Ardabil Road — Mitra & Karim

The codes sit at the base of Karim’s pack, wrapped in leather that feels older than it should. We haven’t spoken for half an hour, mountain air cutting thin, the silence thick with certainty of pursuit.

Karim finally breaks it. “Whoever that was in the alley—they had Turkish military posture. Not Ardabil locals.”

I don’t answer. My mind won’t let go of the codes. Everyone else calls them access—politics, business, leverage. But the leather doesn’t just hide paper. When Karim first unwrapped them in Tabriz, I watched his hands shake. Not fear. Recognition. Like touching something that remembered him.

The headache started then. A pressure behind my eyes that hasn’t lifted since we took the mountain road.

If my suspicion is right, the codes aren’t worth more than Sandi. They’re older than the work Karim names them for. And whoever follows us knows it.

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Mountain Curve — Tarmo & Mikael

One man from the tail car dove for cover. The other stayed put—braver or dumber—and Tarmo’s shot dropped him.

“We take the car,” Mikael said, already moving.

Tarmo’s gaze cut to the valley ahead. “No. We let it burn. No one follows us into Kandovan.”

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Hidden Road — Elena & Asdar

My fingers found Asdar’s without thinking. “What did she mean?”

He didn’t look at me, eyes fixed on the road’s narrow edge. “She meant we’re closer than they think.”

But his hand betrayed him. The grip tightened—not reassurance, something else. Pressure that carried weight I couldn’t name. I’d spent fifteen years reading body language across three continents, and this was a man holding back truths large enough to crack the air if spoken.

The van climbed higher into the folds of night. What the old woman meant wasn’t just distance or arrival. It was something older, waiting. And Asdar knew it.

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Approach to Kandovan — All Roads

Three routes climbed. Three sets of lights threading upward through rock-cut hollows and winter-dark passes.

Above them, the village clung to the mountain like a secret carved in stone. Sandi was there, hidden somewhere in the honeycomb of houses and chambers. Her captors held her. And soon, all of them would be drawn into the same narrow rooms, the same air.

What none of them knew was how quickly the others were coming—as if the mountain itself pulled their paths into one vein.

Kandovan waited. Not merely as a place, but as a witness.

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First Contact — Kandovan

Snowmelt dripped from stone eaves, each drop loud in the silence. The main street of Kandovan was no more than a rib of packed earth between rock-hewn houses, lit by scattered yellow lamps. The whole village seemed to listen as strangers’ boots sounded on its spine.

Tarmo & Mikael

They coasted the last hundred meters, engine off. The quiet was wrong—heavy with the weight of places that already know trouble is coming. They left the SUV in shadow, weapons close.

Mikael caught movement first: two figures by the well, vanishing the moment they saw who’d entered. “Already clocked.”

Tarmo gave him a thin smile. “Good. Saves us knocking.”

Mitra & Karim

From the opposite end, they moved between stone walls slick with frost. The folio rode heavy in Karim’s bag, shifting like a lodestone.

Mitra’s headache had sharpened into something with edges. She tasted copper at the back of her throat.

Karim caught headlights cutting out in the upper street. “We’re not alone.”

She pulled her scarf tighter, lowering her face against cold and sight. “Then we don’t meet them until we have to.”

Elena & Asdar

The Romani van stopped short of the village. We climbed the last steep slope under the dim sway of lanterns. Behind us, the old woman lingered, her lips shaping a blessing I couldn’t quite catch. The words scattered in cold air, but their weight followed me.

At the first doorway, Asdar slowed. “They’re here.”

I didn’t ask who. In this place, they could be anyone—eyes behind shutters, figures folded into shadow. But I felt it pressing in from all sides, every path converging, every road leading here.

Not chance. The mountain drew us together, pulling threads into one knot. I could sense it tightening with every step.

The Street

Tarmo stepped from a side alley, slicing into the lamp’s halo, exactly as Mitra and Karim surfaced from the lower path. For a heartbeat, everyone stopped. Faces mapped by cold and calculation, eyes measuring risk, intention, history.

Above, a shutter opened. A man’s voice cracked down in guttural Azerbaijani—I caught the cadence, not the words, but the intent was clear: They have arrived.

The first shot rang against stone. Not random, not lethal. Deliberate—a signal.

Mikael dropped to a crouch. Karim shifted, his frame blocking Mitra’s exposed side. Asdar yanked me back, fast, instinctive—I found myself behind him, heart hammering, the smell of gun oil sharp in the cold air.

The village shifted. Figures bled through the alleys, doors cracked open just enough for the glint of metal, the suggestion of blade. Silent choreography, not panic.

In the pocket of stillness, everything connected. Sandi’s presence pulsed somewhere in this stone labyrinth—never visible, palpably real. Her captors waited. And now all the hunters—every thread that climbed out of mountain night—read one another.

Not introductions. Recognition.

We’d all arrived in the kill-box, pulled by codes that Mitra suspected were more than political leverage, that Karim touched with shaking hands, that made my palms sweat and the air taste like snow and burnt powder and old ritual waiting for blood.

Anthropology drilled me to admire structure. Now all I wanted was a way out before the second act broke open.