For a week, the war room buzzed with frustrated energy. The Syndicate was a ghost in every sense.
"It's nothing," Nyx reported. Her usual confidence was replaced by a rare frown. "Dark web forums, encrypted message boards, intel leaks. It's like they don't exist in the digital age. Anyone who even whispers the name 'Ouroboros' in certain circles gets laughed at. They say it's just a boogeyman story, a myth."
Elias Vance agreed, his face grim. "My contacts say the same. They think it's a legend from our fathers' time. An old group of industrialists and aristocrats who supposedly pulled strings, but they believe it disbanded decades ago."
"They didn't disband," Dante said, his voice low and firm. "They evolved. They learned to hide in plain sight."
We were searching for a needle in a haystack, but we didn't even know what the needle looked like. Frustrated, I pushed back from the terminal and walked to the window. You don't hunt a ghost by searching for it. You look for what it touches, the cold spots it leaves behind.
"We're approaching this the wrong way," I said, turning back to the room. "We're looking for them. Let's search for their shadow instead. An organization this powerful and this old can't exist without leaving a mark on the world, even if they erase their name. They must have influenced major events."
Dante's eyes lit up with understanding. "Corporate takeovers. Political shifts."
"Exactly," I said, my mind racing. "Not just murders. Economic warfare. I need access, Dante. Unrestricted access to the Moretti Global data archives. All of it. Decades of financial records, stock market analyses, and acquisition histories. I want to run a deep-level diagnostic looking for anomalies—companies that collapsed without a clear reason, hostile takeovers that emerged from nowhere, powerful men who were financially ruined just before they 'retired.'"
It was a bold request. I was asking for the keys to his entire kingdom, access to secrets that could destroy him.
He didn't hesitate. "Done," he said. Then he looked at Nyx. "Give her whatever she needs. Top-level clearance. No firewalls."
For the next forty-eight hours, I immersed myself in the code. I built an algorithm designed to sift through a mountain of global financial data, searching for a ghost's footprint. Dante arranged for coffee and food, but no one interrupted me. On the third day, bleary-eyed and fueled by caffeine, I found it.
It wasn't a name or a symbol. It was a pattern, faint but clear, like a recurring echo in the code. A series of powerful, independent CEOs across Europe, spanning thirty years, who had all turned down buyout offers from the same mysterious, untraceable holding company. Within months of their refusal, each one of them was either financially destroyed, disgraced by a scandal, or had died in a sudden, tragic "accident." Their companies, now leaderless and vulnerable, were then absorbed for pennies on the dollar by another entity.
I pulled up the file on Antonio Moretti. Nineteen years ago, he had been approached by that same holding company. He had turned down their offer two months before he was murdered.