The meeting point wasn’t a place.
It was a frequency.
Alon and Nora sat in silence as the encrypted receiver hummed quietly on the farmhouse table. The radio crackled with the sound of atmospheric hiss, dry, hollow, faint as breath through broken glass.
Then: a pulse.
Three short bursts. A pause. Two long. A pause. Four short.
Hadrian.
A ghost calling to ghosts.
Nora adjusted the dial, narrowing the band, until the sound bled into a tight, rhythmic whisper. Not voice. Code. Something beneath language.
Alon translated in real-time, scribbling shorthand on a torn corner of a cipher map.
“He wants a meet,” he said. “Coastal. Northern edge of the Akamas Peninsula. Signal tower ruins. Dawn.”
Nora raised her eyes from the receiver. “Where the cables used to run?”
“Yes.”
“Old Cold War node,” she said. “Buried infrastructure. Long abandoned.”
“Not abandoned,” Alon replied. “Forgotten. There’s a difference.”
The drive was long. Winding. No signs. Just scrubland and rock, wild fig trees leaning over forgotten roads, and the blue flicker of sea between breaks in the cliffs.
They arrived just before first light.
The structure was a skeleton, concrete pillars reaching toward nothing, tangled coils of rusted wire spilling from broken walls. Wildflowers grew through cracks in the floor. Seagulls circled above, silent.
Hadrian stood with his back to them, hands in his pockets, staring out at the sea. No visible weapon. No allies.
“You came,” he said without turning.
“You lit the fire,” Alon replied. “I walked through it.”
Hadrian turned then. The years had etched his face deep, creases like carved fault lines, hair graying at the temples, but his eyes were still sharp. Still too quiet.
“You heard the files.”
“Yes,” Alon said. “Yael died for them.”
“She always knew she would.”
Nora stepped forward. “What is the Shemesh Protocol?”
Hadrian nodded at the broken tower behind him.
“It started here,” he said. “Buried lines. Back channels. Built by men who understood that power doesn’t come from knowing the truth, but from controlling who gets to speak it.”
He walked slowly toward them.
“The Shemesh Protocol was designed as a failsafe. In case Mossad ever fractured. A soft coup from within. Identify the oldest operators, the quiet dissenters. The ones who’d ask questions. Then erase them.”
“Who activated it?” Nora asked.
Hadrian’s face tightened. “Someone above Koren. Someone who believes Israel’s enemies aren’t outside the walls, but inside.”
He pulled a small device from his coat, flat, black, blinking.
“This,” he said, “is a dead channel activation key. It turns on old hardware, buried receivers, long-range signal nodes, one-time-use caches.”
“Why give it to us?” Alon asked.
“Because I’m next on their list,” Hadrian said. “And I’m tired of running.”
Later, they stood alone in the ruins. The sun climbed, slow and gold, casting long lines across the shattered tower.
Alon stared at the device in his hand. A dead switch. A whisper waiting to be heard.
“What happens if we use it?” Nora asked.
“Everything that was buried… comes up for air.”
She looked at him. “And if it’s worse than we think?”
He met her eyes.
“Then we burn the whole map and draw a new one.”
Back in the safehouse, Alon slid the activation key into the modified comm port.
A hum.
A flicker.
Then silence.
And then, on the far side of the world, a light blinked to life in a bunker no one had entered in twenty years.
A voice filtered through.
Old. Warped by time. But real.
“Regev?”
Alon’s blood turned to ice.
He hadn’t heard that voice since 2017.
Since Damascus.
Since the mission that went wrong.
But it wasn’t Koren.
It was someone higher.
Someone who was never supposed to speak again.
The man who had buried them all.