Viktor watched the snow fall outside the dacha window, swirling gently in the lamplight. Forty years. Forty years since the wall fell, since the empire crumbled, not with a bang, but with the quiet, humiliating whimper of empty shelves and broken promises. They had called it a victory for freedom. Viktor called it a lesson. The Americans, in their arrogance, had taught him how to dismantle a nation without firing a shot. And he had proven to be an excellent student.
The man across the ocean, Rex Thorne, was the perfect instrument. A creature of pure, wounded ego. A showman who craved adoration but understood only transactions. Thorne didn’t truly hate his country; he hated the parts of it that refused to worship him. Viktor understood this kind of man perfectly. Give him a mirror that reflected only greatness, feed his grievances, offer him the one gaudy prize his vanity craved—a glittering tower bearing his name in the heart of the old empire—and he would hand you the keys to the kingdom.
The meeting by the frozen sea had been the culmination. The delivery of the small, dense package—the digital soul of a nation traded for a blueprint and a handshake. Thorne had felt powerful in that moment, Viktor knew. Like a king dispensing favors. He didn’t understand he was merely a pawn, the final, necessary piece in a game that had started long before he learned to tie his own shoes.
Across another ocean, a man named Marcus sat in a quiet room, watching the fragmented pieces of news flicker across a screen. He saw the patterns. The strange alliances, the inexplicable policy shifts, the constant, churning rage stoked by the showman, the quiet, coordinated dismantling of the institutions he had once sworn to defend. He saw the “Ocean’s 50” heist playing out in plain sight, the slow, methodical fleecing not of a casino, but of a republic. He saw Viktor’s long shadow.
Marcus felt the old anger stir, the familiar, cold fire that had been forged in deserts and alleys half a world away. The instinct was simple, clean: find the rot, cut it out, cauterize the wound. He could be the torturer, the executioner, the judge. The skills were still there, dormant but sharp.
But he held the leash tight. That was the old mission. The new one was different. Harder.
He thought of the roaches in the kitchen. You don’t just kill them one by one. You turn on the lights. You expose the filth they thrive in. You clean the surfaces so thoroughly that there is simply no place left for them to hide, no sustenance left for them to feed on. You make the environment itself hostile to their existence.
The showman and his court, Viktor in his dacha—they were not monsters to be slain. They were symptoms of a sickness. A sickness of complacency, of historical amnesia, of a nation that had forgotten the price of its own freedom. Killing the symptoms wouldn’t cure the disease.
Marcus leaned forward, the faint blue light of the screen reflecting in his eyes. The work wasn’t about blood. It was about clarity. It was about holding up a mirror so clean and so bright that the roaches would scatter from the light themselves. It was about reminding the householders that they had the power to clean their own kitchen.
He picked up a pen. The quiet battle required a different kind of weapon. He began to write, his voice steady, his hand firm. He would not offer violence. He would offer something far more dangerous: the truth. And he would deliver it with the quiet, unwavering intensity of a man who understands the stakes, who respects his enemy, but who will, under no circumstances, allow the house to fall.