Trust Amellal, Zurich Headquarters

The command centre is flooded with blue light and sleep deprivation. Tarmo stands above three monitors—one cycling through riverbank thermal images, another frozen on a grainy satellite view of the Carpathians, a third pulsing with encrypted alerts from half a dozen agencies. His broad, pale face—so often unreadable—now bears twin crescents of exhaustion beneath his eyes.

He paces, hands clenched, the rubber band at his wrist snapped raw. On the wall, the corkboard is a parody of order: maps, notes, a single photo of Elena in a parka, a bright red line linking a point labelled HYDROPLANE (00:13) to an expanse blank but for three words: LAST SEEN.

A junior operator calls from the corner, voice tight. “Romanian border police deny seeing anything unusual. Russian movement was a feint—satellites confirm retreat. Local fishermen? Just rumours about spirits in the reeds.”

Tarmo doesn’t answer. Inside, he’s a centrifuge: guilt, dread, and calculation spinning faster by the hour.

This was my plan. She trusted me. You don’t lose your anthropologist in Romania—not to bullets, not to a river, not to an invisible enemy.

A field lead from Timisoara chimes in on the headset: “Sir, do we treat this as criminal, or—”

“It’s a rescue. Until I see a body, we act like she’s waiting for us. Every border post, every contact, every dog-walker with a radio—double it.”

He knows his anger is too much, but fear keeps leaking out the sides.

The night’s surveillance logs replay in his head:

They’d all been running—bullets, shrieks, the pitch-dark churn of water. He’d watched, powerless, as Elena’s heat signature swerved off the infrared, vanished, gone.

Around him, his team parses rumour from noise. Mikael, usually unflappable, bites his lip until it bleeds. He whispers, “Boss… if it was an ambush—”

He shakes his head, jaw locked. “It wasn’t supposed to be real fire. They weren’t supposed to actually—”

A fist slams the table. The mug shudders, sloshing cold coffee across the keys.

He tries to steady himself, imagines what Elena would say:

“Get over yourself, stop moaning, Tarmo. Just get it done.”

CYcrds Crisis: Headquarters. Deep Night.

Mrs H.’s Office

Blue light slices through the darkness. Mrs H. sits rigid at the command table, glasses catching each flicker with a shield’s flash, three phones pressed to her ears—triangulating chaos. Sandi, laser-eyed and relentless, types with one hand, coordinates field teams with the other. No one here is sleeping. Sleep is for the board; Elena was the board.

Orders echo sharp as snapped glass:

“Do not alert family. Lockdown until Sandi confirms: zero at last satellite ping, yes?”

Sandi’s reply cuts the silence:

“Visual showed all running. Gunfire. Elena hit the water. Heat lost. Locals heard shots. No body. No proof. Just mayhem and night.”

Mrs H. stabs a finger at the map’s edge, voice lower, harder:

“We drag the lake. With or without paperwork. Officially, she’s missing. Unofficially, she’s alive. No one dies—not tonight.”

Romanian officials choke on protocol, acutely aware: gunfire, Russian signals, jurisdiction melting under a border crisis. Mrs H. doesn’t blink:

“If we drag the lake, you admit death. So keep pretending.”

Internal Shock

Staff huddle over laptops, faces bone-white in monitor light, eyes mapping lakes they’ve never seen. Rumours lock tight. Name: Elena. Codeword only. No slip-ups.

A junior analyst, voice brittle as ice: “She’ll fire half of us for calling her missing.”

Sandi’s mouth twists in a grin that isn’t a grin: “She’ll find her way back, she managed just fine before she even knew we existed.”

Allies and Dead Ends

Hasna’s desk floods with conflicting messages, none adding up. She spits into her phone: “No demands. No witnesses. We don’t know if this is a crime. She’s just—gone.”

Her contacts talk fast—rumours of lights, planes, forest ghosts—each lead colder than the last. Across the board, the narrative fracture grows.

Tonight, the crisis belongs to those still awake.

Zurich: Trust Amellal, 4:52 AM

Cold room. Coffee stale as memory. Eyes raw, blinking under the unmerciful LED hum. Every click—keyboard, mouse, replay—echoes in the near-silence, as if the ten seconds of night-vision were the only heartbeat left in the building.

Tarmo braces, elbows set. Holds his breath. Pixel haze, ghostly static—Elena, blouse battered, lunges through reeds, riverbank ablaze with gunfire’s electric scribble.

Not again. This time, slower. Try being the water.

Mikael, gravel-voiced from exhaustion: “There. Freeze. Two frames back.”

His finger presses the screen: water, mud, Elena—blurred, dropping fast.

Inside Tarmo: She’s hit. No—she drops. But the water’s shallow; she should thrash, scream, fight. Nothing.

A flood of guesswork. Hole? Trap? Something under? Or—?

Sandi’s eyes dart between feeds. “Heat’s there, then gone. No surface break. No silt. No splash.”

A junior tech curses. “Bathymetry says two feet. You could sit in it, nothing, barely wet.” 

Pulse spikes. Tarmo’s old inner voice: What do you do when even the river won’t give an answer?

Logic stutters. Protocols pile up, but myths bleed through.

Silence holds. Then Mrs H., crisp and clinical, voice patched from London:

“Well then. Either our CEO breathes mud, or physics just failed. Go again—frame by frame. Sandi, run sonar, ground scan. Pipe, fissure, wormhole—I don’t care how impossible.”

Mikael, eyes narrow in the blue light: “It’s not the water. Maybe something under. Or…waiting.”

Tarmo closes his eyes. Horror and hope crack certainty. If Elena’s alive—where? If not, what did that lake swallow?

Again, the replay. Elena vanishes in the shallows. For just a flicker: no figure, no shadow, only a shimmer—alien, patient, unsolved.

He straightens, voice steady but brittle:

“We expand the scan zone. Rerun everything. This is not just a search and rescue now—it’s a question. And whatever answer she finds first, we’re damn well going to be there to hear it.”

The footage loops, the minutes drag, and on a cold morning in Zurich, the search takes on a new and uncanny tone—one where the limits of evidence and imagination blur, and no one can say with certainty who, or what, owns the water that took Elena under.

I.Ph.