ZARA — ROOFTOP, LONDON DOCKS — 01:40 AM.
The night tasted like rain and diesel. From our rooftop perch above the old textile warehouse, London looked like a city that wanted to forget things quietly — except tonight it wasn't forgetting; it was about to remember.
Leo was a silhouette beside me: jacket up, binoculars pressed to his face. I hunched down in the cold, the folder from Dubai tucked under my thigh like contraband. The thumb drive was still gone. Noor had the drive. Noor had the skiff. Noor thought he had the advantage.
"You nervous?" he asked, voice low. He'd taken to asking stupid questions that were actually invitations — because the answer tore at both of us.
"Always," I said. "That's how I know I'm alive."
We scanned the yard below. A pair of black Range Rovers eased in like vultures. Two men with short coats and faster hands climbed out. Noor's courier — the one who had flipped on the pier — walked with a limp now and a face stitched with fear.
"Target in," Leo whispered. "Two SUVs, one courier, plus muscle. Buyer should be in the second Rover." He motioned with one finger. "On my mark we drop to the fire escape. Quiet. No fireworks unless necessary."
We breathed the same plan into our lungs and climbed down the rusted ladder. The world tightened to a line of backlit men, to boot heels on planks, to the small, precise choreography of a sting.
At ground level, the cold hit like reality. The yard smelled like wet cardboard. Noor moved with an easy arrogance — the kind of man who believed luck was on contract. He walked to the crate as if the folder were already his. The second Rover door opened and a man stepped out with an umbrella, a scarf, an air of someone who had everything to lose and nothing to fear.
Noir placed a hand on the box and smiled. "Pleasure," he said.
I moved. Breach and quiet — two breaths and we were at the crate. I slapped my palm to the wood, thumb over the latch, and the world fragmented into shouts. A masked man on the far ridge fired. The night exploded. Men scattered. I dove behind a stack of pallets. Leo was already running, his rifle breathing controlled fire. We were in the middle of someone else's war.
Between gunfire I saw things click into place: Noor's courier made a grab for the folder, the buyer backed away, and a shadow dropped from the roof and landed like a cat. Aria. She moved with that cruel poetry — slow enough to enjoy the panic, quick enough to control it. She made the courier pivot and pointed him toward the water.
"Noir!" she called, voice silk. "Don't be sentimental."
Noor lunged for the drive during the confusion. He grabbed it and ran toward the river. Someone fired a flare. A skiff waited. It should have been the end of it. But plans go sideways.
Leo and I chased. The pier threw spray and wood. Noor made it to the dock but the skiff's motor choked. A quick hand off — the buyer shoved a briefcase into Noor's arms, and Noor sprinted for the water. I dove. My boot slipped. Leo's hand slapped my back, steady and hard, and I hauled myself forward. We hit the water knees-first, cold and unforgiving.
The skiff cut away. Noor was away. The buyer was gone. Aria was already a black shape on the pier, as if she had never been there except to leave fingerprints on our nerves. We surfaced and cursed and kicked for the ladder. The drive had slipped under a dozen hands. Noor had the folder, but not everything moves as people think. The buyer, in the chaos, left a tablet on one of the crates — a careless, human mistake. We dove for the crate and pulled the tablet free.
Leo's fingers were shaking when he thumbed it open. There were messages, shortcuts, a cached file with a different name. A manifest. Coordinates. A timestamp. And an encrypted log with a header: HQ Delivery Schedule — OP:Project Origin — Receiver: Internal. A chill threaded my spine. The tag was a direct line to command; the metadata looked official. The timestamp matched the London transfer. Someone inside the machine had coordinated the move.
"Someone on our side knew," I said. My voice was flat. The rain started, small needles on my face.
"Or someone made it look that way," Leo countered. He'd learned to distrust the obvious. "Either way, we need to talk to Rina."
We climbed back to the van soaked and silent. My hands wouldn't stop. Leo didn't say it, but his jaw worked like gears. Rina was our lifeline and our only person who might explain why a manifest labelled Internal had shown up on a buyer's tablet. We drove away from the river. The city lights blurred. The drive in my pocket slipped and slid like a rumor.
<<<<<
LEO — SAFEHOUSE OUTSKIRTS — 04:10 AM.
Rina told us to meet at a place she used once when cells were quiet: a pub that served breakfast at dawn to truck drivers and men with guilty consciences. It felt wrong — an ordinary place for an extraordinary conversation — but that was the whole point: to keep the eyes off.
She sat in a corner booth like a woman rehearsed in being invisible. She was thirty-two in the way a winter tree is thirty-two — not fragile, just weathered and full of rings. Rina's eyes flicked to us, then to the tablet I held. She didn't smile.
"Show me," she said. No preamble. No hugs. Cold coffee and colder truths.
I placed the tablet in front of her. She scrolled with a practiced thumb and then looked up with a face that had already rehearsed sorrow.
"They staged a transfer to flush a leak," she said quietly. "It was supposed to be a controlled burn. Noor was a pawn who would buy the bait and we would watch the buyers. It was a way to see which moneyed men would move Project Origin forward. We wanted the buyers on record."
"The buyers were Noor's buyers," Zara said. "Noor took the drop. He ran. Aria took advantage. Noor disappeared with the drive."
Rina's jaw tightened. "No — I authorized a staged drop. But Noor deviated. And someone in the system flagged the transfer as 'internal' to make it look like HQ-sanctioned movement. That's not how I set it up."
"Who flagged it?" Leo demanded. The table between them turned into something like evidence.
Rina looked at him and then at Zara. "I don't know for sure. That's the problem. If it were a simple mole Noor's men would have been sloppy. But this was surgical: an inner-account tagging the manifest as internal, then routing it through Noor's buyer. It indicates someone at a high level is trying to control the narrative."
"Which means?" I asked.
"Which means either someone in HQ is compromised," she said, "or someone has the credentials to spoof internal tags." Her fingers tapped the table like a metronome. "Either way, I staged the drop to flush the leak. I asked you both to be bait to draw out who was taking the file."
I felt something inside me harden. "You put us on a pier with Noor and expected us to be bait? You didn't tell us the whole plan."
She pinched the bridge of her nose. "I didn't tell you because the fewer people who knew… the cleaner the evidence. Also because I needed you to have moral distance. If you were only operatives, you might hesitate. If you were bait—" she closed her eyes and opened them with a tiny, exhausted laugh. "You'd prove your instincts. You'd find the buyers."
"You nearly got us killed," Leo said. The anger in his voice was a blunt instrument. He wanted to break and fix and he did both with the same breath.
"I know," Rina said. "And I am sorry. There was no other way I could get the network to move without spilling everything at once. There is pressure from above. The Viper—this man—has leverage. He can make the Agency tremble. He has contacts who can make men like Noor move like puppets."
"You're telling us Viper controls parts of the Agency?" I asked. The words felt overheated.
"I'm saying Viper has influence," she corrected, "and that influence has metastasized. I had to force their hand to see who would step forward to buy Project Origin. Noor's buyer? Not a small fish. He's on a list that reads like a who's who of people who buy power with currency. We have a lead thanks to the tablet — a transfer route and a buyer code. But the real problem is that the manifest was stamped internal. Someone used HQ credentials."
"How do we trust you?" Leo asked. Simple question. Explosive.
Rina's eyes softened for a second. "You don't have to. Not yet. Trust is earned by actions you can verify. I can give you documents, a route, a name and coordinates. I can also tell you someone will try to stop you from acting on it. I can't guarantee I won't be named as the orchestrator, because I will be. That's the trade."
Zara's laugh was small and sharp. "So you used us as bait and now you ask us to trust you with the butcher's bill."
"Call it leverage on the right people," Rina said. "Call it strategy. Or call it desperate. The truth is I chose the lesser evil: make a temporary compromise to pull the head of the snake out into daylight."
Leo rubbed his temple. "And Viper?"
Rina's face closed like a book. "He has deep ties to private contractors, shell companies, and a portfolio that reads like a shadow state. He calls the shots for several 'clean-up' operations. He has a name on a file here and there. He's the reason I had to stage something drastic. He holds leverage over officials in three capitals."
"Leverage how?" I asked.
"Family, blackmail, money, favors—whatever blankets a man's life so he won't speak. Viper's got a ledger. If he wants someone silent, he makes sure they pay with more than money."
I remembered my sister Selina, what had been taken. My fists clenched.
"Why tell us?" I said. "If HQ is compromised, why risk you?"
Rina's hand trembled, ever so slightly. "Because someone on the inside still believes actions matter. I still believe you can stop this. And because Noor's buyer is scheduled to move in two nights — if we don't intercept, London becomes a staging ground."
"Two nights," Leo echoed. He had already begun running and counting possibilities in his head. He is always three moves ahead. "We intercept the buyer. Where?"
Rina slid a paper across the table. It had a time, a code name, and the name of a warehouse near Heathrow cargo. Hanger B. A manifest stamp. "This is cleaned up enough to move operationally. It's not perfect, but it's something."
"And the cost?" I asked.
She looked at us like a woman who'd rehearsed saying the hardest thing. "You'll be compromised in the record. I will be blamed. But you'll have the evidence you need: the buyer, the transfer route, and the list. You'll be able to trace it outward."
Leo's jaw tightened. "So we do this, we expose the buyer, and the name on the manifest leads back to—?"
"To a shell company," she said. "And that shell company lists ties to a firm that sits in the portfolio of—" She swallowed. "Viper."
A cold piece of clarity slid across me. Viper wasn't just someone outside the agency. Viper was the axis. If we pulled on that thread, the whole thing might unravel.
"Why are you telling us now?" I asked.
"Because I don't have time," she said. "And because I don't trust anyone else to do it cleanly. You two are stubborn, and you make your own rules. That's a liability and a rare asset."
"Rina—" Leo began.
She cut him off. "I staged the drop to flush the leak. I sent the burner to give you the cue. Noor's deviation was unexpected — and Aria's intervention was catastrophic. But the corruption is bigger than any of us. You can run by HQ's orders, or you can run by your own map. Either way, you will be watched."
My breath hitched. "So what you're saying is — you would rather be blamed than let Project Origin move."
She nodded. "Yes."
It was the sort of confession that makes enemies of everyone and saints of none. I hated her for making the choice and hated myself for needing her to have done it.
"Fine," Leo said finally. "We do the hanger. We get the buyer. We expose the shell. Then we burn Viper's ledger and see what crawls out."
Rina looked like she'd been punched and smiled because she'd been given a lifeline. "I'll route backup, small teams—only deniable assets. But if HQ is compromised, they'll try to intercept. Move fast. Move quiet."
I reached across the table and put my palm on hers, a small, ridiculous human thing. "If this goes sideways, we're making you explain everything to us, personally."
"You'd better find time," she said. "And Zara — if this breaks you, you'll break me."
It was not the reassuring sort of promise, but it was a promise.
<<<<<
ZARA — BACK IN THE VAN, 05:45 AM.
We left the pub with coffee that tasted like compromise. The city had not slept; it had merely shifted roles. London's skyline looked calmer than the conversation warranted.
Leo drove. I sat with the folder between my knees and thought of the file, Noor, Aria, the Viper. The stakes had moved from islands and deserts into ledger lines and shell companies. The war was growing sharper, colder.
My phone buzzed. A message from an unknown number: HANGER B —48 HOURS.
Leo read over my shoulder and didn't flinch. He put a hand on my knee like we'd planted flags in the sand together.
"We go together," he said.
"We always did," I replied.
He gave me that crooked grin that made everything below my ribs melt and twist and feel like the only truth left in the world. We were tired. We were angry. We were alive. And we were learning what it cost to stand up.