Meva Lake

Mei Wa Lake

A journalist had been publicly sniped in front of 10 Downing Street, shot in the head under live broadcast cameras. It was undoubtedly one of the most sensational news events of the century.

Beta leaned back in his cabin seat. A passenger in the row ahead was playing a news video aloud, and the female anchor's voice echoed through the cabin. He gazed absently out the window, where ground crew mechanically loaded and unloaded luggage.

Beta's destination was Munich, after which he would transfer to Paris.

He needed to log into an encrypted account in Paris and press for the final payment that had yet to arrive. Although the employer had sent confirmation saying "Good job," the money had never come through.

Once he confirmed the final payment, he would fly directly to Milan.

His phone suddenly vibrated, its alert especially loud in the quiet cabin.

Beta took out his phone. A familiar number flashed across the screen: John Wick.

He pressed answer and held the phone to his ear, silent as usual.

There was a few seconds of frozen silence on the other end, followed by a hoarse, low male voice. "Helen is gone. She went peacefully."

Beta still gave no response. Only his steady breathing carried through the receiver.

John Wick paused, his voice carrying restrained exhaustion. "May 25th. Senta Cemetery. She always treated you like her own child. You should come."

The call was decisively cut off. Beta put away his phone and looked out the window, his face betraying no emotion.

John Wick, the legendary assassin of the Continental Hotel, a being like the Boogeyman. Beta had no desire to dig into their past, but Helen... that woman, so innocent she was almost foolish, was someone he could not avoid.

Her naivety was laughable, and her kindness almost seemed like an intellectual disability. Yet it was precisely that utterly defenseless purity that made even someone like Beta admit: he fucking missed her.

That longing was like a red-hot coal lodged in his throat, impossible to swallow and impossible to spit out.

Beta tightened his jaw, trying to force it down, but the burning sensation surged through his veins straight to his head, finally turning into a sharp ache in his nose. He blinked, and beneath his lashes was the faintest trace of moisture.

"What a complete idiot."

Beta narrowed his eyes and forced his gaze onto the blinding sunlight reflected off the wing. The flickering patches of light cut through his thoughts. He needed that sharp pain to make a gentle figure completely fade from his mind.

When he opened his eyes again, every ripple had sunk into their depths. He expertly inserted his noise-canceling earbuds and adjusted his seat to a familiar recline, one that would not let him relax completely yet would allow him to react instantly in an emergency.

The cabin's hum gradually faded away, and his breathing became long and even. At thirty thousand feet, the man who had just completed the sniper shot of the century drifted into a light sleep like an ordinary passenger.

London, thirty thousand feet below, was now descending into chaos.

After four hours of work, the police ballistic experts finally found the equipment Beta had abandoned on the rooftop of that derelict building. The weapons that had been soaked in hydrogen peroxide were already corroded, and every trace that might have pointed to the killer had been thoroughly erased.

This was not because the police were inefficient.

The initial ballistic reconstruction showed that the bullet seemed to have come from a nearby elevated moving platform, leading investigators to devote all their efforts to checking the flight records of every helicopter that day.

It was not until forensic experts reviewed the data a second time that a suffocating truth surfaced: the fatal bullet had been fired from the roof of a sixty-story commercial building 3,800 meters away.

When the ballistic analysis report was delivered to MI6, the nature of the case changed abruptly.

A sniper capable of hitting a target precisely in the brow from 3,800 meters away posed a threat far beyond the scope of an ordinary police investigation.

As the seal on the red case file was sliced open by a blade, the case was officially transferred from Scotland Yard to the intelligence agency's Special Operations Division.

A codename was carefully entered into the surveillance list system.

Meva Lake tied her sleek golden-brown hair into a high ponytail. At thirty-eight, she had lost none of her sharp edge.

Dressed in a tactical jacket, fitted athletic pants, and lightweight combat boots, she radiated competence. Her gray-blue eyes were like precise scanners, always catching crucial details at the first opportunity.

As the leader of the Special Operations Group, the natural presence she commanded simply by standing there made every team member tense up unconsciously.

Meva Lake stood at the sniper position Beta had once used, gripping high-powered binoculars in both hands. In front of 10 Downing Street, 3,800 meters away, the bright red human-shaped target swayed slightly in the wind.

The howling gale atop the building had blown her ponytail into a mess, several golden-brown strands constantly lashing her cheeks. Her brows were tightly furrowed as she repeatedly adjusted the binoculars' focus. In the end, she had no choice but to lie prone on the cold concrete rooftop, trying to gain a steadier angle of observation.

Yet even so, the conspicuous red target remained blurry in her view. At maximum magnification, the target's head was only the size of a coin, and she could barely make out the numbered label stuck to it.

Meva lowered the binoculars, her expression frighteningly grim.

Right in front of 10 Downing Street, before Scotland Yard's highest-ranking official and cameras from the global media, that bullet from 3,800 meters away had precisely pierced the target's brow.

The moment blood splashed across the live broadcast, the case had already surpassed the bounds of an ordinary shooting. It had directly shaken the national dignity of the entire United Kingdom. Calls urging action from Buckingham Palace and Westminster came one after another, yet the investigation remained stalled.

Meva braced both hands against the railing, her knuckles whitening from the force.

"This isn't a shot a human being can make," she told her deputy. "That shooter. He's too strong to be human. The current world record is 3,500 meters, using a .50-caliber anti-materiel rifle. But that was in the Middle East desert, with constant temperature, stable airflow, and an unobstructed view. The sniper spent a full three hours making that shot."

Meva stared down at the city below. "Sixty floors, 240 meters. This is the sniper's high ground, and also the starting point of the bullet's trajectory. From the moment the trigger is pulled to the moment it hits the target, the bullet has to pass through a temperature difference of 2.35 degrees Celsius."

"And here." Meva looked toward London's skyline shrouded in mist. "Every building is warping the airflow. The moisture from the River Thames makes the trajectory feel like it's passing through syrup. 3,800 meters. Killing with one shot in this environment. This isn't a sniper. It's a precision killing machine."

She turned to face her deputy, her fingertip tracing a falling arc through the air. "This isn't a simple calculation of a two-dimensional ballistic trajectory. It requires predicting the combined effects of temperature, humidity, and airflow on the bullet in three-dimensional space. And that madman calculated every variable and made this 'impossible' kill."

"Fuck!"

John Wick and Helen were from the film John Wick.