Location: Berlin, Germany – The Spree Riverfront
Date: November 22, 2014
Berlin in November felt like a wheezing lung—cold, damp, and smelling of diesel and old stone. Maddy Thorne sat in the back of a nondescript black van, her face illuminated by the ghost-blue glow of three different monitors.
At twenty-four, she was the Grey Sector’s premier "Infiltrator." She wore a tactical compression suit under a heavy civilian parka, her fingers dancing across a keyboard she had modified herself to be silent.
"Signal is green," Maddy whispered into her comms. "Director Vane, I’m at the back-door firewall of the oligarch's penthouse. Moving in."
"Copy, Thorne," Vane’s voice crackled in her ear from the command center. "Secure the drive. It contains the ledger for the 'Chimera' accounts. Once you have it, exit via the roof. Extraction is three minutes out."
The Infiltration
Maddy didn't use a grappling hook or a glass cutter. She used physics.
She walked to the service entrance, pulled a small, hand-wound ultrasonic transducer from her pocket, and pressed it against the glass of the door. The high-frequency vibrations turned the molecular structure of the tempered glass into a liquid-like state for exactly three seconds. She pushed through without a sound.
Inside the penthouse, she moved like smoke. She bypassed the laser grid by puffing a tiny cloud of powdered cornstarch from a travel-sized makeup bottle to reveal the beams, then contorted her body through the gaps with the grace of an acrobat.
The safe wasn't behind a painting; it was the floor lamp in the office. Maddy didn't try to crack the code. She unscrewed the bulb, touched a 9-volt battery to the socket's copper contact points, and sent a specific voltage spike that forced the safe's digital "brain" to reboot into factory-default settings.
Click.
She grabbed the sleek, silver hard drive. "Asset secured. Moving to extraction."
The Ambush
Maddy hit the roof, the freezing Berlin wind whipping her hair. She saw the extraction team—four men in grey tactical gear, muzzles suppressed. But they weren't looking for threats. They were looking at her.
"Where’s the chopper?" Maddy asked, her "Strange" intuition suddenly screaming.
The lead operative didn't answer. He raised his rifle.
"Direct orders, Thorne," the man said. "The Director says you’ve seen too much of the ledger."
Vane. Maddy didn't wait. She dove to the left just as a suppressed round hissed past her ear, shattering the brickwork behind her. She didn't have a gun—the Grey Sector didn't want her leaving ballistic footprints. She had a bag of "junk."
She reached into her pocket, pulled out a handful of heavy-duty ball bearings, and threw them onto the slick, frost-covered roof tiles. Two of the operatives lost their footing, sliding toward the edge.
She sprinted for the ledge of the building, the river Spree churning fifty feet below.
"Thorne! Stop!" Vane’s voice came through her earpiece, no longer cold but predatory. "You were a brilliant experiment, Maddy. But every experiment has a conclusion."
"I'm rewriting the ending, Director," Maddy hissed.
She felt the sharp, hot bite of a bullet in her left shoulder. The force spun her around, her blood spraying crimson against the white frost. She felt the edge of the roof disappear beneath her boots.
The Cold Dark
She hit the water like a slab of concrete. The Spree was a liquid grave, sucking the heat from her body in seconds. She stayed under, her lungs burning, watching the searchlights of her own agency sweep the surface like the eyes of a hungry god.
She kicked, dragging herself toward a rusted drainage pipe. Her shoulder was a scream of white-hot agony.
She crawled into the filth of the sewer, shivering violently. She pulled out her agency-issue burner phone. It was already dead—remotely fried by Vane. She was officially Burned. No name. No medical. No backup.
She reached into her medical kit. It was empty. The "cleaners" had replaced her morphine with saline.
Maddy looked at her wound. The bullet was still in there. She grabbed a heavy-duty industrial stapler she’d swiped from the penthouse desk and a half-empty bottle of high-proof schnapps from a trash heap in the tunnel.
She poured the alcohol over the metal staples and the wound, her vision blurring from the pain. She bit down on her parka sleeve and, with a shaking hand, fired three steel staples into her own flesh to close the artery.
"Strange," she whispered, her voice a ragged sob in the dark. "You want strange? I'll show you strange."
She clutched the silver hard drive to her chest. She wasn't dead. And in the world of shadows, that was the most dangerous mistake Director Vane could ever make.
ns216.73.216.66da2
and then Add to home screen.