Badge of the Death Game

Chapter 059

"So you've already located Asset X-017?"

Soren kept his voice level, watching Nora's face for the flicker that would confirm what he already suspected. It wasn't a difficult calculation. If she had been embedded beside Nighthawk long enough to earn his trust, she could have moved against him at any point. She hadn't. Which meant the mission had only become urgent now, and there was only one reason for that.

"That's right." Nora didn't bother hiding it. She met his eyes with the calm steadiness of someone who believed the game was already over. "Asset X-017 is nearly at MI6 headquarters as we speak. Nighthawk, it's finished. All of it."

A brief silence settled between them.

"Perhaps," Soren said.

He let the word sit there, quiet and noncommittal. But behind it, the math was already done. If he wanted the full completion bonus on this Career Instance, the intelligence couldn't reach MI6. It absolutely could not reach Dax Carter. That left him exactly one option, and it was the kind of option that reasonable people spent their whole careers trying to avoid.

He was going to have to walk straight into the lion's den.

The scalpel moved before Nora could read the shift in his expression. A single clean draw across her carotid, deep and certain. Her eyes went wide, not with pain but with something rawer: shock, confusion, the disbelief of someone who had genuinely not seen it coming. Soren caught her with his free hand, already reaching inside her jacket for the weapon and magazine holstered there.

"Don't worry," he said quietly, lowering her to the floor. "Next time, I'll let you walk away."

He tucked her body behind the nearest desk, out of the immediate sightline from the door, and straightened up.

Outside the Briarcrest Medical Center, things were already moving. The MI6 surveillance team monitoring the communications channel had heard every word of that exchange. Within minutes, a convoy of vehicles had pulled up to the curb, and armed operatives were pushing through the hospital's front entrance at a controlled jog, weapons concealed but hands ready.

Soren didn't run.

He pulled the suppressor free from the pistol's barrel and dropped it, the metal clinking against the floor as he walked. He hit the magazine release, caught the magazine mid-air, and ran a quick thumb-check: full load, no issues. He seated it again with a firm click and kept moving, heading not for an exit but deeper into the building, toward the security monitoring station.

The guard inside was a heavyset man working his way through a bag of crisps, feet up, half-watching a bank of screens that showed corridors full of ordinary hospital foot traffic. He looked up when the door opened and broke into an easy grin.

"Hey, Dr. Hawke. How's the day treating you?"

"Not bad," Soren said, and smiled back.

The pistol grip came down hard on the back of the man's neck. The guard slumped without a sound, the crisp bag spilling across the console. Soren caught him before he could slide out of the chair, settled him against the desk, and turned to the fire alarm panel on the wall.

He pulled the handle.

The alarm tore through the building, sharp and relentless, bouncing off every tiled surface in every corridor. Through the monitors, Soren watched the hospital transform in seconds: nurses abandoning stations, patients being guided toward stairwells, orderlies moving with the brisk efficiency of people who had drilled this exact scenario. The flood of bodies heading for the exits was dense and fast.

Moving against it, pushing upstream through the evacuating crowd, were four figures in civilian clothes with the unmistakable body language of trained operatives.

Soren cut the power to every camera in the building.

The screens went black all at once. In the surveillance van parked outside, he knew, the MI6 perimeter team would be staring at dead feeds and already calling it in. Every available operative in the area would be redirected inside. That was fine. That was the point.

He was already gone from the security room before the first two-man team reached it.

They stacked on either side of the door with practiced efficiency, traded a nod, and the lead operative kicked it open and went in hard, pistol up. His partner moved to follow.

The office door across the hall swung open.

Soren came out in a CAR stock compressed ready position, fast and close, and fired twice before the operative in the hall could fully process what he was seeing. Two shots, precise, center-mass and head. The man dropped straight down, no stumble, no grab at the wall.

Inside the security room, the first operative heard the shots and spun. He took in his partner's body in the doorway, the spreading dark stain, the absolute stillness, and made the only tactically sound decision available to him: he slammed the door shut, pressed himself against the wall beside it, and fired a burst through the door panel. The rounds punched through the thin material and threw pale shafts of light across the floor where they exited.

Soren was already moving down the corridor.

Three more operatives came around the far corner at a run, drawn by the gunfire. The surviving man inside shouted through the door as he heard them approach, "He went toward the surgical wing!"

They regrouped into a four-man tactical formation and pushed forward, faster now but tighter, checking angles as they went. The lesson from thirty seconds ago was fresh. Without the camera network, without any way to track his position through the building, Nighthawk had become something else entirely: not a target to be cornered, but a predator moving through familiar ground. They would need to be careful.

More operatives were flooding in through the hospital's ground-floor entrances, fanning out through the corridors in pairs and threes, beginning a systematic sweep of every room.

Across the street, inside a parked cargo van with blacked-out windows, a group of figures in dark clothing sat in tense silence, watching aerial footage on a laptop screen. The drone overhead was theirs. On the feed, they could see the operatives' movements around the building's perimeter, the last of the evacuating civilians filtering out through the emergency exits.

One of them noticed the van's rear door first, the faint sound of footsteps stopping just outside.

Nobody spoke. Hands moved to weapons. Eyes locked on the door.

The breaching charge detonated.

The rear doors blew inward in a shower of fractured metal, and the flashbang was already rolling across the floor before anyone could react. The detonation filled the van with white light and a concussive c***k that folded the world in half.

A figure came through the gap immediately after, moving fast and low.

Gunfire erupted inside the van, muzzle flashes strobing in the confined space. It lasted less than thirty seconds. When the smoke cleared and the ringing silence took over, a lean man in a well-cut suit was standing among the bodies, a SIG P365 held loosely at his side. One of the figures on the floor was still moving, fingers scrabbling weakly at the metal. The suited man put a single round through his skull without breaking stride.

The empty magazine dropped free. He drew a fresh one from his quick-draw holster and seated it smoothly.

"Ghost Wolf. Surveillance vehicle neutralized. Moving into Briarcrest now."

The slide racked forward, chambering the first round.

________________________________________

Back inside the hospital, Soren stood motionless behind a doctor's office door, back flat against the wall, breathing slow and even. The room was dark except for a single desk lamp throwing a narrow cone of amber light across the floor. The door was open. He had left it that way.

Footsteps in the corridor, quick and deliberate. A three-man team, by the sound of it.

They reached the office. Two of them peeled off and came through the doorway in sequence, sweeping the room. The third held position outside, covering the hall.

Soren pushed the door shut behind the two who had entered.

He was already moving before the latch clicked, closing the distance to the nearer operative in two steps. One hand clamped down on the man's weapon, thumb finding the safety and clicking it off in the same motion. His own pistol came up from chest height and fired twice. Both rounds punched through center-mass at near-contact range.

The second operative had already turned, pistol tracking toward Soren's silhouette in the dark. Soren stepped sideways off the line of aim, firing three times in a tight grouping: the first shot knocked the pistol from the man's grip, the next two caught him in the chest and abdomen. He went down hard.

The door exploded inward. The third operative came through with his weapon already firing, a controlled burst aimed at where Soren had been standing. Soren was already low and moving, one hand extended with the pistol, shooting on the move as he crossed toward the far wall. It was ugly and close and loud in the small room. When it was over, all three operatives were down.

Soren's slide locked back on an empty chamber.

He stripped the spent magazine, pulled a fresh one from his pocket, and slapped it home. Three quick shots to confirm the kills, one per head, clean and deliberate. Then he stepped back into the corridor.

At the far end of the hall, another team rounded the corner and spotted him instantly. They opened fire without hesitation.

Soren was already ducking around the next corner at a dead run.