[Ethan’s POV]

The Black Sea Anchor was exactly the kind of tavern where men went to disappear.

It sat on the edge of the commercial docks, a low, concrete bunker of a building that smelled of spilled vodka, cheap tobacco, and unwashed bodies. The music thumping from the jukebox was a heavy, aggressive Russian bass track that rattled the floorboards.

I sat at a sticky wooden table in the corner, my flat cap pulled low over my eyes. Claire sat across from me, her face buried in the collar of her oversized parka. We had been nursing the same two glasses of warm beer for an hour, just watching and listening.

"The Panamanian freighters," Claire murmured, leaning forward so only I could hear her. "I checked the public port registry at an internet cafe down the street before we came in. Two of the three ships Jake noted in his journal are currently docked at Pier 14. They’re registered as carrying agricultural machinery."

"Agricultural machinery doesn’t require that many armed guards," I replied, my eyes tracking a group of rough-looking men at the bar. "Isabella is moving something else. Its either weapons, black-market tech or Cash."

"Then if Jake knows they’re here, he’s going to hit them right?" Claire asked.

"He might already have," I said, nodding toward the bar.

The men I had been watching were dockworkers, but they weren’t acting like men who had just finished a long, hard shift. They were agitated. One of them, a massive Ukrainian with a thick beard and a bruised jaw, was speaking in rapid, hushed tones to the bartender, waving his hands frantically.

I stood up, sliding a thick stack of euros from my pocket into the palm of my hand. "Stay here."

I walked over to the bar, slipping into the empty space next to the bearded Ukrainian. I didn’t look at him. I just placed the stack of euros on the sticky counter and slid it toward the bartender.

The bartender, a bald man with a scar over his eye, looked at the money, then looked at me.

"I’m looking for a ghost," I said in Russian, keeping my voice low and even. "An American. Tall. Dark hair. He’s been asking questions about the Panamanian freighters at Pier 14."

The bearded Ukrainian next to me suddenly went rigid. He slowly turned his head, his eyes wide with a mixture of hostility and deep, lingering fear.

"You are a friend of the demon?" the Ukrainian asked, his voice a gravelly rasp.

"I’m looking for him," I said, shifting my stance slightly, preparing for a fight.

The Ukrainian let out a harsh, bitter laugh and grabbed his shot glass. "Then you should look in hell. Because that is where he sent my crew last night."

I slid another fifty euros across the bar. The Ukrainian snatched it up.

"We were hired to unload a special shipping container from the Santa Maria," the man said, his voice dropping to a whisper. "Off the books. No customs inspectors. The boss—a woman from the West—pays very well for discretion. We moved the container to a holding warehouse on the edge of the pier."

"And the American?" I pressed.

"He was waiting for us," the man shuddered, rubbing his bruised jaw. "He didn’t have a gun. He didn’t make a sound. He just... came out of the shadows. He moved like water. He broke Ivan’s arm in three places. He crushed Sergei’s windpipe with a wrench. There were eight of us, and he dismantled us in less than two minutes."

"Did he take the cargo?" I asked, my pulse quickening.

"No," the Ukrainian said, staring into his empty glass. "He didn’t even open the crates. He just took the ledger from the foreman. The physical manifest. Then he poured gasoline over the container and burned it to the ground."

Jake wasn’t stealing Isabella’s assets. He was destroying them. And he was taking the paper trails to find the next link in the chain.

"Where is the warehouse?" I asked.

"Pier 14, Warehouse 7," the man muttered. "But you are too late. The boss’s private security arrived this morning. Men in black suits with submachine guns. They locked the place down."

I nodded, turning away from the bar. I walked back to the table and tapped the wood twice. Claire immediately stood up, following me out the heavy iron door and into the freezing night air.

"Pier 14," I told her as we walked briskly down the cobblestone street toward the docks. "Jake hit a holding warehouse last night. He burned a container and stole the physical manifest."

"The manifest," Claire’s eyes lit up. "Ethan, if Isabella is using shell companies, the digital records will be scrubbed clean. But the physical manifest—the one the dockworkers use to verify the cargo—that will have the true destination of the shipment. Jake is tracking the supply line backward."

"And Isabella’s PMCs are locking down the crime scene," I said. "We need to get inside that warehouse before they clean it up. If Jake left a clue, or if there’s a copy of that manifest, we need it to be able to track his next location."

...

The commercial port was a sprawling, mechanical beast. Towering cranes moved like steel dinosaurs under the harsh glare of halogen floodlights. We stuck to the shadows, navigating through a maze of stacked shipping containers until we reached the perimeter of Pier 14.

Warehouse 7 was a massive, corrugated metal structure sitting at the edge of the water.

Just as the Ukrainian had said, it was locked down. Two matte-black SUVs were parked near the loading bay. Four PMCs in heavy tactical gear were patrolling the perimeter, their suppressed rifles resting against their chests.

"Four tangos outside," I whispered, crouching behind a stack of wooden pallets. "Probably more inside."

"Youcan’t take them all in a firefight," Claire whispered back. "Not without drawing the local police or worse dying."

"We don’t need a firefight," I said, my eyes scanning the environment. Darius’s training kicked in, analyzing the geometry of the battlefield. "We just need a distraction."

I looked up. A massive, automated gantry crane was positioned on a track that ran directly over the warehouse. The operator’s cabin was empty, but the heavy steel lifting spreader was dangling about forty feet in the air, right above the PMCs’ SUVs.

"Stay here," I told Claire. "When they move, you slip through the side door."

I didn’t wait for her to argue. I melted into the shadows, moving silently between the containers until I reached the base of the crane. I climbed the rusted access ladder, my boots making no sound on the metal rungs.

When I reached the operator’s cabin, I jimmied the lock with my pry bar and slipped inside. The control panel was old, analog, and powered up.

I looked down through the glass floor of the cabin. The four PMCs were grouped near the loading bay, smoking cigarettes and talking in low voices.

I grabbed the heavy release lever for the lifting spreader and yanked it hard.

With a deafening screech of metal, the massive steel spreader plummeted from the sky. It slammed directly into the roof of one of the parked SUVs, crushing the vehicle flat against the concrete with an explosive crunch of glass and steel.

The PMCs shouted in alarm, raising their weapons and scrambling away from the wreckage, their flashlights sweeping the sky.

I didn’t stick around to watch. I slipped out the back of the cabin, slid down a support cable, and dropped onto the roof of the warehouse. I moved quickly across the corrugated metal, finding a rusted skylight. I kicked the glass in and dropped twenty feet, landing in a crouch on top of a stack of wooden crates inside the warehouse.

The interior smelled heavily of gasoline and charred metal.

In the center of the room sat the blackened, melted remains of a shipping container. The doors had been blown open.

I hopped down from the crates, my Glock drawn, and moved toward the container. The side door of the warehouse creaked open, and Claire slipped inside, moving quickly to join me.

"Look at this," Claire whispered, shining her penlight into the burned container.

It wasn’t weapons.

The container was filled with the charred, smoldering remains of shrink-wrapped pallets. Millions, maybe billions, in untraceable bearer bonds and high-denomination euros, reduced to ash.

"Money," I said, staring at the burned fortune. "Why is Isabella smuggling physical cash into Ukraine?" Claire stepped closer, her eyes scanning the ashes.

"Because digital money leaves a trail. Isabella uses these black-market funds to finance her corporate raids on Vanguard and Aldridge Global without the SEC tracking it." She looked up at me, her face pale in the dim light.

"Jake isn’t just tracking her supply lines, Ethan. He’s bankrupting her. He’s burning her liquidity to the ground, and the only thing she do is try and follow his trail of destruction. "