Badge of the Death Game

Chapter 058

Nora was looking at him with the same expression she always wore at this moment: careful, warm, professionally concerned. It was a good performance. If he hadn't watched her put a suppressor-fitted Glock 17 against his head twice already, he might have found it genuinely disarming.

He rubbed the bridge of his nose and let exhaustion settle into his face, which wasn't entirely an act.

"Sorry," he said. "Just tired. Bad dreams."

"Bad dreams?" A small, curious tilt of her head. "Did you sleep poorly last night? Let me get you some water."

"Thank you, Nora."

She turned toward the water cooler. In the same motion, unhurried and quiet, Soren closed his fingers around the scalpel he'd palmed from the instrument tray behind him. He held it loosely at his side, blade inward, and waited.

She came back with the paper cup held out in both hands, the picture of attentive care. He took it from her with a smile and set it on the counter beside him without drinking.

Something moved behind her eyes. Gone in an instant, but he'd been watching for it.

"So," she said, her tone light, "what were these bad dreams about?"

"You, actually." He smiled. "Funny enough."

A faint flush appeared on her cheeks, perfectly calibrated. She reached over and nudged the cup a fraction closer to him, the gesture of someone playing a role they'd rehearsed until it felt like second nature. "You're always teasing. Come on, drink your water. We have work soon."

"The water can wait." His smile didn't waver. "Before that, I was hoping you could tell me something. What is Asset X-017?"

The color drained from her face.

Her right hand moved toward her jacket.

Soren was already moving. He caught her wrist before her fingers reached the fabric, pulled her arm across his body to break her angle, and brought the scalpel up against the side of her neck, the blade resting flat against the carotid artery. To anyone watching from across the ward, it looked like two colleagues sharing a quiet, close-spoken conversation.

The blade pressed in, just enough. A thin line of red welled up along the edge and clung to the steel, catching the overhead fluorescent light in a dark, wet gleam.

"Nora," he said softly, "I know you don't want to die. And I'd genuinely prefer not to kill you. I only want to understand three things: what happened ten years ago, what's happening now, and what X-017 actually is. That's all."

She held herself very still. When she spoke, her voice had shed every trace of the warmth she'd been performing.

"Nighthawk. I always knew a standard approach wouldn't work on you." Her eyes were flat and cold, measuring him the way a person measures a problem rather than a threat. "Whatever years you spent hiding, they didn't dull your instincts."

"Maybe not," he said agreeably. "So are you going to answer me? Because I'm sure the street outside is full of your people right now. I'm under surveillance around the clock, and I'm probably going to die today regardless. But if you don't answer, you'll die first. Right here. That's not a threat, it's just arithmetic."

Her mouth curved, but it wasn't a smile. "Your interrogation technique has gotten worse. You used to be better at this."

He applied a little more pressure. The cut deepened, a slow seep of blood tracking down toward her collarbone. One more fraction of an inch and the artery would open. They both knew it. He watched her weigh it, the calculation running behind her eyes, and he waited.

Ten seconds passed. Possibly the longest ten seconds the hospital corridor had ever hosted.

Then she exhaled through her nose.

"What exactly do you want to know?"

"The same three things I already said. X-017. Ten years ago. Today."

She frowned, and for the first time something other than cold professionalism crossed her face. Something that looked almost like confusion. "X-017 was your own operation. You ran it. How can you not know what it is? You were there when it happened."

"You know that's not what I'm asking."

She studied him. Her eyes moved over his face with the focused attention of someone trying to reconcile two versions of the same image. The way he held himself. The way he'd spoken. The particular quality of his stillness.

"You're not Nighthawk," she said. It wasn't quite an accusation. It was closer to a hypothesis being tested aloud.

"Does it matter what I say? Would you believe me? Would your superiors?"

She considered that. "No."

"Then we're back to the same place. Answer my questions, and I let you walk. I keep my word. I always have."

Another silence, shorter this time. The scalpel hadn't moved. She looked at his eyes and apparently found something there that settled the question.

"Fine," she said quietly. "But I don't know much. I can only tell you what I know."

What she knew was this.

Ten years ago, Nighthawk had been one of MI6's most capable field operatives, running long-term deep cover assignments across the Americas. He was the kind of asset that organizations built careers around, reliable, adaptable, and almost impossible to trace. Then one day, without warning, his handler had activated him with a priority tasking. A classified operation. The designation assigned to it was X-017.

What happened during that operation, Nora didn't know. The details had never filtered down to her level. What she did know was the outcome: roughly two weeks after receiving the assignment, Nighthawk had gone dark. He cut contact with his handler, disappeared from every network MI6 maintained, and vanished so completely that for years the working assumption was that he was dead.

Why he had resurfaced in Westbridge ten years later, living quietly under the name Hawk Hollis and working as a hospital physician, was a question that apparently had only one possible answer, and that answer was Nighthawk himself.

But MI6 had found him anyway. The world had changed in ten years. Network surveillance, biometric tracking, the layered architecture of modern intelligence infrastructure. It had taken time, but eventually the threads had come together. And when they had, the order had come down from the very top.

From Dax Carter, the director of MI6 himself.

Recover Asset X-017. Silence Nighthawk. Completely and permanently.

Nora had been placed inside Briarcrest Medical Center a month ago, embedded in the ward rotation, waiting for the right moment.

Soren listened to all of it without interrupting. When she finished, he stood quietly for a moment, turning the shape of it over in his mind. There were still gaps, significant ones. What X-017 actually contained. Why it was important enough to warrant a decade-long manhunt. Why Nighthawk had defected in the first place.

But one thing had come into focus.

The director of MI6. The man who had personally ordered the operation. The man at the center of everything.

Dax Carter.

Soren felt something settle in his thinking, the particular clarity that came when a problem that had been shapeless finally acquired an edge. He didn't have Asset X-017. He didn't know where it was or what it looked like. But he now had a name, and in his experience, a name was always somewhere to start.

He eased the scalpel back from Nora's neck, keeping his grip on her wrist a moment longer before releasing it. She stepped back, one hand going to the shallow cut along her neck, her eyes still watching him with that same evaluating steadiness.

He said nothing else. He was already thinking about what came next.