Chapter 288: Capture
[Jake's POV]
The Shadow stopped ten feet away from me.
The sodium light above buzzed and flickered, casting his black suit in alternating bands of yellow and dark. Water dripped from the edge of a container behind him. The only other sound was his breathing. Controlled. Measured. But I could hear the hitch. That shoulder wound was costing him.
He didn't reach for a firearm. The suppressed submachine guns they used were too loud for a stealth infiltration, and drawing a pistol in a confined space against a prepared opponent was a tactical error.
He drew a combat knife instead. The matte-black blade caught the faint ambient light. He held it in his left hand. Smart. He was right-handed, but the right shoulder was compromised.
"You're bleeding," I said, my voice a low, calm rumble in the quiet corridor. "The shoulder wound is tearing. You're losing mobility in your right arm."
He didn't speak. Imperial Shadows were conditioned for silence. Information was a weapon, and he wasn't giving me any. He shifted his grip on the knife, his stance perfectly balanced despite the injury. Feet shoulder-width apart. Weight centered. Ready to explode in any direction. He was a fanatic, completely devoted to the Empress.
I kept my hands loose at my sides. No weapon visible. I needed him to come to me. I needed him alive.
"Song Mei sent you to map our logistics," I said. "That tracker on the truck. GPS, burst-transmitter, probably piggybacking off our own network."
No reaction. Just those dark lenses of his NVGs fixed on me.
"She thinks if she knows how we move, she can cut us," I continued. "She doesn't realize we already moved."
He lunged.
He was fast. Vanguard fast. But the injury had compromised his center of gravity. He slashed the knife in a tight, diagonal arc aimed at my throat. No telegraph. No wasted motion. If it landed, it would have opened me from jaw to collarbone.
I didn't step back. Stepping back gives a knife fighter space. I stepped inside his guard, parrying his left arm with my right forearm, bone on bone, and drove my left palm hard into his wounded right shoulder.
The Shadow grunted, a sharp hiss of pain escaping his mask, and his knees buckled for a fraction of a second. Pain flashed across his posture before the conditioning locked it down.
It was all the opening I needed.
I swept his legs with my boot, driving him hard onto the asphalt. The impact was solid. He hit and rolled, trying to bring the knife up, but I was already on him. I dropped with him, pinning his knife arm beneath my knee, and drove a precise, calculated strike into the side of his neck, targeting the vagus nerve.
His eyes rolled back, and his body went completely limp.
"Target is down," I murmured into the comms, pulling a set of heavy-duty zip-ties from my vest. The plastic was cold against my fingers. I secured his wrists behind his back, then his ankles. Double loop. He wasn't going anywhere.
I quickly patted him down. Combat knife. Concealed pistol in an ankle holster. A small, encrypted burst-transmitter tucked into a hidden pocket in his vest. No ID. No markings. Ghosts don't carry ghosts.
I checked his collar. Ethan was right about the fanaticism. A small, false tooth containing a lethal dose of cyanide was embedded in his jaw. Standard Imperial protocol. Capture is failure. Failure is death.
I used my multi-tool to carefully extract the tooth, tossing it onto the asphalt where it skittered away. Without it, he was just a man.
"Bring the van to the loading bay," I told Ethan. "We have a package."
"In route," Ethan replied. I could hear the relief in his voice. Taking one alive was a big risk.
We loaded the unconscious Shadow into the back of the surveillance van. I sat across from him, watching his chest rise and fall. The zip-ties bit into his wrists. He'd wake up angry.
Ethan drove us back to the safehouse, bypassing the main streets and sticking to the industrial routes. No cameras. No witnesses. The city outside was dark and quiet, like it was holding its breath.
We carried the Shadow down into the soundproofed basement of the safehouse, strapping him to a heavy steel chair bolted to the concrete floor. The chair was old. We'd used it before.
Li was waiting for us, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. She looked at the unconscious assassin, a mixture of fear and profound satisfaction in her eyes. The Imperial Shadows had been the boogeymen of Macau's underworld for a decade. Stories of men vanishing in one night. Seeing one bound and helpless in her basement shattered the myth of their invincibility.
"Will he talk?" Li asked, watching me pull a small medical kit from the wall cabinet.
"He's been trained to withstand physical interrogation," I said, preparing a syringe. "Pain won't break him. It will just trigger his conditioning. He'll bite that cyanide if he gets the chance."
"Then how do we extract the intelligence?" Ethan asked, leaning against the wall.
"We don't ask him questions," I said, injecting a precise dose of a Vanguard-formulated chemical stimulant into the Shadow's neck. It wasn't a truth serum—those only existed in movies—but it was a powerful cognitive disruptor. It stripped away the brain's ability to maintain complex lies and suppressed the adrenaline response.
The Shadow's eyes snapped open. He gasped for air, straining against the zip-ties, his pupils dilated. He looked at me, then at Li, then at the steel walls. For the first time, there was something other than coldness in his face. Confusion.
"Nia," I said, holding up the encrypted burst-transmitter I had taken from the Shadow. "Can you slice this?"
"If I have physical access to the hardware, yes," Nia replied over the comms. "Plug it into the terminal."
I connected the transmitter to the secure laptop on the table. Lines of code started scrolling.
"He won't talk," I told Li and Ethan, looking at the Shadow. "But his hardware will."