Chapter 4 - The Geneva Connection
"Get down, Clara!" I roared, grabbing the elderly woman and throwing both of us behind a heavy oak armoire just as the hallway outside detonated in a blinding flash of orange fire and concussive force.
The shockwave blew the master bedroom door off its hinges, showering us in splinters and drywall dust. Smoke billowed into the room, choking and thick with the stench of high explosives. Beneath me, the operative I had pinned took a direct piece of shrapnel to the chest and went completely limp, silencing his secrets forever.
I coughed, pulling myself up through the haze, checking Clara. She was bruised and terrified, but alive. "Can you walk?" I yelled over the ringing in my ears.
"Yes! Go!" she gasped, clutching a small leather-bound journal to her chest—the real ledger she had managed to pull from beneath the floorboards just before I kicked the door in.
Sirens wailed in the distance, cutting through the suburban night. Local police were less than two minutes away, alerted by the blast. But local cops were the least of our worries; whoever tossed that flash-bang was a professional team sent to wipe out any surviving witnesses.
I scooped Clara up in a fireman's carry, ignoring the burning pain in my shoulder from the concussive blast, and sprinted down the back service stairs. Bursting out into the backyard, I found Thomas waiting by the fence, his weapon drawn and his face smeared with soot.
"Grenade!" Thomas shouted, helping me ease Clara over the wooden barrier. "I saw two guys in black tactical gear scaling the fence across the street. They're setting up a kill box!"
"Move, move, move!" I barked, shoving Clara into the back seat of the Ford Explorer and diving into the driver's seat.
I jammed the ignition, tires spinning wildly across the manicured lawn as I cut the steering wheel hard, launching the SUV through a wooden property fence and onto the main road just as a hail of automatic gunfire chewed up the rear quarter-panel. Glass shattered, and the rear tires hissed, but the heavy armor plating of the vehicle held.
We hit the highway at ninety miles per hour, heading into the blinding rain of an incoming autumn storm. Panting heavily in the back seat, Clara handed me the leather ledger.
"James kept this in case anything happened to him," she said, her voice shaking violently. "He said the man pulling the strings inside the Pentagon isn't just a rogue contractor. It’s someone working directly under the Secretary of Defense. A man named Director Sterling."
I gripped the steering wheel so hard my knuckles turned white. Arthur Sterling—the architect of every major black-ops deployment in the Middle East for the past decade. If Sterling was compromised, then the entire intelligence apparatus of the United States was weaponized against us.
I flipped open the encrypted tactical laptop on the passenger seat, plugging Clara's ledger into the USB port to decrypt the hidden files. A directory popped up instantly: Project Janus – Target Manifest.
My eyes scanned the list of names, stopping dead at the very top.
Thomas looked over my shoulder, his face turning ghostly pale as he read the name highlighted in red under my own.
May you like
"Daniel," Thomas whispered, his voice trembling. "Look at who authorization just cleared for immediate offshore extraction in Geneva tomorrow morning."
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