Page 5 of Echo: Spark
My throat closes. The coffee mug trembles in my grip like a leaf in a hurricane, and I set it down before Kane sees. He's already seen enough. The drunk who got sloppy in Whitefish. The operator who chose dead kids over a clean extraction. The fool who calculates righteousness matters in our world.
"I got Collins killed in Kinshasa," I say, the words tasting like ashes. "My spotter. Twenty-six years old. Had a girl back home. Was saving up for a ring."
"Collins knew the job."
"He didn't know I'd go off script. Didn't know his team leader was the kind of asshole who'd throw away the mission for a principle."
"He knew you." Kane's voice doesn't change, but something in his eyes does. Understanding, maybe. Or recognition. The look of one soldier seeing another. "Same as I knew you in Mosul. Same as you knew me when the chips were down."
The warehouse door clangs open, metal on metal, sharp enough to make me reach for a weapon that isn't there. My hand finds empty air where the Glock should be, muscle memory faster than conscious thought. Even half-drunk and poisoned with guilt, the reflexes are still there.
She enters like winter itself.
Victoria Cross. Not the British equivalent of the Medal of Honor, but a force to be reckoned with. I recognize her from the files, the rumors, the warnings whispered in safe houses from Beirut to Bangkok. Her silver hair was sculpted into a style that likely cost more than most cars, and the coat draped over her shoulders could have paid a year’s salary for the average person. But it's her eyes that mark her as a predator—calculating, cold, cataloging everything in the warehouse including the exits, the weapons, and the two broken operators sitting at a planning table.
Her gaze lands on me, takes in the shaking hands, the three-day stubble, the blood under my fingernails from whatever fight I'd gotten into before Kane dragged me here. Then Kane, his tactical calm, his readiness. She's measuring us both, running calculations on our usefulness versus our liability. In her world, everything has a price and everyone has an expiration date.
"Gentlemen." Her voice carries that particular authority that comes from knowing where bodies are buried. Probably because she buried half of them herself.
She moves to Kane's operational planning table with deliberate grace, designer heels somehow silent on the concrete floor. From an expensive Italian leather portfolio, she produces photographs. Black and white. Surveillance quality. She spreads them across the table with manicured fingers, each movement precise as a dealer laying out cards in a game where the stakes are measured in lives.
Cross doesn’t say it out loud, but the message is clear: if we’re going to keep breathing, we’ll be hearing from her again. Not in person, not with a business card. The kind of contact that arrives on a dark screen with a tag that simply readsCROSS.
Tommy’s tablet blinks twice. He angles it my way: last-known trace routes through a Brussels diplomatic enclave. The burner chain is clean, too clean. Redacted employment records line up with intelligence tasking windows. Not proof—but enough to keep listening, enough to remind us she plays on a board above ours.
Forty-three faces stare up at us.
I know that number because I count them twice, my brain trying to process what I'm seeing through the fog of withdrawal and disbelief. Operators. All of them. Dead. All of them. Professionals who'd survived wars, revolutions, and betrayals only to end up as eight-by-ten glossies on a warehouse table.
"Marcus Reid," she says, tapping one photo with a fingernail painted the color of dried blood. "Shot through his hotel window in Crete. Single round, .338 Lapua, eight hundred meters. Professional work." She moves to the next. "Daniel Lockwood, car bomb in Beirut. Remote detonated. Clean blast pattern, minimal collateral damage." Another photo. "James Chen, supposed suicide in Tokyo that forensics would disputeif anyone cared to look. Hanging, but the ligature marks are wrong. Staged."
My stomach turns to ice water as I recognize more faces. Rodriguez, who ran overwatch in Fallujah and saved my ass three different times. Petrov, who shared his vodka during a bitter Chechen winter. Williams, who gave me his last MRE in some Colombian jungle whose name I never learned and whose heat tried to kill us all.
"Systematic elimination." Cross's voice remains clinically detached, like she's discussing quarterly earnings instead of murdered men who bled for their countries. "Professional work. Someone with resources, intelligence, and very specific targeting criteria."
"Burned operators," Kane says with deliberate precision, his voice carrying the weight of understanding.
"Precisely. Every one of them disavowed, abandoned, or betrayed by their handlers." She slides another file across the table with one finger, the movement elegant and deadly. "Which brings us to this."
Alex Mercer's file opens to reveal a face I remember from Syria. Quiet professional who could track anything through any terrain. Lost his whole team when someone decided drone strikes were cleaner than extraction. Someone in a clean office decided eighteen village kids were acceptable collateral damage for taking out one mid-level insurgent commander.
He refused. Disobeyed direct orders to paint the target.
"Mercer's gone dark near Glacier National Park." Cross studies her manicure like the information bores her, but I catch the tension in her shoulders, the slight tightening around her eyes. "Six months off grid after refusing that drone strike. If he's still alive, he won't be for long."
She looks up, those predator eyes moving between Kane and me like a surgeon choosing where to make the first cut. "None of you will be unless you stop running and start fighting back."
The warehouse feels smaller suddenly, the walls pressing in like a tomb. The weapons on the wall aren't enough. The reinforced doors aren't thick enough. We're three people in a concrete box, waiting for death to find us. And death, apparently, has gotten very good at finding people lately.
I catch my reflection in one of Kane's tactical monitors. Bloodshot eyes stare back at me like accusation. Hollow cheeks. The face of a man who's been trying to drink himself to death because it's easier than living with what he's done. What he's failed to do. Collins died because I went off script. Van Der Berg died because I couldn't walk away from those kids. And now Kane's looking at me like I'm worth saving, like I'm anything more than a drunk who brings death to everyone stupid enough to trust him.
"Why?" The word comes out before I can stop it, raw and honest. "Why do you calculate I'm worth this?"
Kane's eyes don't leave mine. "Because you're asking the wrong question."
"Yeah?” asks the guy who thinks whiskey solves tactics. “What's the right one?"
"Whether those kids in Kinshasa were worth Collins's life." He lets that sink in, each word deliberate as a sniper's bullet. "Whether those eighteen children in Syria are worth Mercer's. Whether doing the right thing matters even when it costs everything we have."
