The safehouse squatted like a diseased tooth on Washington's eastern rim, where urban decay met industrial wasteland. Dawn of October 1939 bled through cracked windows, casting skeletal shadows across water-stained walls. In the distance, muffled radio broadcasts about the European war drifted through broken glass. Rick helped Scott up three flights of stairs that groaned their protest with each step, the sound echoing through the building like old bones breaking.
Forty-eight hours. The deadline hammered in Rick's skull as he watched Scott's labored breathing, each wheeze a reminder that time was bleeding away faster than they could bandage it.
"Home sweet home," Catherine muttered, pushing open a reinforced door that had seen better decades.
The apartment reeked of mildew, stale cigarettes, and something else—the sour smell of fear that had soaked into the walls over years of desperate people making desperate choices. Two Treasury agents stood guard: Thompson, mid-thirties with nervous eyes that darted like trapped flies, and Reyes, older, steadier, but with the kind of stillness that came from seeing too much.
Rick catalogued their faces, their weapons, their blind spots. Trust no one—his father's voice, whispering from the grave.
Scott collapsed onto a moth-eaten couch, his bandages already weeping red through his shirt. "You're looking at me like I might bite," he said without lifting his head.
"Might you?" Rick's hand stayed near his weapon.
Scott's laugh was hollow as a church bell at midnight. "Already did. Question is whether you're going to put me down for it."
Ford wasn't lying. Scott A. Vaughn. The name sat in Rick's chest like swallowed broken glass, cutting him with every breath. Part of him wanted to pull the trigger right now. Part of him wanted to understand why.
Catherine moved to the grimy window, her reflection ghostlike in the streaked glass. "We've got maybe six hours before they triangulate our position. Maybe less if—"
She stopped mid-sentence, her fingers finding the locket at her throat. Silver, tarnished, unremarkable—the kind of jewelry that screamed I'm hiding something important. Her hands trembled slightly as she worked the catch. Why is she nervous now?
Inside, where a lover's photograph might rest, lay a strip of microfilm no bigger than a fingernail.
"Operation Thunderbird," she said, her voice steady despite the tremor in her hands. "The bombing was just theater. Street magic—make you watch the left hand while the right hand prepares for a much greater catastrophe." She held the film to the anemic morning light. "Three years of arms deals, contract fixes, senators' votes bought and sold... but all of this was just preparation for a larger objective."
Rick stepped closer, noting how Catherine's eyes never quite met his. What aren't you telling me?
"Who's buying?"
"Industrialists. Defense contractors tired of competing for scraps." Her smile was sharp enough to cut glass. "Why bid for government contracts when you can buy the government?"
Thompson shifted by the door—a nervous shuffle that made Rick's skin crawl. The agent's eyes kept flicking to his radio like a junkie checking his watch for the next fix.
"Names, dates, bank transfers," Catherine continued. "Everything encrypted, everything verifiable. But I need a decoder."
"Baltimore," Scott said from his throne of decay and regret. His voice carried the weight of a man who'd sold his soul and was still paying installments. "Guy named Petrov. Russian mathematician, freelances for Treasury."
The room held its breath.
"I know," Scott continued, "because I've been feeding them information for eight months."
Rick's hand found his gun without conscious thought, muscle memory overriding moral complexity. Kill him. Kill him now before he can do more damage.
But Scott's eyes... Christ, those eyes. Like looking into the face of a drowning man who'd stopped fighting the current.
"Ford wasn't lying," Rick said.
"No." Scott pressed his palms against his eyes as if he could push the memories back into the dark where they belonged. "He wasn't."
Catherine stepped between them, her weapon half-drawn. "Easy, cowboy. We need him alive."
Do we? Rick's finger found the trigger's curve, familiar as a lover's touch. One squeeze and the betrayal ends here. One squeeze and maybe his father could rest.
"They had the photos." Scott's voice cracked like old leather. "Emma. Fourth grade. Unicorn backpack." Each word fell like a hammer blow. "Sarah at the grocery store. Frozen between cereal boxes. Oblivious."
His hands shook now, the tremor starting in his fingers and spreading up his arms like infection. "Then the ultimatum: Watch. One photo at a time. One shot at a time. One scream at a time."
Jesus. Rick's grip loosened slightly. Not forgiveness—he wasn't ready for that—but understanding. The shape of it, anyway.
"I became their dog." Scott's voice was ash and bitter regret. "Barked when they said bark. Bit who they told me to bite. Changed files. Misdirected investigations. Fed them intelligence."
He looked up at Rick, tears cutting tracks through the grime. "Black started asking questions. Too many questions. Too deep."
The silence stretched taut as a hangman's rope.
"So they killed him. Eight bullets to keep him down. One knife to make it personal." Scott's voice shattered. "I might as well have pulled the trigger. Might as well have twisted the knife."
Thompson's hand drifted toward his weapon—subtle, practiced, but Rick caught the movement in his peripheral vision. Wrong. All wrong. The way the agent's eyes kept cutting to his radio, the nervous sweat despite the morning chill, the way he positioned himself for a clean shot at all three of them.
"Black left me a message before he died," Scott said. "'Look deeper, the truth is hidden in plain sight.' Took me three days to realize he meant me. The spy they were hunting was sitting right next to them in every briefing room."
Catherine's radio crackled like burning paper. "Safehouse Seven, this is Control. Status report."
She keyed the mic, but her eyes were on Thompson now too. Smart woman. "Secure. Three packages delivered."
Thompson's hand completed its journey to his weapon.
Now.
Rick drew and fired in one fluid motion, the sound deafening in the confined space. Thompson spun like a broken marionette, his radio exploding in a shower of plastic and electronic confetti. Reyes went for his gun but Catherine put two center mass before he cleared leather, the impacts driving him back against the wall in a spray of crimson.
"Tunnel," Catherine barked, already moving toward the kitchen. "Now!"
Forty-seven hours, thirty-two minutes.
The kitchen floor lifted on hidden hinges, revealing a shaft that dropped into absolute darkness. Scott groaned as Rick hauled him upright, the sound of a man whose body had given up but whose conscience hadn't.
"Move," Rick said, but there was no malice left in it. Just the cold pragmatism of men who'd seen too much and still had work to do.
Boots thundered up the stairwell like approaching thunder. Black-clad figures rappelled through windows, their movements precise and practiced—not cops, not federal agents. Something else entirely.
Rick shoved Scott toward the tunnel, grabbed Thompson's radio with his free hand. The message history made his blood turn to winter in his veins:
Clean slate failed. Initiate Protocol Shadow. Assets compromised. Terminate with extreme prejudice. No survivors. Make it look like gang violence.
They dropped into the shaft as automatic weapons turned the apartment above into a slaughter house of splintered wood and shredded plaster. The tunnel stretched beneath the building, a forgotten artery from Prohibition days when smuggling whiskey was the worst crime anyone could imagine.
Rick's boots splashed through standing water that smelled of rust and decades of decay. Each step echoed like a countdown, bouncing off brick walls that wept with condensation. Somewhere behind them, boots hit the tunnel floor.
They're coming.
"How far?" Rick called to Catherine, who moved ahead with the confidence of someone who'd mapped every exit before she'd even entered.
"Two blocks. Maybe three." Her breathing was controlled but rapid. She's scared too.
The tunnel branched, split, branched again—a maze designed by paranoid bootleggers who'd understood that sometimes the only way out was deeper in. Catherine chose their path without hesitation, leading them through darkness that felt solid enough to choke on.
They emerged through a storm drain six blocks away, blinking in strengthening daylight that hurt eyes adapted to absolute darkness. The city was waking up around them—early commuters, joggers, people whose biggest worry was whether they'd remembered to wind their alarm clocks.
If they only knew.
Catherine hot-wired a Ford sedan with the casual efficiency of someone for whom grand theft auto was just another Tuesday morning skill. The engine turned over on the second try, purring like a contented cat.
As they pulled away from the curb, Thompson's radio buzzed with a new message that stopped Rick's heart:
Target acquired. Baltimore. 48 hours.
Rick showed Catherine the screen. Color drained from her face.
"Petrov."
"They know."
"Then we better pray." She gunned the engine. Tires screamed. The city cried out.
In the rearview mirror, smoke rose from the safehouse like a funeral pyre. Rick studied Catherine's profile in the dashboard light, noting the tension in her jaw, the way her eyes kept checking the mirrors.
What else aren't you telling me?
He looked at Scott, who stared out the window with the hollow expression of a man who'd lost everything except the chance to make it right.
"Your family," Rick said. "Where are they now?"
Scott's smile cut like winter wind. "Safe house in Montana. Real one this time." His voice dropped to a whisper. "At least, that's the story. That's what they told me. That's what I have to believe."
He closed his eyes. "Because if it's not true..."
The words hung in the air. Unfinished. Unnecessary. Unbearable.
The Ford sedan ate miles, carrying them toward Baltimore and whatever waited there. Behind them, Washington burned with the kind of fire that only conspiracy could kindle—not the clean flame of justice, but the greasy smoke of corruption consuming itself. And somewhere across the distant Pacific, something far more terrible was brewing.
Forty-six hours, eighteen minutes. Time wasn't just running out—history itself hung in the balance.
Ahead lay answers, if they lived long enough to find them. Rick's father had died seeking the truth. Black had died protecting it. Now it was his turn to carry the torch, even if it burned him alive.
Thompson's radio crackled one final time: Pacific assets in position. Sunrise Protocol initiated.
Rick turned off the radio and threw it out the window. Some messages weren't worth hearing twice.