Inside, the air smelled of ozone and copper. The main atrium was a cathedral of glass and steel, now strung with motion sensors and IR lasers. Maverick moved like smoke. He disabled two guards with silent, brutal efficiency—one dart to the neck, one disarmed and knocked unconscious with the edge of his hand. He took their comms, patched into their frequency, and heard Fenris’s voice for the first time in eight years.
Maverick had two options. Go loud and risk the switch. Or go deep.
Maverick shuffled forward, eyes scanning. He spotted the master power relay for the cryo-vault—a red switch behind Fenris, ten meters away. He also spotted the one flaw in Fenris’s theater: his mechanical arm’s servo twitched every four seconds. A timing tell. maverick igi
Maverick climbed the maintenance gantry to the overhead walkways, looking down into the cryo-vault’s viewing gallery. Fenris stood in the center, tall, shaven-headed, with a mechanical arm that glinted with chrome and malice. He held a dead-man’s switch. Around him, fifteen heavily armed mercenaries. The hostages were huddled against the far wall—scientists, janitors, a group of children on a school tour.
“I’m a bioinformatician,” he whispered to a trembling woman. “Play along.” Inside, the air smelled of ozone and copper
Maverick’s jaw tightened. Fenris. He’d trained with him. Laughed with him. Then watched him burn a safe house in Prague with three fellow agents inside. Fenris didn't do hostage negotiations. He did theater. Geneva was a silver scar in the pre-dawn rain. Maverick didn’t use the front entrance. He went in through the sub-level helium recycling vents—a route only someone who had studied the IGI’s architectural schematics for six months in a safe house outside Vladivostok would know.
The voice on the other end was cold, clipped, and belonged to his handler, a ghost named Nair. “Maverick, we have a Code Ashoka. A splinter cell of the Serpent’s Hand has seized the International Genetics Institute in Geneva. They’ve locked down the cryo-vault containing the Alpha Strain.” He disabled two guards with silent, brutal efficiency—one
“...the world will pay in screams for every vial of the cure we shatter. I want the IGI director on his knees. Live stream in ten minutes.”