Chapter Text
August19th.
The world was full of accidents.
At least, that was what the reports said. A shipping magnate in Rotterdam was found at the bottom of his private dock; slipped on wet wood, the coroner ruled, with blood alcohol twice the legal limit. A pharmaceutical executive in Singapore suffered cardiac arrest mid-flight somewhere over the South China Sea, where jurisdiction became non-existent. A diplomat in Buenos Aires who had, apparently, developed an unfortunate habit of sleepwalking plummeted right through a sixth-floor window.
All accidental. All over the world.
Shannon bought none of it.
She caught up with the pattern quickly; each death, however minute, had an impact on the opposite party. If a leader fell, another would rise to the wishes of many. If someone knew too much or held too much power in someone's eyes, they'd be gone in a matter of days. Even something as small as a civilian death would have a certain effect on higher powers. It was all a matter of cause and effect, and accidents don't achieve a convenient shift of power every single time.
Interpol called it a coincidence. The FBI called it outside their jurisdiction. Three different intelligence agencies received the same memo, stamped it with three different classification levels, and filed it in three different places where it would never be read by anyone with the clearance to act on it.
The CDP wanted nothing to do with it, but she did.
Detective Shannon d'Ivoire, attached to no agency in particular and a freelance investigator and coroner on demand, called it a modus operandi. Who would believe the morphine addict who happened to have a police badge?
No one, but she'd drawn that conclusion eight months ago.
*
Having death in one's veins is a weight 47 will have to carry for the rest of his life. He had spilt the blood of many throughout the years, witnessing life slip away from people in his grasp. It never had felt like a loss to him; instead, it took the shape of some sort fluency in his reality. He never questioned it, knowing it was simply what he was made for, in the most literal sense a man could be made for anything.
What he had not been made for, it turned out, was the truth.
The ICA's true neutral stance was a fiction he had operated inside for years without knowing the walls were there. Victoria had been the crack in them; a child who should not have existed rewrote things he hadn't known he believed. He had tried - unsuccessfully - to step out of the life Dr. Ort-Meyer had ever-so-carefully picked out for him. Working as a gardener for Father Vittorio and his congregation gave him the respite he'd needed from the beginning, yet it was short-lived and quickly proved danger was ingrained in himself. It wasn't an inability to keep stillness, he'd figured, but the jeopardy surrounding him did nothing but engulf those close enough to see it as well. He had gone back to the ICA the way a blade goes back to its sheath; not out of loyalty, but rather out of a cold and careful arithmetic.
None of his arithmetic had accounted for an amateur detective poking where she shouldn't.
Somewhere over the Atlantic, in a business class seat booked under a name that belonged to no one, 47 watched the clouds beneath the plane in untouched silence. Onhis knees rested the hands of a man who had learned stillness as a discipline rather than a comfort. In his jacket pocket, a new contract. He hadn't opened it yet, but he convinced himself it was because he already knew what to expect from its contents.
He did not think about the smell of wet soil or the particular quiet of a church garden in the early morning. He did not think about Father Vittorio's voice, or the unremarkable mercy of being simply a man who grew things, because reminiscence was not a luxury a cold-blooded person could afford.
Meanwhile, in a city he had never visited and would not think to consider, a woman pinned a red thread between Rotterdam and Singapore and stepped back to look at what she'd built. The board stared back at her. Fourteen deaths, Nine countries, and one invisible hand.
She made a note to pull flight records next.
Neither of them slept well that night. They never would again.