CHAPTER 6
Geneva
Lena woke before dawn, long before the city's trams began their soft metallic hum along the Rue du Mont-Blanc. Her hotel room overlooked Lake Geneva, a still mirror under the early sky. She didn't waste time staring at it. She had slept in her clothes — a habit she had kept from deployments — and her mind was already cataloging the day, lining every action with military neatness.
She sat at the edge of the bed, reread the notes she had taken the night before, and closed the small leather notebook. There was only one question on every page, written in different ways but always the same:
**What was her mother doing at Helix Biogen the night she vanished?**
She strapped her hair back. Something about this city made her uneasy. Geneva was clean, orderly, almost too quiet. A place that pretended it had no secrets.
She left the hotel and stepped onto the chilled morning street. The cold bit at her cheeks, but her pulse stayed steady. She moved like someone with a purpose — and overlooked nothing.
Halfway to the tram stop, she felt it.
Not a sound.
Not a shadow.
A shift.
A weight pressing from behind her left side, the subtle tilt of someone adjusting their stride to match hers.
She didn't turn. She'd been followed before — in Kabul, in Lagos, in Manila — and the instinct never left her. She crossed the street without looking back, watched the reflection in a bakery window. The figure crossed too. A man. Gray coat. Neutral posture. Controlled.
Too controlled.
She continued walking, now taking a route she knew ended in a cul-de-sac. A test. If he followed her there, it wasn't coincidence.
She turned into the narrow lane.
The air tightened.
Her steps slowed.
She reached the dead end.
Only then did she turn around.
The man was already there, blocking the exit. No rush, no pretense of innocence. His expression revealed nothing, but his hands remained outside his pockets — a sign he wanted her to understand he wasn't hiding a weapon.
Or that he didn't need one.
"Lena Moretti," he said, his accent clean, European, educated. Swiss or Austrian, she couldn't tell.
She didn't answer.
"You shouldn't be in Geneva."
She shifted her weight slightly, the first movement toward readiness.
"Why is that?"
"Because three different people are looking for you," he said calmly, "and you won't like what they want." He glanced past her shoulder, as if checking the rooftops. "You're in over your head."
"Who are you?" she asked.
He didn't give a name. Instead, he stepped closer, and for the first time, she saw something flicker across his eyes — not fear, but urgency.
"You need to stop investigating Helix Biogen," he said. "Today. Before you disappear the way your mother did."
The words cracked the air.
Lena's throat tightened, but her face stayed still.
He stepped back, as if his task was done. "They already know you're here. You still have time, but not much."
She moved. "Wait—"
But he was already leaving the cul-de-sac with the practiced fluidity of someone trained to vanish in crowded cities.
Lena walked out seconds later — but he was gone, swallowed by Geneva's morning calm.
And for the first time since she arrived, she realized something she had ignored:
She wasn't the hunter.
She was the target.