The fog rolling off the Ottawa River didn’t just obscure the sharp Gothic lines of the Parliament buildings; it seemed to swallow them whole.

Inside a nondescript brick building on Bank Street—far removed from the polished marble of government offices—Marcus Vance stared at a dry-erase board. It was mapped with red strings, sticky notes, and a list of seven names. All seven were mid-level federal employees. All seven were dead.

Marcus didn’t work for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), nor did he carry a badge from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). He was the senior investigator for Apex Risk Solutions, a private intelligence and corporate security firm. When the public sector couldn’t handle its own rot, people with deep pockets hired Apex.

This time, the client was an anonymous coalition of high-ranking bureaucrats who had realized, with mounting horror, that a pattern was emerging—one the official authorities were actively framing as a string of tragic coincidences.

“Eight months, seven bodies,” Marcus said, his voice a low gravelly rasp. He looked over at his partner, Elena Vance, a former digital forensics expert for the military turned private contractor. “A budget analyst at National Defence. An IT director at Shared Services Canada. A logistics coordinator for Public Works. On paper, it’s a heart attack, a hit-and-run, two suicides, an accidental drowning, and two home invasions.”

“But look at what they touched,” Elena replied, her fingers flying across her keyboard. She pulled up a heavily encrypted spreadsheet on the main monitor. “They weren’t the decision-makers. They were the paper-trailers. The people who sign off on the line items, the procurement orders, the system access logs.”

Marcus walked over to the monitor, his eyes narrowing. “They were the ones who would notice if something was missing.”

The breakthrough came forty-eight hours later, when the eighth target was identified not by a body, but by a frantic, middle-of-the-night phone call to Apex’s secure line.

Dr. Alistair Finch was a senior data scientist with Environment and Climate Change Canada. He wasn’t a spy, but he was currently hiding in the basement of a twenty-four-hour diner in Nepean, hyperventilating.

By the time Marcus and Elena arrived, Finch was a ghost of a man, clenching a ruggedized USB drive like a lifeline.

“They’re clearing the board,” Finch whispered, his eyes darting toward the diner’s rain-streaked windows. “I thought it was just a glitch in the satellite monitoring data for northern infrastructure. But it wasn’t a glitch. Someone has been systematically altering the geographic telemetry data for the Arctic coastline. Millions of dollars in federal grants and sovereignty funding are being routed to shell companies building deep-water ports that don’t exist on any official map.”

“And the victims?” Marcus asked.

“Donald discovered the financial anomalies at Defence. Sarah saw the irregular server pings at Shared Services. Every single one of them raised a flag to their superiors. Within three weeks of filing a internal report, they were dead.” Finch swallowed hard. “I filed my report four days ago. Yesterday, my brake lines were severed. The police told me it was road debris. The police aren’t looking, Mr. Vance. Someone inside the Privy Council Office is suppressing the files.”

Marcus took the drive. “We need to get you out of the city.”

They never got the chance.

The diner’s power went out, plunging the basement into pitch blackness. The rhythmic hum of the refrigerators died, replaced by the heavy, terrifying silence of an impending strike.

“Move,” Marcus barked, pulling his Glock from his shoulder holster.

He pushed Finch behind a stack of industrial-sized flour sacks just as the heavy wooden door at the top of the stairs groaned. Two figures descended, moving with the terrifying, silent synchronization of military contractors. They didn’t use flashlights; the eerie greenish glow of night-vision goggles cut through the dark.

Marcus didn’t wait for them to clear the steps. He fired two rounds, the muzzle flashes illuminating the cramped space. A grunt followed, and one figure collapsed backward. The second operator returned fire, bullets chewing through the concrete walls and spraying dust into the air.

Elena, tracking the shooter’s position by the sound, blind-fired a heavy-caliber round from her corner. It clipped the piping near the ceiling, releasing a hiss of scalding steam that blinded the second attacker. Marcus closed the distance, neutralizing the threat with a swift, brutal strike to the temple.

Standing over the unconscious operative, Marcus ripped the balaclava from the man’s face. There was no military dog tag, no government ID. Instead, tattooed sharply on the side of his neck was a stylized geometric falcon—the mark of the Vanguard Group, a ruthless global mercenary outfit known for executing corporate statecraft.

“This goes way beyond an internal government cover-up,” Elena said, examining the operative’s tactical radio. “They aren’t taking orders from Ottawa. They’re taking them from Zurich.”

Marcus looked down at the USB drive in his hand. The private authorities had their proof. The Canadian government wasn’t just dealing with a leak; it was being systematically dismantled from the inside out by a corporate entity buying up sovereign territory under the shroud of manufactured tragedies.

“Pack up the gear,” Marcus told Elena, his face hardening as he looked toward the stairs. “The RCMP won’t touch this, and CSIS is blind. It’s up to us. We’re going to blow this entire board wide open.”