The safehouse in Kornos was barely more than a ruin.
A single-story stone farmhouse nestled between olive groves, long since abandoned to heat and wild grass. The windows were blacked out with plywood. The floor creaked with age. In the corner, a plastic table held a satellite laptop, an encrypted modem, and three folders stained with time and coffee.
Alon sat with the hard drive from Yael Rimon resting in the center of the table like a dead heart waiting to be restarted.
Nora paced behind him, tension in every step. She hadn’t spoken since the drive from Limassol. Not since the rooftop. Not since Yael bled out against cracked stone while the sun slid behind her eyes.
Alon connected the drive. Lights blinked. The screen pulsed once. Then nothing.
“Dead?” Nora asked.
“No,” he said. “Sleeping.”
He cracked his knuckles, typed a short sequence, an old cipher, one used in joint field comms for abandoned op briefings. A protocol known only to four people.
Three of them were supposed to be dead.
The screen flickered again.
Text appeared.
INITIATE_327-ECHO
AWAITING HANDSHAKE.
Nora stepped closer. “What’s it waiting for?”
Alon didn’t answer. Instead, he reached into his shirt and pulled out a chain. From it hung a narrow obsidian stone etched with code, the kind of thing passed from operative to operative when the real enemy wasn’t outside, but within.
He placed it against the drive’s faceplate.
A single light turned green.
Then the file structure opened.
Lines of code. Maps. Financial links. Names.
One folder pulsed differently, marked with a simple label:
DEAD FREQUENCY.
He clicked.
Inside: audio files, all named with dates. All within the last year.
He played the first one.
Crackling. Hiss. Then a voice.
Yael’s.
“This is Alpha Channel One. Day sixteen. Koren is moving assets through Vienna, but not for himself. Something bigger. He’s using a private network, dead frequencies lifted from Cold War intelligence cables buried under EU infrastructure. I think he’s building a ghost circuit. A shadow net.”
The file ended in static.
Alon played the next.
“Day thirty-two. Leah lives. I saw her. She’s running a trace on a payment trail out of Qatar. The funds are disguised as aid, but they’re being routed to dormant black-budget ops from Jerusalem. Someone high up is feeding him. Higher than we ever imagined.”
Another.
“Day seventy-one. I’ve intercepted a name. Shemesh Protocol. It was shelved decades ago. But the directive is clear, burn the old guard, install a synthetic net of loyalty. I think I’m on the list.”
Static swallowed the last word.
Alon stared at the screen, unmoving.
Nora stepped beside him, whispering.
“Shemesh Protocol?”
Alon nodded, slowly. “A purge.”
“Of who?”
“Everyone who remembers how the system was built.”
Outside, the wind picked up, rattling the shutters. Somewhere beyond the grove, an engine hummed and faded.
Alon copied the files, encrypted them again under a different cipher, and shut the drive down.
He slipped it into a pouch inside the lining of his jacket.
“We need a third party,” he said. “Someone outside the agency. Off-grid. Someone who can help us trace Shemesh without triggering alarms.”
Nora looked at him. “You mean bring someone in?”
“No,” Alon said. “I mean resurrect someone.”
She stared.
He met her eyes.
“I know where Eli’s next meeting is.”
At midnight, the radio pulsed.
Not with a voice, but with a sequence.
Morse.
Three dots. Two dashes. Four dots. Pause.
A ghost frequency.
From the old Beirut network.
Only one man used that call sign.
Hadrian.