Tel Aviv was just starting to exhale. The early morning haze slid off the glass towers along Rothschild Boulevard, and the air held that brief, precious stillness before the day turned to noise.
Alon Regev ran along the Yarkon River, his breath steady, his body precise. Two clicks past the Namal, sneakers hitting the pavement like clockwork. Routine was his armor now. No mission. No briefings. Just sweat, sky, and silence.
Then his phone vibrated, a short pulse pattern, nothing like a standard call. He slowed, wiped his face with the back of his hand, and looked down.
4-2-5.
No name. Just three digits. A signal code that hadn’t been used in over seven years.
He stopped completely.
The last time he’d seen that code was the Damascus operation. The one that left his team burned. The one that left Eli Koren presumed dead.
Alon looked around. The park was quiet. A couple walking their dog. A cyclist. Nothing unusual. But he’d learned long ago that unusual often dressed up as ordinary.
He sat on a nearby bench, trying to keep his breath steady, pulled out his second device, a slim, hardened burner he hadn’t touched in months. Turned it on. Waited.
The message came through in bursts of raw text. No preamble.
BARAK ECHO REACTIVATED. DEVICE PINGED IN EILAT. ACQUIRE.
He blinked.
Barak Echo wasn’t a weapon in the traditional sense. It was code. Malware tailored to embed itself into hostile communications networks and rewire logic paths from the inside. The digital equivalent of a shapeshifting parasite. Only four prototypes were ever created. All accounted for.
Until now.
The message continued:
POSSIBLE INTERNAL BREACH. ASSET ID UNKNOWN. SEEK CLARITY WITHOUT CONTACTING COMMAND. FULL DENIABILITY PROTOCOL. REDEPLOY IMMEDIATE.
The last line hit harder than the rest.
He was being activated.
No formal recall. No team. Just him. Like it always was when things got bad.
A footfall approached. Light. Quick.
Alon looked up. Nora Weiss.
Of course.
She stood in her workout gear, hair pulled back, eyes shielded by reflective aviators.
“Figured I’d find you here,” she said. No smile.
Alon nodded. “How long have you known?”
“Three hours. Sat relay picked up chatter off the Red Sea. Compression patterns matched Barak Echo’s original bootloader.”
He frowned. “You decrypted it?”
“I built it. Remember?”
He did. Too well.
They sat in silence for a beat. Old ghosts settling between them.
Then she added, “You’re not the only one they called.”
He looked out over the water. The sun was rising now, sharp and relentless. The kind of light that didn’t hide anything.
“Eilat,” he said finally.
She nodded.
Alon stood. “Pack light.”
“I always do,” Nora replied.
They didn’t shake hands. They didn’t hug. That wasn’t their language.
They walked toward the car waiting near the boardwalk. Black sedan. Dust on the tires. Engine running. No license plate.
By the time they merged onto Route 40 south, Tel Aviv was waking up.
But Alon wasn’t.
He was already somewhere else, back in the field, chasing something that shouldn’t exist, in a city where the Red Sea didn’t just swallow secrets.
It buried them.