COLLAPSE PROTOCOL

Location: Miami, Florida – Rooftop of Kito Holdings HQ

POV: Third Person – Laz Kito

The Miami skyline cut a jagged silhouette against the dusky orange horizon as Laz Kito stood on the rooftop terrace of his brutalist concrete fortress.

Forty-nine floors above the glittering coastline, the evening breeze carried the scent of salt and money-two commodities he'd learned to leverage with equal precision.

"Sir." A voice interrupted his thoughts. "They're waiting in the secure room."

Laz didn't turn. His eyes remained fixed on the distant cargo ships dotting the horizon-vessels that, to the unsuspecting world, carried nothing more dangerous than imported electronics and Caribbean fruit.

Only five people alive knew that three of those ships held enough weapons to arm a small revolution.

"Tell them twenty minutes."

he said, his voice carrying the slight accent of a man who had spoken too many languages in too many dangerous places.

The assistant disappeared, footsteps fading across Italian marble.

Laz took a final sip of his whiskey-Macallan 25, the same brand Director Harmon used to keep in his office at Quantico.

A private joke only Laz found amusing anymore, since Harmon had been dead for eleven years.

Eleven years, two months, fourteen days, thirty-four minutes, and forty seconds.

Laz set down the crystal tumbler and adjusted his tailored Brioni suit. The transformation from Special Agent Lazarus Kito, the king of Miami's underworld, had been methodical-surgical, even.

Nothing like the messy criminal enterprises he'd once dismantled.

His rise to power had been built on the very techniques the Bureau had taught him to combat organized crime.

Know your enemy until you become him. Then surpass him.

The secure elevator required a retinal scan and voice authorization. As Laz descended to the thirty-seventh floor, he scrolled through encrypted messages on his phone. Operations across four continents required constant attention.

A shipment delayed in Mozambique. A police commissioner in St. Petersburg demanding higher payments.

A CIA asset was spotted near one of his Caribbean processing facilities.

The latter made him pause. The agency had been unusually very active lately.

The secure room was a Faraday cage disguised as an executive conference space.

No electronic signals in or out. No recording devices.

No witnesses except the four lieutenants who sat around the polished mahogany table and were offered drinking water while waiting.

"Gentlemen."

Laz nodded, taking his place at the head.

"What's so urgent it couldn't wait until morning?"

Marco Vega, his security chief, slid a manila folder across the table. "Someone accessed the bureau files."

Laz maintained a neutral expression, but his pulse quickened. Those files were supposed to be buried-expunged from all databases when he'd "died" during that operation in Tangier.

His new identity had cost him three million dollars and the lives of two federal agents.

"Which files?" he asked quietly.

"The Monarch operation. And your personnel records."

The air in the room seemed to thin. Monarch was the classified operation that had turned him-the mission where he'd seen exactly how corrupt his government handlers truly were.

Where he'd learned that patriotism was a weapon wielded by men in comfortable offices and iron briefcases against those who still believed in something as quaint as justice.

"Who?"

"We don't know," Marco replied.

"The access came through internal FBI channels, but it's being scrubbed. Someone with top-level clearance."

Laz opened the folder. Inside was a grainy surveillance photo taken outside a coffee shop in D.C.

The woman is in her mid-twenties, with an athletic build and auburn hair pulled back in a severe ponytail.

She wore no makeup, carried a standard-issue government laptop bag, and moved with the hyperaware precision of someone who knew they were being watched and monitored.

"Who's she?" Laz asked.

"Rachel Bolt," said Dmitri, his intelligence specialist. "CIA operative, specializing in deep cover operations. Her father was-"

"Colonel James Bolt," Laz finished, the name triggering memories he'd spent years suppressing. "Gulf War. Special operations. Died in '08."

The room fell silent.

Laz rarely revealed his knowledge of military personnel.

"You knew him?" Marco asked.

"I knew of him," Laz corrected carefully. "Colonel Bolt was part of the classified team that extracted intel from Baghdad during the first incursion. He worked with...

"He hesitated, old loyalties warring with new realities." He worked with some of my former associates at the Bureau."

What Laz didn't say: James Bolt had been one of the few honest men in a dishonest operation.

The kind of man who believed in duty and country right until the moment those ideals got him killed.

"Why would his daughter be looking into Monarch now?" Laz wondered aloud.

Dmitri cleared his throat.

"There's more. She's been assigned to a new task force. Something called Collapse Protocol."

The name meant nothing to Laz, but instinct told him it should. In his former life, protocol designations were only given to operations with presidential authorization.

"Find out everything about Collapse Protocol," Laz ordered. "And put surveillance on Rachel Bolt. I want to know what she knows."

"There's a complication," said Marco. "She's being deployed. Our sources say she's heading to Baghdad next week."

Baghdad. The place where everything had started to unravel. Where James Bolt had discovered the same ugly truths that eventually drove Laz from the Bureau.

"Not a coincidence," Laz murmured. He looked up at his lieutenants. "Activate our assets in Iraq. I want eyes on her the moment she touches down."

"You think she's coming for you?" asked Victor, his youngest lieutenant.

"No," Laz replied. "I think she's being used, just like her father was. Just like I was too."

The meeting concluded with detailed assignments, contingency plans, and increased security protocols.

As his men filed out, Laz remained seated, staring at Rachel Bolt's photograph and acknowledging the resemblance.

She had her father's eyes-intelligent, determined, slightly haunted. The eyes of someone who believed they were fighting for something greater than themselves.

Poor kid, he thought. She has no idea she's just another pawn available to be used.

Back in his penthouse, Laz poured another Macallan and opened his private safe.

Behind the cash, passports, and diamonds was a small, weathered photograph: three men in desert camouflage, arms around each other's shoulders, squinting against the Iraqi sun. Himself, twenty years younger.

Director Harmon, still alive and still believing in the mission.

And James Bolt, whose daughter was now unknowingly stepping into the same web of lies that had destroyed them altogether.

Laz traced a finger over Bolt's face. "Your girl's digging, James," he whispered to the ghost in the photograph. "And I need to find out why before they do to her what they did to you, Laz ghosttalking."

He replaced the photo and closed the safe.

Tomorrow, he would begin making calls to his contacts in Baghdad.

Whatever Collapse Protocol was, whoever had authorized Rachel Bolt to dig into his past, Laz needed to uncover their endgame.

Because if there was one lesson Lazarus Kito had learned in his journey from FBI golden boy to criminal kingpin, it was this: when ghosts from the Bureau files begin to stir, blood inevitably follows without a trace.