In the heart of London – Surveillance at a glance…

The Ghost of Londonderry

The encrypted hard drive from Dr. Finch had been a ghost in itself, a digital key to a nightmare. The key didn’t lead them to a location, but to a hidden layer of files on the drive—Dr. Anya Sharma’s private journal. The journal was a chilling narrative of a mind unravelling, but it was also a map. Her final entry, a cryptic set of coordinates and a single address, was their new lead: 1c Westend Park, Londonderry. The city, with its history of walls and division, was a fitting stage for the next act.

They arrived under the cover of a cold, persistent drizzle. Westend Park was a quiet, unassuming street, a row of identical Victorian terraced houses that gave no hint of the dark secrets they might hold. Number 1c was a small, two-story house, its windows dark and its facade weathered by the years. It didn’t look like a genius’s hideout; it looked like a dead end.

“It’s a trap,” Jake said, his voice low, his eyes scanning the windows. “She knows we’re coming.”

“Or it’s a message,” Emma replied, her laptop open on the dashboard. She was running a scan on the house’s electrical and Wi-Fi signals. There was a ghost of a signal, an old, encrypted Wi-Fi network that had long since gone dormant. But it was enough.

The Message in the Walls

They didn’t break in. That would be too obvious. Instead, Emma used her skills to bypass the old alarm system from the outside. The house’s front door clicked open with a soft, mechanical sigh. The interior was shrouded in dust sheets, the furniture a ghostly collection of forgotten memories. There was no sign of Dr. Sharma, but there was a trail.

In the living room, a single bookshelf had been recently moved. Behind it, on the wallpaper, was a faint, almost invisible inscription. Emma used a specialised ultraviolet light to reveal the message. It wasn’t a set of coordinates or a password. It was a single, cryptic phrase: “The genesis is in the heart of the beast.”

“The genesis,” Emma whispered. “It’s a reference to Project Lazarus. The origin of the disease.”

“But where?” Jake asked, his eyes scanning the empty room. “What’s the ‘heart of the beast’?”

They searched the house, every room, every closet, every hidden space. They found nothing. Dr. Sharma had been here, but she had left no physical trace. Then Emma noticed something strange. The dust on a single lightbulb was clean, as if it had been recently wiped. She unscrewed the bulb, and inside, a small micro-SD card was taped to the glass.

The card held another set of files, all encrypted. Emma worked with a quiet, furious energy, her fingers flying across the keyboard. She broke the code, and a new set of data appeared on her screen. It was not a physical address. It was a name, a historical reference, and a chilling piece of data.

The data was a molecular sequence for a specific, long-dormant plague: Bubonic Plague. The name was a key. It pointed to a historical figure who had once been believed to have brought the plague to London: Sir Richard Whittington. The location was a museum archive that housed his belongings.

The Chilling Revelation

“The genesis is in the heart of the beast,” Emma said, her voice a low, horrified whisper. “The heart of the beast is the genesis of a new plague. She’s not just recreating a disease. She’s re-engineering it. Her endgame isn’t to kill people; it’s to create a pathogen that is the key to her Project Lazarus.”

“She’s not a killer,” Jake said, a cold realisation dawning on him. “She’s an architect. She wants to create a disease that can be used to re-engineer humanity itself.”

Just as they were about to leave, Jake’s eyes caught a fleeting reflection in a mirror. A brief, almost imperceptible red light. A laser sight, a sniper’s mark, aimed directly at Emma’s head. He shoved her to the floor, and a single, muffled shot echoed through the empty street. The sniper’s bullet hit the wall, a small, brutal hole appearing in the plaster.

A pair of SUVs sped away from a side street, their tires screeching. Dr. Sharma knew they had been here. She had been watching them all along. The address was not a dead end; it was a ghost of a location, a place to leave a message, a trap to see if they were worthy of the next clue. The hunt was no longer a silent game. It was a deadly race.