CHAPTER 31: SOMETHING FISHY IN COUNTRY K

The base always looked uglier after a mission. Maybe it was the fact that the lighting was too stark. Or maybe it was the way reality set in the moment their boots hit the tarmac. No more adrenaline. No more clarity. Just exhaust fumes and the bureaucratic stink of the debriefing that would come.

Zubair was the first off the chopper, his expression unreadable behind dark sunglasses he didn’t take off, even in the middle of the night. His rifle was slung across his back like it had fused to his spine. Elias followed without a word, the case in his hand handled like glass. Lachlan whistled low as he stepped out, shaking snow out of his hair that wasn’t supposed to be there.

"Looks like they missed us," he grinned, glancing at the empty platform. "What? No welcoming committee?"

"They’ve already got what they wanted," Alexei muttered. He stepped down with the fluid grace of a cat, barely leaving footprints on the steel.

Elias didn’t comment. His grip on the case was firm, but his shoulders were tight. None of them liked this one—not the silence of the mission, not the cold, not the humming man in the chair. Especially not how fast they’d been cleared to deliver something they weren’t even allowed to ask about.

Inside the sterile heart of the lab, Layla Orhan was already waiting.

She stood with arms folded, lab coat crisp, dark hair tied back in a braid so tight it looked like it might snap. Her eyes flicked over the team one by one, then settled on Elias. Not Zubair. Not the case.

"You have it?" she asked.

Elias nodded once and placed the container on the steel table between them.

Dr. Orhan didn’t reach for it right away. She just looked at it, then up at him again. "Any contamination?"

"No. The sample was intact. We followed your protocol exactly," Elias replied, voice clipped.

"Of course you did," she murmured with a nod of her head before finally turning toward the containment unit.

The team didn’t linger.

------

They didn’t go to a bar—none of them trusted public spaces anymore. Not after the last time Alexei spotted an unmarked van sitting outside the one closest to base for three hours straight. Instead, they went to one of their own safe houses, a small concrete block of a building two clicks from the city edge.

It had heat, alcohol, a half-decent sound system, and exactly one ugly plaid couch that Lachlan refused to let them replace.

By the time the drinks were poured, the mood had shifted from post-mission detachment to something colder. Sharper. Zubair sat on the floor, his back to the wall, and a bottle of arak untouched beside him. Elias leaned against the kitchen counter, his hands wrapped around a mug of black tea. Lachlan sprawled across the couch, legs over one armrest, boots still on.

Alexei stood by the window, watching the frost creep across the glass.

"She didn’t ask a single question," Lachlan finally said. "Didn’t even check the seal. Just nodded like she already knew it was clean."

"She did know," Elias replied. "It wasn’t about the sample."

Alexei glanced over. "Then what was it about?"

"She wanted to see us. All four of us. Together," Elias said. "To see how we looked."

Zubair didn’t move. "She’s still pushing the vaccine."

"She asked me again before we left," Elias confirmed. "Said it’s a precaution. Global health, inter-agency compliance, all the same polished excuses."

Lachlan laughed without humor. "You already took it. Feel any safer?"

Elias looked down at his tea. "Doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous. Just means I’m a controlled variable now."

"Do you trust her?" Alexei asked without turning around.

"No," Elias said simply. "But I know how she thinks. She doesn’t want control. She wants proof."

"Proof of what?" Zubair’s voice was flat.

Elias glanced toward the table, where his untouched food had gone cold. "That someone’s lying. Either Country K’s got a real breakthrough... or it’s a dead-end designed to waste time. Either way, she wants to beat them to it."

"And we’re just the errand boys," Lachlan muttered. "Risk our necks for a fridge full of guesswork."

Alexei tilted his head. "What do you think she’s really doing?"

Elias finally looked up. "I think she’s trying to turn someone into a god... or a god into money."

The room went quiet.

Zubair picked up his drink and took a long sip. "That explains the man in the chair."

"Explains why his eyes were empty," Elias said. "Whatever he was, it didn’t work."

"Yet," Alexei added softly.

Lachlan tossed his empty beer bottle in the trash. "I don’t like this. We’ve done some shady shit before, but this?" He ran a hand through his hair. "You don’t shoot up someone with untested juice and call it medicine. You call that a death sentence."

"You didn’t take it," Elias said.

Lachlan snorted. "Yeah, because I like living."

"You think I don’t?" Elias asked quietly.

Zubair cut in before it got sharp. "Enough."

He stood slowly, rolling out his shoulders like he’d been carrying the weight of the conversation the whole time. "We did what we were paid to do. We retrieved it. We delivered it. No questions asked."

Alexei raised an eyebrow. "But we’re asking them now."

"We’re asking because we know we’ll be sent in again," Elias said. "And next time, it won’t be a clean lab with humming freaks. It’ll be a hot zone."

Lachlan made a face. "Just say plague pit, mate. We’re all thinking it, have the balls to say it."

Zubair finally smirked. Barely. "Let’s make something clear. If they send us back in, we go. But we go knowing it’s not about orders anymore. It’s survival."

"Define ’survival,’" Alexei said, his smile not quite reaching his eyes.

Zubair looked at each of them in turn. "It means none of us dies for someone else’s lie."

Lachlan whistled low. "Damn. That almost sounded like a toast."

Elias raised his mug. "To mistrust and mayhem."

Alexei clinked his glass to it. "To surviving the truth."

Lachlan raised his bottle. "To never letting that bitch inject me with anything."

Zubair didn’t lift his glass. He didn’t have to.

His eyes were already watching the shadows outside the window.