Chapter 12 – The Mole
The butcher shop stank of ammonia, offal, and burnt fat. Upstairs, the apartment hadn't seen sunlight in months. Mold climbed the corners. Wallpaper peeled in damp curls.
Ghost knelt by the radiator, peeled back a slat of warped linoleum, and pried up a floorboard with his knife. Wood snapped—rotted soft. Below: a grease-stained plastic bag, vacuum-sealed, heat-creased. He tugged it free.
Inside: a half-burned CIA field dossier. Ash curled along the edges, crisp as paper snow. Across the top margin, scrawled in red pencil:
"Handler: Joseph Ward – STATUS: UNCONFIRMED."
"Last Known Location: Brussels."
A low crackle filled his ear.
Laswell's voice slid in over encrypted comms, sharp and low:
> "Ward was off-book for two weeks. Surveillance went dark. We think he passed something—maybe to Spectre. Maybe not."
Soap leaned in the window, a cigarette dead between his fingers. His eyes tracked a delivery van parked too long across the street.
"Lot of maybes, Ghost." His voice low, clipped. "We tail a ghost, or we dig up a corpse?"
Ghost didn't answer. He pulled his sidearm from its thigh holster, screwed on a suppressor, then loaded a thermal scanner from his belt pouch. The dead didn't sweat. The living always did.
He stood, checked the sight line through the cracked blinds. The dossier burned a hole in his hand. He folded it once, slid it inside his chest rig.
"We move," Ghost said. "Either we find Ward…" He racked the pistol's slide.
"Or what's left of him."
---
The feed stuttered—grainy, timestamp glitching. Ghost paused the CCTV clip on frame 47.
Joseph Ward. Gray windbreaker, messenger bag slung tight. He passed through the Brussels-Central terminal just after midnight, three nights back. His gait clipped, eyes fixed down. Purpose in every step.
Ghost rewound the feed, watched it again.
No exit.
"Tunnel C-14," Laswell said in his ear. "Utility access. Old NATO fallout routing. Decommissioned in '08."
"Not decommissioned enough," Ghost muttered, pushing up from the terminal screen.
They crossed the station disguised as maintenance workers—blue overalls, badge spoofers blinking green. No one looked twice. No one wanted to.
A service door creaked open to a breathless dark. Ghost's boots crunched on old glass and rust flakes. A rail cart half-smashed against a wall bore graffiti thick as bruises. Syringe husks glinted under Soap's torch beam.
"Feels more morgue than metro," Soap muttered.
They moved deeper. The walls narrowed. Stale piss and mold thickened the air. Pipes hissed overhead—live steam bleeding out.
Then Soap's light stopped.
A crude mark scorched into the concrete. Blackened, jagged. A stylized "V" slashed across the wall like a brand.
Spectre's mark.
Soap leaned in. "Ward didn't walk in here blind."
Ghost stared at the burn, jaw flexing behind his mask.
"No. He was followed," he said, voice low.
He stepped back, eyes sweeping the dark.
"Or bought."
---
The freight elevator screeched to a halt, metal grinding against rust. Ghost raised a closed fist. Soap went still beside him.
"EMP shielding," Ghost muttered, watching his thermal scanner fizzle and die. "Dead zone."
Soap clicked his flashlight off. Darkness swallowed the shaft. The doors creaked open.
Ghost stepped out first—silent, sidearm raised. The underground switchyard stretched ahead, a gutted transit hub turned graveyard. Stripped cables dangled like nooses. Every security cam was melted or smashed. The hum of the elevator faded, replaced by a low, mechanical drone—a signal jammer pulsing under the concrete.
Three shapes moved in the dark—silent, practiced. Ex-Spetsnaz by their gait. Not Spectre. Hired blades.
Too quiet.
Ghost rolled a flashbang across the floor.
Pop. White fury. The dark screamed.
He lunged through the noise and light, slamming into the nearest merc. One-two combo to the ribs, then he drove the man's skull into a junction box. Bone crunched. Body dropped.
Soap engaged the second—ducked under a swing, grabbed a monkey wrench off a crate. Steel met jaw with a wet crack. The merc staggered. Soap didn't stop. He brought the wrench down again. And again.
Third merc broke and ran.
Ghost tracked him. One clean shot. The man collapsed, screaming, clutching his leg. Blood spread across the concrete.
Ghost reached him, knee to chest, pistol to cheek.
"Names."
The merc spat red, blinked through tears.
"Go to hell."
Ghost pressed the muzzle against the wound.
The scream echoed down the rails.
---
The wounded merc lay on his back, leg twisted beneath him, blood pulsing through his fingers. The stink of copper filled the air, thick and wet. His breath came in ragged bursts, lips glossy with spit and pain.
Ghost crouched beside him, pistol hovering just above the man's cheekbone.
"You've got one lung's worth of time left," he said flatly. "Start talking."
The merc spat blood, aimed low, tried to smirk. Didn't land.
"Codes," he muttered in broken Czech. "Ward gave them. Not to us. To the one with no flag."
Soap stepped closer, dragging the monkey wrench behind him like a leash. "Spectre?"
The merc winced. "Not Spectre. Worse."
Ghost's eyes narrowed behind the mask. "Name."
A beat. Then, a whisper like glass underfoot: "Wexler."
Soap stiffened. "No. Wexler's dead. We watched the drone feed. He bled out in Mosul."
Ghost didn't blink. "No. Wexler's buried. Big difference."
The merc's head lolled, a twitch, then still.
Soap exhaled, muttered, "Bloody hell."
Ghost stood. "Ward handed off Mosul intel to a ghost. Now ghosts are crawling back out."
---
Rain ticked against the shingles as Ghost and Soap crouched on the rooftop of an unmarked building nestled between shuttered cafés in Ixelles. The city was asleep, but the kind of sleep that never felt safe—like something watching just beyond the curtain.
Ghost peered through a thermal monocular. "No heat signatures."
"Dead quiet," Soap muttered, already prying open the skylight.
They dropped in without a whisper, boots landing soft on dust-hazed parquet. The power was cut. No hum from a fridge, no glow from standby lights—only the brittle hush of abandonment.
Soap swept the first floor with a low-ready stance, barrel aimed where ghosts might hide.
"Left's clear," he said.
Ghost didn't answer. He'd already moved, drawn to the scent—iron and rot. Down the hallway, a smear of blood marred the wallpaper like someone had tried to crawl or claw their way out. He followed it to a mirror cracked into a spiderweb.
He looked into it. Not for reflection—just habit.
A laptop rested on a blood-smeared desk. Black screen. Still warm to the touch.
"Fresh kill," Ghost said, gloved fingers ghosting over the keyboard. No data. Someone had scrubbed it hard and fast.
Soap stepped into the room, boots crunching over shattered glass. "If Ward was here, he didn't leave on foot."
Ghost turned toward the far wall. The ash caught his eye—charred grey against the plaster, a message scrawled in jagged strokes like someone wrote with their last nerve:
MOSUL WASN'T A MISTAKE.
The room went still. Not quiet. Still.
Soap read the words aloud under his breath. "What the hell does that mean?"
Ghost didn't blink. "It means someone didn't want it to be forgotten."
Soap's gaze slid to the laptop. "Whoever wiped that didn't expect us this fast."
Ghost's tone darkened. "Or they wanted us to find it. On their terms."
A floorboard creaked behind them. They spun.
Nothing.
---
Ghost's eyes locked on the ash-scrawled words like they were carved into his own skull. MOSUL WASN'T A MISTAKE. The message didn't whisper—it accused. The kind of truth that couldn't be unsaid.
His fingers curled into fists, leather creaking.
The room vanished.
2017 – Mosul
Wind howled through half-broken comms. Dust screamed past the lenses of his goggles. The feed from the forward recon team was glitching—red outlines flickering in the blown-out thermal image. Children. Fighters. Hard to tell anymore.
"Abort. Ghost, I said abort!" Laswell's voice cut in through the static, high and sharp.
He didn't answer. The comms were already lagged.
He tapped the strike order. Once.
No confirmation ping.
Then—nothing.
Just silence. Then light. And a sound he never heard in dreams because it was deeper than hearing. Like the world cracked open at the edges.
Back in the safehouse
He blinked. Rain on the roof, a faint metallic tang in the air. Soap stood across the room, crouched over a half-destroyed bookshelf. His gloved hands worked carefully, pulling apart a hollowed-out volume with a 9mm hole drilled through the spine.
"Found something," Soap muttered, holding up a small USB drive jammed inside a ruined copy of The Quiet American.
"Fitting," Ghost said flatly.
Soap tossed it. Ghost caught it one-handed.
He stared at it, jaw clenched beneath the balaclava.
Laswell's voice buzzed over comms, dry and calm as a surgeon: "Anything worth burning?"
Ghost didn't blink. "We've got the match. Just need the fuse."
---
The tram yard stank of oil and rain-soaked concrete. Somewhere above, traffic hummed like nothing was rotting beneath it. But in this underworld—beneath rusted struts and flickering fluorescents—truth bled out in bytes.
Ghost leaned over the folding table, gloved hand steady on the USB jammed into a burner rig. A cracked laptop hissed to life, flickering with Laswell's remote link.
Her voice came filtered through static and distance. "Signal's weak. I've got partial access."
Soap paced behind him, eyes scanning the entrance. Rifle angled down, but twitchy.
Files crawled across the screen—encrypted blocks, audio tags, raw metadata bleeding through like wounds. One folder blinked open.
A garbled voice broke through first. Male. American. Strained, but not panicked.
> "This isn't about control. It's about truth. You left him there. You burned them all."
Ghost didn't flinch, but his jaw locked. That voice—Ward's. Angled with betrayal and something deeper.
Laswell again: "Ward tried to dump it. He didn't trust the channels."
Soap leaned in. "Trusted Spectre instead?"
Ghost grunted. "No. He panicked. Spectre moved faster."
Another file loaded—a stripped spectrogram, labeled INTERFERENCE RELAY LOG. Soap tapped through.
> "Emergency scramble relay detected. Frequency overlap blocked all inbound NATO signals—Mosul, March 2017."
"Means someone wanted our recovery team deaf," Soap muttered.
Ghost's eyes flicked to the embedded GPS coordinate. A dull pulse on the map: Luxembourg. Classified Site 3A. Inactive since 2015.
Laswell's voice hardened. "That relay wasn't Spectre tech. It was ours."
Soap stared at the screen, voice low. "How deep's this rot go?"
Ghost shut the laptop. "Far enough someone wanted Ward erased, not buried."
He slid the USB from the port, tucked it into a lead-lined pouch.
Behind them, the wind kicked through the tram tunnel. Cold. Hollow.
Laswell again, quieter now. "One last file. Sending image."
The laptop blinked once more. A black-and-white still loaded slowly—concrete walls, a single bulb, two chairs bolted to the floor. On the back wall, painted in crude capital letters:
> SILENCE
---
The tram yard went quiet—too quiet for Brussels. No rail clatter. No voices. Just the tick of cooling metal and the slow buzz of an overloaded breaker box.
Ghost stared at the image frozen on the laptop. The black-and-white frame didn't flicker. It didn't move. No timestamp. No feed ID. Just cold concrete, twin chairs bolted to the floor, and that word—painted in block black slashes like a warning, or a command.
> SILENCE.
He didn't blink. Didn't need to.
Soap hovered near the workbench, eyes flicking from Ghost to the screen, then to Laswell's voice piping through comms.
"Silent Room was meant to disappear," she said. "Scrubbed from blackbooks in twenty-eighteen. Ward wasn't supposed to know it existed."
Ghost tilted his head. "He knew. Someone led him there."
Soap's voice tightened. "And sealed it behind him."
The laptop chirped—file transmission complete. Laswell's signal dipped into static.
"I'm losing link. Satellite's degrading. Whatever you're planning, make it fast."
"We're not planning," Ghost said, voice low. "We're moving."
He snapped the laptop shut and slid it into a burn bag. He looked to Soap. "Grab gear. We roll in fifteen."
"Luxembourg's four hours out, best case."
"Then we get moving four hours ago."
Soap nodded and checked his mag, then his secondary. "You think Ward's still breathing?"
Ghost pulled his balaclava over his face. "I think if he is, someone's using him as bait."
Soap zipped up his tac vest. "And if not?"
Ghost holstered his sidearm. "Then we pull the hook out and feed it back to whoever set the line."
They exited the tram yard under cover of dark. Lights flicked out behind them. The USB's contents burned through Laswell's cloud link, already triggering flags buried beneath layers of obfuscation.
Back in the room, the laptop screen blinked once more—connection lost. But the last image lingered in its cold afterglow.
Two chairs.
No door.
Silence.