a.m.,” he muttered. “And again… thirty minutes before the Zia extraction.”His jaw tightened.Click.The logs weren’t just showing transmissions; they pointed to relays buried in the mansion’s hidden architecture. Routes Amelia would k
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