The afternoon sun baked the New Jersey farm, warming the scent of crushed grass and dry earth.
Anthony leaned back in a folding chair, his eyes narrowed behind his sunglasses as he watched the training field in the distance.
James Fitzgerald, the former Delta Force operator, was running the newly expanded Tarasov PMC element through brutal close-quarters combat drills.
"Hold formation! Cover the left flank!" James's voice echoed sharply across the empty fields.
"Second-floor window, three o'clock! Assume there's a sniper! You think you can just charge straight up the gut like that?"
A five-man stack was caught out of position while transitioning between the plywood simulation buildings. James immediately halted the drill.
"How the hell did you survive Afghanistan?" James barked, marching up to the team leader until they were nose-to-nose. "Dumb luck?"
"In an urban environment, there is a gun barrel behind every window, every rooftop, and every dumpster! You are professional operators, not street thugs!"
"When you breach, keep your center of gravity low. You only get one life, and bullets do not have eyes!"
At the firing range forty yards away, the rhythmic crack of suppressed gunfire filled the air.
Mason, leaning heavily on a pair of crutches with his shattered leg locked in a heavy cast, stood behind the firing line, screaming at the recruits.
"Moving target at three o'clock! Your breathing rhythm is a mess, Mike! Do you think you're shooting balloons at a carnival?"
Mason's voice was hoarse from yelling, but his eyes tracked the trigger discipline of every single shooter on the line with hawkish intensity.
Anthony's lips twitched into a faint smile.
"How long do you think it will take to train them up to Tier One standards?"
Marcus had driven down from the upstate farm. He sat at the picnic table next to Anthony, nursing a glass of bourbon.
John sat across from them, gently stroking the head of his pitbull puppy, his eyes soft.
"Six months, minimum," Anthony said, taking a sip of ice water. "But we probably don't have that kind of time."
John didn't look up from the dog. "You can't rush tactical synergy. They come from different units and different branches. Building that kind of muscle memory as a team takes time."
"Time is the one luxury we cannot afford," Anthony said, setting his glass down.
Marcus's smile faded.
He looked out over the training field. "Gramont has been entirely too quiet lately. Winston told us the Elders are watching you closely."
Anthony found the silence strange as well.
He had spoken with Winnie Pritzker the day before. The Pritzker board was stable, and there had been no new maneuvers from the French syndicate since Anthony had executed Bertrand Laroche. But Anthony didn't dare contact Winnie too often; Gramont was too unpredictable, and Anthony wouldn't risk painting a target on her back.
"Boss! I found it! I think I found the source of the disappearances!"
Radar, the young hacker Anthony had recruited, waved frantically from the second-floor window of the main barn.
Radar had become the Tarasov family's primary technical analyst. He lived full-time on the black-site farm; even Abram was unaware of his existence.
Anthony immediately stood up and jogged toward the barn. John and Marcus followed close behind.
The command center, converted from an old hayloft, hummed with the sound of high-end server racks.
All six of Radar's monitors were lit up, but the massive central screen was playing a shaky, high-definition video.
Radar's fingers flew across his mechanical keyboard. His voice trembled slightly.
"I pulled this from an anonymous, heavily encrypted link deep in the VIP section of a dark web forum called 'Golden Apple.' I had to bounce through a Swiss relay server to get it, and their anti-tracking software almost fried my motherboard."
"Boss... this is some kind of hunting event. And it's trending massively among the ultra-rich."
The video feed stabilized. The angle was high, indicating the camera was hard-mounted to a tree trunk.
It was a dense, old-growth forest. A man was sprinting through the frame.
He looked to be in his late forties. He was wearing a shredded, filthy business suit, and his face was contorted in absolute, primal terror. A bright red tracking bracelet was locked around his wrist.
He stumbled blindly through the underbrush, constantly checking over his shoulder as if the devil himself were chasing him.
"Facial recognition tags the target as 'Accountant,'" Radar explained rapidly. "He was a risk management executive on Wall Street. He vanished from a bodega in Midtown Manhattan a week ago."
"Where is this being filmed?" Anthony asked, his eyes locked on the screen.
"I ran topographical simulations. My initial assessment is the Adirondack Mountains, upstate New York. But I can't pinpoint the exact coordinates. The video stream is encrypted and bouncing through IPs in over a dozen different countries."
On the screen, the running man caught his foot on an exposed root and crashed heavily into the dirt. He scrambled frantically, trying to push himself backward.
An elegant, composed, and distinctly playful laugh echoed from off-screen.
A man strolled casually into the camera's view.
He was dressed in bespoke, dark green hunting camouflage. The material looked absurdly expensive, featuring delicate gold embroidery along the cuffs. His face was obscured by grotesque, theatrical reindeer makeup, his cheeks dotted with white paint.
He was holding a modern compound hunting bow. An arrow was already nocked on the string.
"Please..." the man in the suit sobbed, dropping to his knees and pressing his hands together. "I have a family. I have two little girls..."
The hunter tilted his head, as if he were genuinely considering the plea.
When he spoke, his voice was mechanically distorted by a modulator, but the arrogant, aristocratic cadence was unmistakable.
"Do you know what is truly fascinating?" the hunter asked. "I placed a wager that you wouldn't survive for more than three hours in this forest. And look at that... you have seventeen minutes left on the clock."
"I can pay you! I can give you all my money!" the accountant screamed.
"My dear friend," the hunter chuckled softly. "I paid two million dollars just to purchase the hunting permit for this sector. Do you honestly believe I require your money?"
He drew the bowstring back. The composite pulleys clicked smoothly.
The man on the ground let out a high, desperate shriek.
Thwack.
The arrow buried itself deep into the accountant's right thigh.
It wasn't a lethal shot. It was deliberately placed to sever the muscle and anchor him to the ground.
The accountant's agonizing screams echoed through the serene forest.
The hunter casually reached over his shoulder and nocked a second arrow.
"Do you know a secret?" the hunter asked, smiling beneath his grotesque makeup. "The kill itself is incredibly boring."
He drew the string back a second time.
"But watching a prey animal process the exact moment it realizes there is no escape... tasting that pure, uncut terror... that is true art."
The second arrow shattered the accountant's left kneecap.
The video abruptly cut to a new feed.
This time, the camera was mounted inside a dark, rocky cave. A woman dressed in torn office attire was huddled in the corner, shaking violently.
A digital timer graphic was overlaid in the corner of the screen: Time Remaining: 6 Days, 22 Hours.
A caption scrolled across the bottom: If Target survives 7 days, payout bonus is $10,000.
But looking at the screen, it was obvious no one was leaving this forest alive. The captives were nothing more than livestock for a casino.
Three figures appeared at the mouth of the cave. They wore a mix of high-end trench coats and hunting gear. Their faces were painted in horrifying Halloween monster masks.
They carried primitive weapons. A hunting knife. A recurve bow. A heavy steel spear.
The woman broke down into hysterical, helpless sobbing.
The video cut again.
This feed showed a young man—clearly a street gang member—who had managed to ambush a hunter, killing the man with a rock and stealing his shotgun.
Seconds later, a tactical squad wearing unmarked black tactical gear and full face masks swarmed the clearing. They executed the teenager with suppressed rifles and dragged the dead hunter's body away, cleaning the scene in seconds.
"They're treating human beings like literal game animals," Radar whispered, his voice shaking with suppressed rage.
A distorted announcer's voice began playing over a montage of kills.
"Current odds: Target #17 survives the night, 3.2 to 1. Target #23 dies by arrow, 1.8 to 1."
"Special Prop Bet: If the total kill count for Sector 4 exceeds five today, payout is 2.1..."
The video feed went to black.
The command center was dead silent. The hum of the server racks suddenly sounded deafening.
Anthony finally broke the silence. "The disappearances."
"Yeah," Radar nodded grimly. "The kidnapped targets are being shipped to this 'Hunting Ground' to serve as live entertainment for the global elite."
"That explains why Gramont hasn't bothered showing up at the Continental," John said, his face a mask of cold stone.
Marcus sneered in disgust. "He's running a private safari. He's letting billionaires hunt the lower class for sport and gambling."
"I cannot believe the High Table would authorize something this barbaric."
"It fits his psychological profile perfectly," Anthony said, his eyes locked on the dark monitor.
"Elegant. Cruel. Elevating human suffering to the level of high art. He isn't hiding from us. He simply has better games to play upstate."
Anthony's mind raced, flashing back to the Continental penthouse. He remembered the micro-expressions of the Adjudicator and the Harbinger.
They knew about the disappearances. They knew Gramont was in New York. But they chose to look the other way.
Why?
Because Gramont wasn't the only one profiting. There were undoubtedly other High Table members, or ultra-wealthy Table affiliates, participating in this hunting game. Gramont was using the blood of the New York underclass to bribe his way to the top of the High Table's political ladder.
By kidnapping the city's invisible population, he was simultaneously isolating the Tarasovs and entertaining the Elders.
This is it, Anthony realized with chilling clarity. This is Gramont's master stroke.
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