Minutes crawl past with agonizing slowness. Fire crews battle the blaze, police cordon off the street, neighbors evacuate buildings on either side. Standard emergency response to a residential explosion.
Somewhere in that chaos, Remy's either extracting to safety or dying in what's left of the apartment.
The comm stays silent.
I keep watching from the window, waiting for movement in the shadows, waiting for his voice through the static, waiting for any proof he made it out alive.
Below, the street shows nothing but fire crews working the contained blaze, smoke still rising from the gutted apartment, emergency lights strobing red and blue against the darkness.
Daylight bleeds out completely. Full night settles over Rotterdam—over the gutted apartment still smoking, over emergency crews packing equipment, over the empty street where I keep waiting for proof he survived what he set in motion.
Hours pass. The comm stays silent.
16
REMY
The explosion lights up the Rotterdam night making it look like dawn came hours early.
From my position on a rooftop overlooking the safe house, I watch the charges do exactly what I designed them to do—turn that apartment into an inferno while leaving neighboring units intact. Fire blooms through blown-out windows, angry orange against the darkening sky. Smoke billows upward in thick columns. Even from two buildings away, I feel the heat shimmer rolling off the burning unit.
Perfect execution. Textbook detonation sequence. Minimal collateral damage.
Lazarev never saw it coming.
I stay low, watching emergency services flood the street below. Fire trucks, police vehicles, ambulances—all the chaos that follows when residential areas explode. Sirens wail. Neighbors evacuate. First responders establish perimeters and start fighting the blaze.
And I wait.
Confirming the kill means patience. Means staying in position until I see proof that Lazarev's vendetta died in that apartment along with him. The comm stays silent in my ear.Radio discipline maintained. Isabella and Luc are watching from the observation post several blocks away, seeing the same devastation on the phone feed before it went black, waiting for me to break silence, waiting to know I made it out.
She's waiting. The thought cuts deeper than it should.
Focus. Confirmation first.
Hours crawl past. Fire crews battle the blaze, bringing it under control in sections, clearing hot spots, making the structure safe enough for investigation. Emergency lights strobe red and blue against the night, casting the street in alternating colors.
I hold position. Just watch and wait with the patience that comes from operations where rushing gets you killed.
The apartment's structural integrity held. Directional blast destroyed everything inside the kill zone while leaving the building skeleton intact. Clean work. The kind of precision that comes from decades placing charges in worse conditions than a Rotterdam apartment.
Finally, they bring out the body bag.
I can't make out details from this distance—too much smoke, too many emergency lights washing out visibility. But I watch them carry it down, note the way two responders struggle slightly with the weight. An adult male, based on how they're handling it.
Below, two fire investigators stand near their truck, close enough that their voices carry up to my position when the wind shifts.
"Single fatality," one says in Dutch, consulting a tablet. "Found at blast center. No chance of survival with that kind of thermal exposure."
"Identification?"
"Won't know until the medical examiner processes remains. But based on position and trajectory analysis, victim was standing in the main room when the devices detonated."
Exactly where Lazarev would have been when the trap snapped shut.
Done. Years hunting me, years planning revenge, and he walked right into the same trap he'd have set himself. Yemen's finished. The vendetta's finished. Lazarev's ash and bone in a Rotterdam morgue.
I key the comm. "Nitro to Oversight. Target neutralized. Extraction in progress."
