Morning sunlight sliced through the polarised bedroom windows of Adam’s flat, casting razor-sharp shadows across the floor. He reached for his phone—slim, matte black, its surface marked by micro-scratches from sleepless nights—and tapped his thumb to the biometric sensor. Unlocked.

  One icon stood out. Or rather, it didn’t. Grey. Square. Entirely forgettable. That was the point.

  He tapped it.

  No boot screen. No sound. The interface blinked to life with all the charm of obsolete military software—flat grey UI, zero animations, no branding. A tool he had built to protect himself from Viktor. Nothing more.

  A map filled the screen. Pale grey background. In the centre, a pulsing green dot—his phone. All around it, red dots blinked like signal flares. Some bore names: Del. Mikey. Simon. Davos. Men, Adam was cautiously aware of—Viktor’s men. Dangerous men. Other dots were marked only with question marks. Unknowns. Hitmen, perhaps. Syndicate agents. Femme fatales. Or worse. His mind spun out toward the edges of paranoia before he reeled it back and locked it down tight.

  Then he saw it.

  A single black dot. Unmoving. Labelled: Viktor.

  It hovered over the part of the map corresponding to a massive estate on the outskirts of town—Viktor’s mansion. The spider’s web. And Viktor at the centre.

  All the dots were at a safe distance—for now.

  The app’s code was simple in theory: if any of those dots came within 500 yards of his phone, it would trigger an alarm. That was the plan, anyway. Adam wasn’t entirely sure it worked. Only one way to find out.

  He summoned an autonomous taxi, keyed in the destination, and climbed into the back seat. The route skimmed past Viktor’s mansion. Close, but not dangerously so.

  He’d passed the estate a hundred times as a child on the way home. Back then, he hadn’t known a crime lord lived just beyond the hedgerows. Now, every meter closer felt like a countdown to disaster.

  As the taxi glided silently along the road—smooth, near soundless—the app remained mute. No alarm. No warning.

  And yet Viktor’s dot hadn’t moved. Nor had the dots marked Mikey and Simon.

  “Turn around,” Adam said sharply after the car had carried him half a mile past the gates.

  The mansion loomed behind them: towering steel gates, sensor arrays woven into the wrought iron, reinforced stone walls rising like a fortress. In the gatehouse, two guards kept watch—Mikey and Simon.

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  Mikey: broad-shouldered, ageing but powerful, his greying goatee a badge of experience.

  Simon: young, brash, all swagger and stories, still trying to prove himself.

  They sat, sipping coffee, and half-watched the surveillance feeds.

  Viktor had dismissed the old pensioner who once guarded the gate—too soft. He wanted killers at the entrance now. Wolves at the den’s mouth. Until the one who murdered his son was caught, no risks would be taken.

  Mikey leaned back in his chair, half-listening to Simon spin another of his implausible brawls.

  “So I’m at this bar, right?” Simon grinned. “This chick starts giving me the eyes. Her boyfriend? Face like a shattered mirror. Tats everywhere. Tells her to quit staring at me. Grabs her arm.”

  “She screams. I step in. Say, ‘Leave the lady alone.’ Then four of his mates stand up—cage fighters.”

  Mikey stifled a groan. He’d heard this one before. Or something like it.

  But then a vehicle pinged on the outer motion sensors—a taxi idling just outside the gate.

  “Hold that thought,” Mikey said, setting down his mug. He stood and peered at the screen. “We’ve got company.”

  Simon turned, curiosity piqued. Mikey unfastened the strap on the chest holster beneath his coat. His fingers brushed the grip of his sidearm. Time to do a little theatre.

  “Let’s check it out,” he said. Not because he thought it was a real threat—more like a welcome excuse to escape Simon’s endless stories.

  Outside, Adam sat hunched in the back of the cab, laptop open, fingers dancing across the keyboard. Code scrolled rapidly—syntax highlights flickering. The app still wasn’t triggering the proximity alert. But he could see through the cab window Mikey and Simon walking toward him.

  Then he spotted the bug—three lines of flawed logic. His fingers flew. Fix. Compile. Deploy.

  Ping.

  Too late.

  A knock at the window.

  Adam flinched and lowered it cautiously.

  Simon’s head popped in, cocky and irritated.

  “What the hell you doing here, nerd? Move along,” he barked.

  Mikey pulled him back with a scowl—more tactful.

  “Listen, pal,” Mikey said, voice low and firm. “We’ve got a funeral today. This whole verge is gonna be packed. Prefer if you moved on.”

  He leaned down, eyes flicking over Adam’s gear—the laptop, the phone. The phone was peeping.

  “What’s all this?” Mikey asked.

  Adam swallowed, sweat forming at the base of his neck.

  “Just... presentation stuff. Down the road. Project’s acting up. Needed somewhere quiet to troubleshoot,” he muttered, fumbling to silence the alarm on his phone.

  Mikey narrowed his eyes. For a moment, Adam thought he saw through everything. But then—

  “Well, you can’t do it here,” Mikey said. “Move on. Please.”

  “Yeah, you heard him. Scram,” Simon added, sneering.

  Adam nodded quickly. “No problem. Sorry.”

  “Drive,” he told the cab, and it hummed back into motion. He exhaled once the mansion disappeared from view. That had been far too close.

  Back at the gate, Mikey and Simon watched the cab vanish down the road.

  “We should’ve searched him,” Simon muttered. “Could be linked to Mikal’s killer.”

  “Please,” Mikey scoffed. “That guy? If he were part of anything serious, he wouldn’t be alone. Wouldn’t be in a traceable taxi. He’d be in a nondescript van. Blacked-out windows. Muscle with pulse rifles riding shotgun.”

  Simon frowned.

  “Nah,” Mikey said, continuing toward the gatehouse. “It’s not humans we need to watch for any more. AI and bots. You don’t need meat to pull a trigger these days.”

  Simon raised a brow. “Maybe, but I’m still a bit suspicious about the nerd in the taxi.”

  Mikey sighed. “If it makes you feel better, we’ll grab a screen still from the CCTV and send it to that cop, Tucker. Let him take a look. But only on one condition.”

  “What’s that?” Simon asked.

  “You give my ears a break for the rest of the day—no more stories.”

  And with that, the two men disappeared behind the steel gates.