Chapter 5
VICTORIA
Prague is a city built on ghosts. I've always known this about it, the medieval architecture and the cobblestones and the Vltava running dark beneath bridges that have seen centuries of occupation and resistance.
I ran operations here for years, used this city's particular talent for secrecy to move information across borders that larger, louder capitals couldn't manage.
I recruited assets in its cafés, ran countersurveillance through its parks, built dead drops into the cracks of buildings that survived two world wars and a half-century of Soviet control.
Now the ghosts are mine.
His hand finds the small of my back as we cross the tram tracks, steering me around a delivery van without breaking stride.
The touch is brief, gone before I can object.
My skin registers it anyway, warmth bleeding through the fabric of my jacket into muscle memory that has no business being this intact after a decade.
Tommy's satellite imagery cleared the approach route an hour ago.
The surveillance post I flagged from the Brussels safe house is still there, a nondescript panel van parked on a residential street, but Tommy confirmed it's been stationary for weeks with no signs of active monitoring.
Dormant, not abandoned. We routed around it.
Marek's building is a renovated Art Nouveau apartment block on a tree-lined street that smells like coffee and diesel and the particular damp of Central European autumn.
I've been here before, climbed these stairs, sat in Marek's kitchen while he fed me Committee shipping routes through Eastern Europe and complained about the price of good beer.
He's an information broker, not an idealist. He works for money, not principle, which is why he's survived this long in a profession that kills the principled first.
I press the buzzer for the third-floor flat and wait. Nothing happens for long enough that my chest tightens. Then the intercom crackles.
"Ano?" The voice is cautious, stripped of the jovial confidence I associate with Marek.
"It's Cross."
A long pause follows. I can hear him breathing.
Roman stands at the base of the steps with his eyes on the street, his body angled so that anyone approaching the entrance would have to go through him first, protective and territorial in the same stance.
The man I want to hate and the operative I need are maddeningly the same person.
The door buzzes open. Roman catches my eye and gives a single nod. He'll hold the entrance. I take the stairs alone.
Marek's flat shows the evidence of a man preparing to run: cabinets open, clothes piled on the sofa, the contents of a desk drawer spread across the kitchen table in the chaotic taxonomy of someone trying to decide what's worth carrying and what gets left behind.
Marek himself stands in the middle of it all, a stocky Czech with a week's worth of stubble and the hollow look of someone who hasn't slept since the killing started.
"Victoria." He says my name like a prayer and a curse at the same time. "I thought you were dead."
"Not yet." I close the door behind me and scan the flat from habit, checking sight lines and exits the way I check my own pulse. "You need to disappear, Marek. Today. Right now."
"I know." He runs a hand through his hair, and it comes away damp. He's sweating despite the cool air. "I heard about Ines. And Henrik. And the courier in Berlin." His eyes search mine. "How many, Victoria?"
I don't answer, because the number is still growing and speaking it aloud would make the ledger permanent.
Instead I reach into my jacket and pull out the emergency cash that Roman provided from an Echo Ridge operational fund.
I didn't ask where the money came from. I didn't want to owe him the debt of asking.
"This will get you out of the country and set up somewhere new.
Pick a city you've never mentioned to me, never visited professionally, never used as a transit point.
Don't tell me where you go." I set the envelope on the table between a passport and a half-eaten sandwich.
"Don't contact me. Don't contact anyone connected to the old network. It's gone, Marek. All of it."
He picks up the envelope and feels the thickness without counting. "Are you running?"
"I'm relocating."
Something in my tone makes him look up, and whatever he sees in my face stops him from asking the obvious follow-up. Marek has survived this long by reading people accurately, and right now I'm giving him the read of a woman who is done running and about to start moving in the other direction.
"Be careful, Victoria." He tucks the envelope into his jacket. "Webb doesn't stop. You know this. He won't stop until you're either dead or so thoroughly destroyed that no one will ever buy intelligence from you again."
"I know exactly what Webb does." I put my hand on his shoulder, briefly, because Marek is not a man who invites physical contact and neither am I. "Go. Today."
He nods once, and I leave him standing in his half-packed flat with the sound of my footsteps echoing down the stairwell.
Each step feels like severing a thread, another connection cut, another piece of the network I built with my own hands dissolving into nothing.
By the time I reach the ground floor, Marek is the last active contact I have left in Europe.
By the time I reach the street, I suspect he won't be for long.
Roman falls into step beside me as I turn east toward Riegrovy Sady, the park that sits at the crest of the Vinohrady hill.
He doesn't ask how it went. He reads the answer in my stride, my posture, the set of my jaw.
Instead he puts his phone to his ear, listens for several seconds, and the mask shifts.
The jaw tightens. The pale blue of his eyes drains to something colder, and his free hand curls at his side with the precision of someone deciding where to apply force.
"Kane," he says to me, lowering the phone.
His voice has dropped to the register he uses when information becomes operational, each word stripped to its weight-bearing minimum.
"Committee chatter intercepted in the last hour.
Webb has authorized extreme measures against your network.
Not just targeted eliminations. Full scorched earth.
Anyone who has ever transacted with you in any capacity is being identified, assessed, and either turned or terminated. "
The words land with the clinical precision of a medical diagnosis: terminal, inoperable, full system failure.
"Anyone who has ever transacted." I repeat the scope of it back to him, testing whether the words sound as annihilating out loud as they do inside my head. "Not just the network. The clients. The couriers. The one-time sources who passed me a single document and never called again."
"Yes." Roman's gaze tracks across the street, cataloging threats, but the tension in his shoulders is personal, the coiled restraint of watching damage he can't prevent land on someone he can't stop watching.
"Of course he is." I keep walking. My legs know the route to the park from years of operational habit, turning left at the intersection, crossing the tram tracks, passing the café where I once met a Russian FSB defector named Fedorov who slid me a USB drive full of Committee operational plans while ordering coffee and commenting on the quality of Prague's strudel.
Fedorov is dead now. I found out through a relay channel while we were on the train.
He was killed in Warsaw, at a hotel near the Vistula, days ago.
My phone vibrates. I pull it from my pocket and read the message, and the ground beneath me shifts again, another aftershock in a sequence that started in London and hasn't stopped.
My last financial accounts have been frozen, every one of them.
I'd known it was coming from Roman's intercepts, but knowing and experiencing are different things.
When I try to access the emergency reserves I maintained under alias identities across Europe, each one comes back locked.
Simultaneously, according to the timestamps, which means Webb didn't find them one by one.
He knew about all of them and waited until he could shut them down at the same time.
The safe houses went the same way: Geneva, Prague, and Lisbon, raided within the same hour.
London would have made one more, but I burned that one myself before Webb's people could reach it.
The systematic precision of it is almost beautiful, in the way that a killing frost is beautiful, in the way that anything perfectly engineered for destruction carries its own cold elegance.
Webb didn't just dismantle my network. He studied it first, mapped every node and connection and financial thread, and then severed them all at once so that by the time I realized what was happening, there was nothing left to save.
I reach the edge of Riegrovy Sady and stop.
The city spreads below me in a panorama of red roofs and church spires, the castle looming across the river, and the view is the same one I watched years ago while Fedorov told me that the Committee was expanding its arms facilitation network into Eastern Europe and that someone needed to care enough to stop them.
I cared. I took his intelligence and sold it to people who could use it, and Fedorov went back to Moscow believing he had made a difference.
He's dead now. Ines is dead. Henrik is dead. The Berlin courier is dead. Sato has been silent for days. Marek has a few hours at best before they find him too.