Chapter 28
Dresner
The hum of the jet engines was a constant, low-frequency vibration against the soles of my shoes. Thirty-five thousand feet above the Atlantic, the air was recycled, cool, and filtered to an almost antiseptic purity. The only thing in my world currently operating within acceptable parameters.
I sat in the leather armchair, back rigid, refusing to lean into the comfort. The tablet in my hand was slim, sleek, a marvel of modern engineering.
Currently displaying the footage of my humiliation.
Watching the sequence again. Frame by frame.
The seizure. The chaotic thrashing of Subject: Blackout. The panicked intervention of the nurse, Clare Bolton. The way she disconnected the monitors, screaming for help, creating chaos that my guards, trained, expensive, supposedly elite, had stumbled into like children.
“Amateurs.”
The word tasted like copper.
The escape didn’t enrage me. Assets were occasionally lost; variance was a statistical inevitability.
No, what made the bile rise in my throat was the method.
Theater. Cheap, melodramatic theater. A dying man performing a miracle recovery.
A civilian nurse outsmarting a secure facility with nothing but hysteria and timing.
They’d been in the same room. The Catalyst and the Subject. The data I could have harvested from their reunion would have been the cornerstone of Oblivion 2.0.
Instead, a grainy recording of an empty room and the backs of incompetent men.
The device nearly cracked in my palm.
Predicting human behavior was my specialty. Neural pathways of fear, obedience, and loyalty, mapped and documented. Men turned into weapons. Free will reduced to a chemical equation.
But this. This I hadn’t predicted.
They were supposed to be remade. Variables I could isolate and solve. Instead, they’d become chaotic. Unpredictable.
Unpredictable was unacceptable.
A soft sound from the rear of the cabin broke my concentration. The scuff of a shoe on carpet.
“Sir?”
Didn’t look up from the screen. “What is it, Alban?”
Calm. I kept it level, stripping away the rage until only the cold architecture of command remained.
“Sir... there’s been a development.”
“Speak.”
“It’s... catastrophic, sir.”
I finally lifted my gaze. Alban stood three feet away, holding his own tablet like a shield. Pale. Shaking. Good. Fear was useful. Fear meant he understood the stakes.
“Define catastrophic.”
“Maeve Durham.” The words came out rough. “The journalist. She published.”
He extended his trembling hand, offering the device.
I took it. The glass was cool against my fingertips.
The headline was bold, aggressive, screaming in a sans-serif font that lacked all subtlety: CURANOVA EXPOSED: THE SHADOW WAR ON HUMANITY.
I swiped up.
Not speculation. Not a conspiracy theory.
An autopsy.
Conditioning protocols from the very beginning of my project. Chemical formulas for the early iterations of PSI-317. Redacted operative files I recognized instantly by their psychological profiles.
And then, the photos.
A visceral, biological reaction I hadn’t felt in decades. Stomach plummeting.
The photos weren’t from the outside. Not grainy telephoto shots taken from a parked car.
High-resolution images of the Geneva facility’s interior. The containment cells. The labs.
My office.
The screen under my thumb made a sharp snap. Cracks bloomed across the glass, distorting the image of my own desk. Hadn’t realized I was squeezing it.
“She has everything.” Alban’s words barely audible. “The dark web mirrors are already populating. Mainstream outlets are picking it up. Interpol issued a provisional warrant twelve minutes ago. The Swiss authorities are raiding the perimeter as we speak.”
Couldn’t answer. Couldn’t speak.
The rage that filled me now wasn’t hot. Cold. Surgical. The kind that calculates trajectories and acceptable casualties.
This wasn’t just exposure. Erasure. Years of work. The evolution of the human species, the perfection of the mind, all of it reduced to a sensationalist tabloid headline by a grieving sister with a laptop.
But how?
Analysis pushed past the anger. Rage was inefficient. Logic was the only way forward.
Maeve Durham was resourceful, yes. But she was outside the walls. She couldn’t have breached the Geneva servers. The encryption on those files was quantum-resistant. The physical gap was total.
Unless the gap invited her in.
The photo of my office. The angle was taken from near the doorway.
“Alban. The security logs from the night of the infiltration. Pull them.”
“Sir, the system is...”
“Pull. Them.”
Alban scrambled back to the comms station. I stared at the cracked screen in my palm. A shard of glass sliced into skin. A drop of blood welled up, dark, before it smeared against the image of Maeve Durham’s face.
“I have them.” Voice cracking. “Unauthorized access detected at 0200 hours. The terminal in your office.”
“Who?”
“Login credentials masked. But the biometric handshake... sir, it’s internal.”
Internal.
The word echoed in the silent cabin.
“Cross-reference with the emergency recall. Total headcount.”
“I’m running the roster.”
I stood and walked to the window, staring out at the infinite blackness of the Atlantic night.
Knew before he said the name. Knew.
The only variable that fit the equation.
“Havoc.” The name fell like a blade. “Havoc is unaccounted for.”
I closed my eyes for a single heartbeat.
Havoc. Tertia Generation.
The Prima generation, Reaper and Specter, had been flawed, too attached to their pasts. The Quinta generation, Blackout, had been unstable, prone to physical breakdown.
But the Tertia? They were optimal. Stable.
Efficient. Their conditioning didn’t rely on erasing memories; it relied on rewriting emotional context.
They didn’t need a chip to be controlled.
Didn’t have a kill switch because they didn’t need one.
Loyalty was structural, part of their neural architecture.
Havoc had no weakness. No woman. No trauma he couldn’t compartmentalize.
And he had betrayed me.
“The breach history. Was it a single event?”
“No, sir.” Barely audible. “There was at least another occurrence.”
All the while he stood in my office, took my orders. While he looked me in the eye.
Not malfunctioning. Not broken by love or trauma.
He’d chosen this. Therefore, my hypothesis about the bond and the possibility of Oblivion 2.0 were flawed and needed to be reevaluated.
“What are your orders?”
Alban trailed off. We both knew the answer.
No remote wipe. No chip. I’d been so arrogant, so certain of the Tertia stability, that I hadn’t installed the failsafe.
Looked at my reflection in the dark glass of the window. The silver hair. The tailored suit. The blood smeared on my palm.
The game had changed. No longer the architect. The target.
But targets could shoot back.
I turned to Alban. Didn’t raise my voice. Didn’t need to. The air pressure in the cabin seemed to drop, sucking the oxygen out of the room.
“Find him.”
“Sir, he’s a ghost. If he’s gone rogue...”
“I don’t care if you have to burn half the continent to flush him out. Find him.”
The blood on my hand caught the cabin lights.
“And Alban?”
“Yes, Sir?”
“Do not kill him. I want him alive.”
Havoc would regret his betrayal.
They all would.