Page 43 of Code Name: Hunter
The DGSE doesn’t put its black sites on any map—not digital, not paper, not even the ones you have to burn after reading.
We'd flown from Rome to Brussels under cover of a diplomatic hop. Cerberus has some outstanding connections within the intelligence community. We were taken straight from the tarmac to a small convoy of SUVs with blacked-out windows and spent the better part of an hour twisting through industrial districts and empty service roads before the lead vehicle ducks into an underground garage.
The air changes the second the bay doors roll shut. Gone is the damp bite of the Brussels night—replaced by the faint acrid mix of oil, heated circuitry, and stale recirculated air.
The DGSE handler—tall, thin, forgettable in the way only trained ghosts can be—swipes us through two layers of security before handing us off to a pair of internal escorts. The deeper we go, the colder it gets, the walls closing in from poured concrete to narrow, steel-lined corridors with cameras that follow everymove. Somewhere above our heads, the rest of Brussels hums along in blissful ignorance.
There's a Cerberus team already in place and working. The team moves like clockwork in the dim light, boots striking concrete in a rhythm that feels like a heartbeat. The team’s here in force. Two of them flank us—one, Archer, on point to clear the path ahead, and Darius, keeping our rear secure, Vivian in the pocket beside me, her eyes sharp even behind the neutral mask she wears for ops.
We come to a stop before an enormous, reinforced door, the dull gleam of its gunmetal surface broken only by a recessed panel with biometric scanners stacked above a keypad. No handle, no obvious way to open it—just an unspoken challenge in steel.
I don’t know where it leads or why it’s tucked away in this part of the labyrinth, but its presence is deliberate. The air here feels heavier, the faint hum of the black site’s systems muffled as if this section were wrapped in insulation and secrecy. I can’t help wondering how they managed to construct the entire facility around whatever this chamber once was—a corridor, a vault, a bunker—without leaving a trace on any blueprint or memory bank.
Archer leans in. “Primary vault. Langley says the lock sequence is triple-nested—biometric, code, then a live key confirmation from the other side. We get one try. We blow it, the whole system goes into lockdown for seventy-two hours.”
Before I can answer, Vivian steps forward. “Move.”
I watch her drop to a crouch, toolkit open before Archer even shifts out of her way. Her fingers dance over the panel, not attacking the primary sequence head-on but slipping into a vendor maintenance subroutine Langley would never have flagged. I’ve seen this trick once before—in Berlin—when she found a dormant exploit left from an old firmware update. Aglitch only someone who’d been inside back then would even know existed, like she’s done it a hundred times. The scanner hums, throwing up a faint wash of blue light over her face. She closes her eyes for half a beat—just long enough to sync her breathing—and then she does something that makes the back of my neck go tight.
It’s in the way she taps the override—deliberate, almost like a rhythm only she knows—the precise spacing between touches, the slight pause after the second input before the third. I’ve clocked that signature before, and it sets off every alarm in my head. Berlin. The same cadence I caught in that van in Rome, buried deep in MI-6’s backdoor. Too specific to be a coincidence. The hit lands hard, confirming that the shadow I’ve been circling has her shape, and I file it away in the vault where I keep the dangerous truths I’m not ready to throw in her face. The night she swore there was no way into that vault, right up until she “found” one in the final breath before the window closed.
The lock clicks open in under twenty seconds, the sound sharp in the hush of the corridor. A soft chime bleeds from the panel quietly, but Archer’s head snaps toward it. She tripped a non-blocking anomaly log. It won’t stop us, but it starts a clock we can’t see, somewhere deep in the DGSE’s audit trail. Archer blinks, then gives a low whistle, his expression caught between surprise and a kind of grudging respect, like he’s just watched her pull off a magic trick no one else in the room could touch.
“Not bad,” he says, voice pitched low but laced with something that admits he’s impressed.
Vivian doesn’t look up from her work, her gaze still fixed on the panel’s readout, voice clipped and decisive. “Go,” she says, the faintest thread of satisfaction in her tone, already turning toward the opening before anyone else can react.
We sweep inside in formation. The room is colder than the corridor, racks of hardened servers lining the walls, their quiethum like the purr of something caged and dangerous. The lighting’s low, the shadows thick. Archer and Darius fan out to cover entrances while Vivian and I move to the central terminal.
After a cursory physical examination of the terminal, Vivian plugs in her drive, hands flying across the keyboard. Streams of data pour onto the screens—layers of encrypted archives nested inside dead-end directories. I stand behind her shoulder, scanning the lines as they resolve. Most are noise: personnel logs, budget shells, procurement requests scrubbed of anything useful. Then, a folder name jumps out at me in stark, unencrypted text:IRON CHOIR.
My pulse hammers once, hard, a sharp jolt that’s as much recognition as it is adrenaline. That name—Iron Choir—snaps me back to a fragment from Berlin: a conversation in a smoke--stained back room, Wolfe’s voice low and certain as he told someone to'keep the choir singing.'I’d dismissed it then as Wolfe's attempt at humor I didn’t have context for, but now, combined with the file name, staring back at me from a DGSE terminal it clicks eerily into place.
“Open it,” I say, my voice roughened by the weight of the memory.
The files are incomplete—fragmented trails scattered like breadcrumbs across a maze of hidden directories—but even this much is enough to form an ugly picture. Project Iron Choir isn’t a single mission—it’s an entire clandestine funding web, a covert pipeline siphoning resources into black-ops tech development across at least half a dozen countries. The same three names glare back at me from multiple headers, each one a loaded weapon in its own right:Klein. Langston. Laurent.
Every one of them is a power broker with a reach that extends far past their official portfolios. Klein—ex-MI6, rumored to have the ear of more than one prime minister. Langston—U.S. senator and member of both the intelligence and defensesubcommittees whose name seems to sprout like a weed wherever conflict is about to bloom. Laurent—DGSE aristocracy, old money wrapped in newer, sharper teeth.
Vivian keeps working, her brow furrowed in concentration, tracing connection lines like she’s tracing the threads of a spiderweb made of encrypted silk. Each link she uncovers gleams briefly on the monitor before she threads it to the next, the intricate map of data growing across the screen with the slow, deliberate elegance of someone weaving a net designed to ensnare far bigger prey.
“There’s more,” she murmurs, almost to herself. “Something’s piggybacking on the Iron Choir transfers—low-level pings to a separate relay. Whoever designed this buried it so deep it would stay invisible to any casual probe—only someone tracing the exact flow of currency data, packet by packet, down to the most granular layer of the network’s transactions, would even catch the faintest glimmer of it.”
She drills down with surgical precision, following the trail past decoy files and misdirection layers until the relay finally resolves—a secure comms node tucked so deep it’s like finding a single lock in a city of false doors. It’s buried under half a dozen false headers, each one designed to make even a seasoned analyst walk away thinking there’s nothing of value here. The timestamp says the last active connection was forty-eight hours ago. The sender tag blooms onto the screen, a ghost signature I haven’t seen in years—sharp, familiar, and dangerous—and yet the recognition is instant, like hearing a voice from a nightmare you thought you’d forgotten. The rhythm of the packets, the way the relay tucks itself into dead architecture—it’s her style again. My stomach drops with the double-hit: Wolfe’s alive… and the code that’s hiding him looks like it was woven by the same hands that opened that vault.
Wolfe.
For a heartbeat, the room seems to cant beneath me, my equilibrium faltering. Heat drains from my hands, leaving them icy, then rushes back in a flush that feels fever -hot, the tremor starting in my fingers before I can will it away. I brace them against the console, trying to still the betraying shake.
I’ve held steady under fire, with muzzles inches from my face, with blood running down my own knuckles—never once giving ground. But this isn’t gunfire. This is the gut -punch of truth after years chasing a ghost, hitting me with the precision and force of a sniper’s round straight to center mass.
Vivian glances up, catches it. Her expression doesn’t change, but in her eyes there’s a flicker—recognition laced with something raw, a flash of memory she can’t quite bury.
For a second, the scene shifts in my head—Marrakesh, years ago, on an off--the--books intercept op. She’s standing in that rain--slick alley, the street lamps painting the puddles in fractured light, just outside a hole--in--the--wall café we used as a meet point. We’d been tracking whispers of a weapons broker tied to Langston, running dark between ports, and she’d vanished inside for less than a minute before returning. A grainy photograph slid across the pitted table between us, the edges curling with damp. I remember the faint smell of diesel from a passing truck, the low murmur of voices from somewhere deeper in the alley, and the way her gaze locked on mine for a beat too long before she shoved the photo away, as if holding it any longer might burn her fingers.
That same guarded look flickers now, chasing across her features before she smooths it over.
“You were right,” she whispers, the words almost swallowed by the hum of the servers. “He’s alive.”
