The Rogue Agenda (Hollow Kings #3)

Chapter 1 Jagger

Chapter One: Jagger

Three months since my brother fucked everything up, and I'm still cleaning the mess.

Webb's old office stinks like athlete’s foot.

I stripped it bare the day after the tribunal, replaced his gold-plated bullshit with clean surfaces and functional equipment.

The man had the aesthetic sensibilities of a drug lord's accountant.

Now it's just three monitors, a desk, and the mountain of files I've been drowning in since Jace decided to play house.

I’m happy for him, truly, but he created a fucking mess that now I have to clean up.

The screen glows blue in the dim room. I've been at this for six hours, maybe seven. The coffee beside my hand went cold around midnight. It's almost four now, and Moore's archive keeps spitting out the same fragments no matter how I rearrange them.

Project Omega.

The name appears in shipping manifests from thirty years ago, but there’s no inception date.

It just existed in the shadows and then bam, a document that shows up with it’s name on the header.

Medical equipment. Genetic testing supplies.

All routed to a facility that doesn't exist on any map I’ve got handy.

Connected to Westpoint Academy, connected to the Pineridge failure, connected to something the Custodians buried so deep that even I, with every clearance and every backdoor I've built into these systems, can't find the bottom.

I pull up another file. Cross-reference it with financial transfers from the same period. The money moved through shell companies before disappearing into a Swiss account that no longer exists. Whoever designed this system knew what they were doing. Knew how to make things vanish.

The Pineridge Boys. That's what triggered all of shipping movements and increase in supply orders, according to the fragments I've pieced together.

Years ago, a cohort of Foundry-trained assets went rogue.

They remembered too much, felt too deeply, turned their training against their masters, and did the hunt their own way.

Animals they were, they still wanted their own choice in mate.

The resulting purge cost The Silent three Ministry directors, two Custodian heirs, and nearly exposed the entire organization.

After Pineridge, something changed. Project Omega was accelerated. And Westpoint Academy sat at the center of it like a spider in a web.

I tab through another set of files. Personnel records, mostly redacted. Facility layouts that don't match the Foundry location I know about. And buried in a subfolder I almost missed, a single phrase that makes my blood run cold:

"Harrison Protocol: phase one. Three viable subjects extracted."

I stare at the words until they blur.

My phone buzzes. Jinx.

"What?"

"Hello to you too, asshole." His voice carries that edge of barely contained chaos that makes most people nervous. I find it almost comforting. "You sound like death."

"Four days without sleep will do that."

"That's not healthy."

"Did you call for a reason, or just to critique my lifestyle?"

A snort. "Jace wants updates. Says you've been radio silent."

"Tell Jace I'll update him when there's something worth updating." I minimize a file that's leading nowhere. "How is he?"

"Disgustingly domestic. He and Elliot are talking about getting a dog."

"A dog."

"I know. Not even a cool dog, like a German Sheperd. No. The Reaper wants a golden retriever. World's gone mad." Jinx pauses, and I hear something shift in his tone. "You finding anything useful in that archive?"

"Fragments. Nothing concrete." I lean back in my chair, rubbing my eyes. "Project Omega keeps appearing, but every trail dead-ends. Someone spent a lot of money making sure this stayed buried."

"Maybe it should stay buried."

"That's not how I operate."

"I know. That's what worries me." Another pause. "Just... be careful, Jagger. Whatever this is, the Custodians wanted it gone for a reason. Poking at it might wake up something we're not ready for."

"I'm always careful."

"You're always arrogant. There's a difference."

A ghost of a smile plays across my lips. "I'll be in touch."

"You better." A pause. "And Jagger? If you find something... if it's bad... you don't have to handle it alone. We're all still brothers. Jace will drop everything for you, you know that. So will I."

"I know."

"Do you? Because sometimes I wonder." His voice softens, just barely. The closest thing to concern Jinx ever lets himself show. "Just don't disappear on us. We've lost enough."

The line goes dead before I can respond.

I set the phone down and turn back to the monitors. The files stare back at me, stubborn and incomplete. Three months of digging, and all I have are shadows. Implications. The sense that something massive is hiding right there, waiting to swallow anyone stupid enough to look too closely.

The Harrison Protocol notation blinks at me from the screen. Three viable subjects.

Jace. Jagger. Jinx.

We are three.

It can’t be…

But can it?

I've always known we were different. The Foundry processes hundreds of children, but we rose faster, performed better, survived longer than anyone else. I assumed it was genetics. Luck. Some combination of factors that made us exceptional.

Now I'm starting to wonder if it was something else entirely.

A notification blinks in the corner of my screen. Asset report. Memory resurgence flagged in a processed informant.

I open it, expecting nothing.

Jonah Doe. Formerly designated Informant-7. Captured three years ago after his investigation got too close to truths we couldn't allow to surface.

I remember him.

I remember sitting across from him in a white room while he screamed.

The report is clean: Routine psychological evaluation revealed unexpected cognitive patterns. Subject displaying signs of memory resurgence inconsistent with chemical processing protocols.

Recommendation: immediate reprocessing or termination.

I read it twice. Three times.

Standard procedure would be to forward this to the appropriate Ministry. Let them handle it. A malfunctioning asset is a liability, and liabilities get eliminated. That's how The Silent has operated for centuries. That's how I've operated for my entire career.

But Jonah Doe wasn't investigating random Silent operations. He was investigating Westpoint Academy. He found connections to fertility clinics, to shipping manifests, to the same patterns I've been chasing for three months. He’d been reprogrammed because of what he found.

He found Project Omega.

And now his memories are coming back.

I type a request for transfer before I can second-guess myself. Asset to be relocated to my facility for enhanced evaluation.

His returning memories might contain information I can't find anywhere else. That's the only reason I'm doing this.

The request goes through. Approved within minutes, because I'm Jagger Harrison and people don't question me.

Not yet, anyway.

I spend the rest of the night reviewing his original file.

Twenty-seven years old when we took him.

Investigative journalist with a reputation for tenacity that bordered on self-destruction.

He'd broken stories about corporate corruption, government cover-ups, trafficking networks that operated in plain sight.

Then he started looking at us.

His investigation lasted eighteen months before we caught him.

In that time, he'd compiled evidence linking Westpoint Academy to a network of fertility clinics, surrogacy programs, and medical research facilities across three continents.

He'd identified shipping patterns, financial transfers, personnel movements.

He'd gotten closer than anyone before or since.

So we destroyed him.

Pulled his soul right out his chest and replaced it with what we wanted him to be.

I pull up the transcripts from his interrogation. My handwriting is on every page. The questions I designed to break him. The chemical compounds I selected to erase his identity. Eighteen hours of systematic destruction, documented in brutal detail.

What sticks out, is the memory of enjoying it. Not the pain itself, but the precision. The satisfaction of watching a mind come apart under carefully applied pressure. He'd screamed until his voice gave out. Begged until the words stopped making sense. And then, finally, silence.

I felt nothing.

That was three years ago. I was exactly what the Foundry designed me to be.

Now I'm sitting in a dead man's office at four in the morning, chasing ghosts that might finally have faces, and the asset I broke is on his way back to me.

I close the files and stare at the dark window.

Something is changing. I can feel it in the way the pieces are starting to connect, in the way the Custodians have been circling since Jace's rebellion, in the way my own carefully constructed certainties keep shifting beneath my feet.

Project Omega. Westpoint Academy. The Pineridge failure. The Bonaccorso allegiance split.

And now Jonah Doe, rising from the grave I put him in.

This is either the break I've been waiting for, or a trap I'm walking into with my eyes open.

Whatever the case, I need to know.

He arrives three days later looking like shit the detention system chewed up and spit out.

I watch the transfer through the security feeds, noting details with detachment.

He's thinner than his file photos. Gaunt.

His hair is longer, messier, dark strands falling across a face that's full of sharp angles and sunken cheeks.

The kind of face that looked soft once, before we got our hands on him.

Innocence. Stripped from him.

He’s a haunted man on two legs.

And I made him that way.

I don’t know if I feel pride at that thought, but either way, he will remember what he was researching because now I need that information to solve my own little problem.