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Steve Crettan & Sonja Holten Saga
Invisible Anchors
by Rodriac Copen
Chapter 1: Controlled Falls
The elevator descended further than the panel indicated. The numbers on the control panel, which lit up as they moved through each floor, reached the bottom of the stairs and went out. The level they were accessing was below the second basement level.
Steve immediately noticed the pressure in his ears and the slight change in the engine's hum. Homeland Security still believed that concealing information began by erasing the obvious, visible indicators. It was a bureaucratic superstition, but so far, keeping the bunker out of public view had worked.
As the elevator stopped, the doors opened, revealing the unpolished concrete walls. They moved forward, flanked by a cold light. As footsteps echoed in the hallway, he began to recall the old smell of metal and recycled ozone from years ago, when he worked in that same building. Steve couldn't help but feel an involuntary twitch in his stomach, a conditioned response from his own nervous system that signaled alertness and tension.
He had spent too many hours of his life there not to recognize the place as a hostile zone.
Sonja walked beside him, with a firm step and her back somewhat straight. She didn't look around with the curiosity of first-time visitors: she did so with memory.
As she passed through the second biometric checkpoint, she hesitated for barely a second. Steve noticed the slight change in her breathing.
—“Here,” she said, without pointing . “I remember the staff dining room was on the left.”
Steve
turned his head. The hallway had been sealed off, transformed into a
smooth, anonymous wall. Nothing indicated that there had ever been a
room with tables, coffee machines, or casual conversations.
—“We first met in this dining room,” Sonja continued . “Do you remember?”
Steve remembered it too, though he'd filed that memory away. His most significant moment was the lunch they'd shared at the Kopenhag café . But now that he mentioned it, he remembered that day when he'd arrived late. He was always late for things that didn't matter to him. She was already seated, tray untouched, surveying the place as if she were assessing a crime scene.
—“Yes. You didn’t eat anything that day.”— said Steve .
—“I was deciding if you were going to do it,” she replied . “You said you hated eating in this building.”
—“I still hate it. The building brings back bad memories.”
Sonja glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. A slight, almost imperceptible expression.
—“But it’s different when you’re there.” — Steve finished the sentence.
Sonja didn't answer. But a barely perceptible smile appeared on her face.
A guard led them to the meeting room. The thick doors swung open, revealing a large, windowless room. They both knew that the active jammers disabled all technology. It was the kind of place where no minutes were recorded because no one wanted to leave a record of what was said.
Sonja sat across from him, not beside him. They had learned this over time: in meetings like this, visible closeness could indicate weakness. The connection had to exist, but it was best not to show it.
While they waited, Steve watched Sonja 's hands . Still and controlled. There was no visible nervousness, only concentration.
—“That first time we met, I thought you wouldn’t agree to work with me,” Sonja said quietly.
“I thought about it. I had just lost my partner Nesko,” Steve admitted . “And the remorse was eating me up inside.”
—“And yet…”—
—“Even so…”— he repeated —“you seemed brilliant. I wasn’t wrong.”
Sonja nodded. She didn't smile. The memory wasn't sentimental. Two people acknowledging the exact point where their paths diverged.
As the directors entered, Steve sensed a change in the atmosphere. Too many important people gathered in silence. In that building, too much calm was never a good sign.
The door closed with a dry magnetic seal. The official meeting was about to begin.
Steve leaned back in the armchair. The bunker, the past, and the meeting without a prior agenda: everything fit together perfectly, like an anchor dropped to the bottom to prevent anyone from moving in the wrong direction.
Or to make sure that no one could escape when the water started to rise.
The second basement level was designed to make people forget the passage of time. Or to make them stop caring about it. It had no windows, the air was dense, and the light fell from recessed panels without casting any useful shadows.
The directors of Homeland Security sat around the table. Four men and one woman, all dressed in identical suits. Their tired faces held trained expressions that betrayed nothing.
Steve and Sonja were observing not the people, but their micro-reactions. Clenched fists, an off-kilter blink, the way some of them avoided looking directly at them.
Director Mikhail Volkov spoke first. The deep, modulated voice, without any recognizable Russian accent, came out flawlessly from his mouth.
—“We have had a series of unusual incidents in the last eighteen months.”
Steve wondered for a moment what she was talking about. He was usually well-informed about what was happening on Earth . Not knowing what was going on could indicate a top-level secret. He suppressed the urge to ask, since there was no point. He would find out soon enough.
—“It affects top-level officials,” Volkov continued . “Those in charge of political agencies, security, and strategic control. People with full access to privileged information have fallen from grace.”
Steve was annoyed by the expression ; it sounded like a newspaper editorial.
A panel activated on the wall to display a multimedia screen. Several faces appeared one after another. Some were familiar, others were merely cross-references in classified files.
—“Some suicides.”— said Chief Lewandowska , the only woman in the group of directors —“All of them with impeccable suicide notes… perhaps too impeccable.”
—“Internal sabotage at secret facilities,” added another director . “A couple of critical facilities compromised from within. Protocols decrypted and alarms deactivated with legitimate codes.”
—“Sale of information.”— Director Volkov concluded —“To terrorist cells, to alleged non-aligned agents, to intermediaries without a flag.”
A secretary handed them some sheets of paper with information.
Steve and Sonja watched the images on the screen as they opened the folders. They were looking for nothing more than consistency to guide their initial suspicions.
—“And do they have anything in common?” Sonja asked .
A split-second delay in the response indicated to Steve that there was a hypothesis in progress.
—“None of them had a criminal record,” Lewandowska replied . “None were under prior suspicion. None of them seemed vulnerable.”
Sonja barely bowed her head.
—“Excuse me, director, but that’s false,” she said . “They were all vulnerable. It’s just not in the records we have.”
The boss smiled as she replied:
—“You’re right, officer. We thought they weren’t vulnerable. What do you think?”
—“Repressed desires. Guilt. Moral fatigue. Stagnant ambition. Fear of becoming irrelevant. Midlife crisis.”— Sonja listed calmly. —“These aren’t character flaws. They’re human conditions. Amplifiable. The human factor.”
Steve noticed a slight movement at the table, a restrained approval. The directors had been waiting for a clue that would tell them they were the right ones. Now the real information would come.
—“We believe we have identified the source of these problems,” said Director Volkov , regaining control . “Thanks to our border control networks.”
The screen changed to show maps and routes. The lines overlapped across Europe like poorly healed scars.
—“A group of agents has infiltrated,” he continued . “Men and women with no clear affiliation. They enter through different borders using clean identities. They stay for a short time, and then the incidents start.”
Steve narrowed his eyes.
—“How many agents?”—
—“We don’t have a clear number yet. We’re doing reverse engineering.”
—“How do they operate?”—
—“We don’t know for sure. We need you to determine that.”
—“And yet you’re still sure you’re the origin?”
The director held his gaze.
—“That’s right. After they leave, everything starts to fall apart.”
Sonja placed her fingers on the table, as if she didn't want to contaminate herself. She said:
—“They are not executors.”— he said —“They are catalysts.”
The word hung in the air. It was explained:
—“It seems they don’t force anything,” he added . “They hint. They seduce. It doesn’t seem out of the ordinary.”
Steve felt a hunch, like an intuition he didn't want to verbalize.
—“Are the suspects from northern Europe?” he asked.
The directors nodded.
—“Orpheus?”— Steve tried to confirm.
No one responded immediately. But that was answer enough for them.
—“We have no proof,” Chief Lewandowska finally said . “Only correlations.”
Steve settled into the armchair.
—“Correlations are the only thing we have to begin investigating hypotheses. We, the agents, confirm them… or not.”
The director closed the panel as the screen disappeared. As if it had never existed.
“Steve, Sonja… we need you,” he said . “To identify the mechanism. To anticipate the next collapse and, if possible, avert the danger.”
—“The next target is probably about to fall…”— said Sonja.
Steve leaned back in the armchair. He looked around. The bunker. The underground. The same building where, years before, he had met Sonja , when they were both loose pieces and still believed that the system reacted to logic.
—“Then,” he said , “we’re already late.”
Director Volkov nodded only once.
—“It’s always like that.”
When they left the room, the hallway seemed longer. Or perhaps it seemed that way to them, carrying something new. It wasn't fear. It felt more like an unwanted responsibility.
Sonja walked beside him, silent. Steve adjusted his pace to match hers. It was a minimal gesture, but it was an anchor. Almost a statement.
They knew this wasn't a series of isolated betrayals. It was a slow, calculated erosion of wills. With such an elaborate strategy, certainty was elusive. Entire institutions were at risk. And they were probably only scratching the surface.
The Northern Confederation was an identity that had been circulating behind the scenes for some time. For decades, conflicts had been global.
The National Security Agency was not a domestic body. It operated on a global scale. And beyond.
Agents like Steve and Sonja didn't need the explanation. They'd been through years of training. They knew about the vacation stations orbiting Earth. There, they served cocktails to vacationers gazing at artificial nebulae. Off- Earth , the mining colonies had a distorted concept of the law, pretending that the world order was a poorly translated memory.
Humanity had expanded, yes. But the only truly global thing remained fear.
After the last world conflict, the political map had been redrawn. More than a hundred states had dissolved, borders no longer separated, and sovereignty was organized into regions.
Abstract diagrams appeared on the panel. No flags or official names. Networks, nodes, and flows of capital, information, and people were now controlled by the new global police: National Security .
The old world order left behind the current remnant of post-nation regions. Some of them autonomous and unregulated. The Boreal Confederation was one of them.
Parts of old nations like Russia , Finland , Sweden , and Norway grouped together private security corporations, repurposed former intelligence services, and structures that never agreed to disappear.
The Northern Confederation was merely an internal name they used to refer to themselves. It did not appear in any official records.
They operated as strategic consultants, think tanks, and technology companies. They advised governments, corporations, and independent colonies. They sold stability to regions. They offered prevention of social and economic crises. They optimized regional leadership.
They operated both inside and outside the law. For their illicit operations, they had a clandestine faction, an operational arm that didn't appear on any balance sheets or contracts. It was called the Orpheus Division .
The directors believed Orpheus was behind the incidents. As far as they knew, they didn't carry out the operations directly. They specialized in preparing the ground. They identified key subjects. They introduced the appropriate stimuli and then withdrew.
—“The breakdown seems spontaneous and self-inflicted,” Sonja said . “Even morally justifiable.”
—“Exactly.” — Steve agreed , resting his elbows on the table.
—“If they don’t officially exist, why do directors talk to us about them?”
—“Orpheus has been suspected for some time. But apparently, they've gone from being discreet to being operational.” — Steve replied .
Homeland Security had detected scattered traces of the Boreal Confederation in different regions, operating legally. But it seemed they were no longer content to operate within the law.
Steve leaned back in his chair. He thought about human expansion, the illusion of progress, the childish notion that the new world order would eliminate conflict. But the weak point of the idea remained humanity. Human beings hadn't fundamentally changed.
—“The old order didn’t die,” he said . “It learned to hide better in the new, borderless spectacle. Now it groups itself into regions, into companies. Into mega-corporations.”
—“And to seduce with business and money.”— Sonja added —“No one obeys someone who doesn’t give them money or power.”
They finished dinner and went out onto the balcony of their hotel room.
The Copenhagen night sky revealed a few stars. The air was rather chilly, and Sonja snuggled into Steve 's arms . Gazing up at the sky, the agent felt an uneasy certainty that the galaxy might be filled with bright stations and new colonies, but the power still operated as always: faceless, homeless, and with infinite patience.
This time, the enemy wasn't after territory. Whether seeking money or power, Orpheus knew how to manipulate the primal instincts of human beings. That alone made his adversaries powerful.
The next day they would begin interviewing the first victims.
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Steve Crettan & Sonja Holten Saga
Invisible Anchors
by Rodriac Copen
Chapter 2: Invisible Anchors
After a short flight, Germany received them without ceremony. From the airport, they traveled directly to the pretrial detention facility, which was located on the outskirts of Berlin.
The building was practically buried in an administrative area. The area had changed its name three times since the last political reorganization.
Concrete, steel, sensors neatly scattered. It was a place designed to detain people who knew too much and were no longer trustworthy. The Secretary of Security waited behind a table bolted to the floor. He wore a suit without a tie. Deep dark circles under his eyes. His hands remained still and clasped, with a discipline that couldn't quite conceal the fine tremor in his fingers.
Steve sat down opposite him. Sonja preferred to remain standing to one side. Close enough to be noticed, but far enough away not to intrude, while still observing his behavior.
—“I’m not going to deny what I did,” the man said before anyone could ask him anything . “I just… I don’t know why I did it.”
Steve didn't react and let the silence work in his favor.
—“I had access, yes,” the secretary continued . “But I never considered selling information. Never. My career was built on the opposite idea.”
—“So what made you change your mind?” Steve asked .
The man frowned, clearly uncomfortable in Sonja 's presence . He acted as if searching for something in a dimly lit room. Finally, he confessed:
-"She." -
Sonja made a mental note of the behavior. Of the genuine disbelief.
“I don’t know her name,” the man added . “Or what hole she crawled out of. She just showed up at a minor reception. Nothing important. We were talking… she listened to me. She looked at me as if…” he broke off , “as if I were special. As if I were different from what I’ve always been.”
Steve observed that there was no theatrical regret. There was genuine bewilderment. That was something… different.
—“After that,” the man continued , “I started wanting things. Not power or prestige. Risk, maybe. Sensations. Easy money. It was… exhilarating.”
Sonja spoke for the first time.
—“Didn’t it seem immoral to you at that time?”
The man shook his head slowly.
—“At first it wasn’t serious. It seemed to me… a necessary game to get his attention.”
Steve asked:
—“Did he sleep with the woman?”
—“That’s why I did it.”
That pattern was repeated.
The next interviewee was a beautiful, fifty-something civil servant. She had been a minister's secretary for over twenty years. An impeccable record and a long marriage, free of scandals or visible cracks, were part of her history.
He sat facing them with his back straight and his eyes sunken in.
—“It wasn’t an adventure,” he said . “It was an interruption.”
Steve raised an eyebrow, intrigued.
—“Interruption of what?”
—“From myself.” —
She couldn't describe the man. She couldn't. She only remembered the feeling of being seen, desired, validated at a point in her life when she felt uncontained. Days later, she had handed over passwords, calendars, routines. Not because of blackmail. Her lover had told her he was a journalist, and that he was after an interview. He had helped her out of a momentary conviction.
—“It was like someone had turned the volume all the way up,” she said . “Everything I always kept under control became… unpredictable.”
The following cases varied in form, but not in substance.
Men and women with solid track records, discipline, and self-control. Suddenly, they engaged in behaviors that even they described as foreign: sexual encounters with strangers, sudden greed, compulsive spending, a need to transgress or take risks without a clear cause.
Some spoke of sexual practices they would never have engaged in during their marriage. Others described an emotional voracity that surprised them more than the act itself.
—“It wasn’t pleasure…”— said one —“It was urgency, excitement.”
Steve closed the last file and rested his hands on the desk of the temporary office they had been assigned. The bulletproof glass offered a view of the city: orderly, functional, indifferent.
—“They weren’t forced.”— he said.
Sonja denied it.
—“They untied them. They gave them the push they needed.”
Steve nodded. That fit all too well. If there was one thing the victims were convinced of, it was their own fault, not the perpetrator's.
“They didn’t create new desires,” Sonja continued . “They took away their shame about having them. They offered them permission.”
Steve looked at his reflection in the glass. He thought about how easy it was to confuse freedom with abandonment.
—“Orpheus doesn’t control the mind.”— he said —“He controls the victims’ internal narrative.”—
Sonja watched him. But there was no alarm in her gaze, only concentration.
—“And when the story you tell yourself changes…”— he added —“everything else seems logical.”
The sun set over Berlin with an almost offensive normality. People walking, traffic, daily routine.
Steve felt the weight of something the reports weren't reflecting. It wasn't just espionage, or classic corruption. It was a silent assault on the very idea of free will. And they were barely investigating the victims in the first country.
The subsequent analysis of the testimonies took them two days and one night with hardly any sleep.
Meticulously planned suicides, improbable love affairs. Betrayals executed without clumsiness. Internal sabotage that seemed designed by someone who knew the systems better than their creators.
The reports from the local agents were piled on the work table. Steve reviewed them all. Dates, contacts, transfers, movements. The other analysts were doing the same, each from their area of expertise. Politics. Security. Logistics. Financial intelligence. Nothing quite added up.
Sonja had been sitting silently for several hours, apart from the files, observing them as if she weren't reading the information, but rather reading between the lines. Steve recognized this gesture. It wasn't doubt, but rather the incubation of ideas.
—“We are looking for the wrong pattern,” he finally said.
The conversations stopped immediately. Steve paid attention.
—“I’m listening.” —
Sonja stood up and walked slowly around the table, without touching the documents.
—“We’re all trying to align political causes, strategic opportunities, and material benefits, looking for common ground,” he said . “But that comes later. The first thing that breaks down here isn’t loyalty. It’s the internal narrative.”
One of the analysts frowned.
—“Narrative?”—
—“The way a person sees themselves,” he replied . “What they desire. What they allow themselves to desire. What they lack.”
Steve felt the clean and brutal fit.
“They’re not looking for a political, economic, or sexual pattern,” Sonja continued . “They’re looking for an emotional profile. They all fall in the same way: first intense validation, then a pleasurable urge, then rationalization. The act itself doesn’t matter. What matters is that, the first time, they don’t feel guilty for letting themselves go.”
Steve closed the file he was holding.
“That sounds logical. Emotional profiles,” he said . “It’s easier for officers to empathize if they know the victims’ emotions beforehand.”
She said it out loud while thinking it to herself. Sonja heard it anyway.
—“If that’s the case, this isn’t the work of a typical agent,” he added . “Or a classical strategist. This is someone who understands desire as an operational vector.”
The others exchanged awkward glances. The kind of awkwardness that arises when the playing field shifts and you no longer control the rules.
Steve stood up.
“We need someone who thinks like them,” Sonja said . “But who isn’t playing their side. Dr. Anders Holm.”
Steve knew the name. They weren't friends, but he'd had enough dealings with her to know she was very effective. He'd run into her a couple of times at Homeland Security headquarters . Her specialty was psychiatry, just like Sonja's .
“He’s a scholar, a historian of psychiatry,” she continued . “He specializes in suggestion, the mythology of desire, and symbolic control. He’s worked for Homeland Security since before the last restructuring.”
—“And in your opinion… is…?”— Steve didn’t finish the sentence.
—“If anyone can help us with this issue, it’s that person.”— Sonja opined .
For greater speed, they opted for a suborbital flight back to Copenhagen . The craft moved smoothly through layers of traffic. Steve leaned his head back against the seat. He felt the accumulated fatigue as a constant pressure, while his mind remained active.
Sonja was checking data on her computer, but her attention was elsewhere. Steve knew this from the way she was breathing.
—“Do you think Holm is clean?”— he asked, always thinking about possible infiltrations.
“I think if anyone can see the origin of this without getting caught up in it, it’s him,” Sonja replied . “He studies how cultures have been manipulated for centuries without technology. Orpheus didn’t invent manipulation… he just refined the method.”
Steve looked at their reflection in the dark surface of the window.
A couple of hours later, the National Security headquarters in Copenhagen greeted them with its usual cold efficiency. Wide corridors, discreet security, and people who avoided asking too many questions.
Anders Holm 's office was in an older wing of the building, with large windows. Steve was pleased about that. He didn't like the prison-like feel of the underground bunker. Apparently, the doctor liked the isolation from the chaos. It was a good office for that.
When the door opened to greet them, the couple saw something that wasn't mentioned in many reports: paper books. Many of them, neatly arranged in a large library. On the desk lay open copies, underlined. A fitting and deliberate anachronism.
Holm watched them with restrained interest. He greeted them with a smile.
—“Dr. Holten, it’s a pleasure to see you again.” — he said.
Sonja introduced her to Steve , and the exchange continued with some trivialities and pleasantries.
Anders Holm 's office didn't look like an official office. It was more like an intellectual's retreat. Walls covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Physical books, cardboard folders, old terminals disconnected from the main network. Nothing ornamental. A personally ordered chaos for individual use.
Holm moved through that chaos with his own logic, like someone who learned to live surrounded by evidence that no one wants to look at for too long.
After Sonja briefed him on the ongoing investigation, she played the interviews. Dr. Holm listened intently to the voices of the disgraced officials. Broken confessions. Hesitations. Long silences where there had once been certainty.
At times, Holm listened with his eyes closed and his head slightly tilted, as if he were not analyzing words, but rhythms.
Steve watched him like a hunter sizing up his prey. Holm was an enigma to him. And that's why he was cautious. He didn't know for sure what kind of man the psychiatrist was, but there was something electric about him.
As if he were an unpredictable person who had worked on his anxiety and tamed it. The kind of guy who knows how to survive in tense and dangerous environments. Steve felt that deep down he was behaving like a field agent playing an undercover role.
When the last file was finished, Holm paused for a few seconds, as if evaluating the presentation he was about to give in a lecture. He walked over to one of the shelves, took out an unlabeled folder, and placed it on the desk without opening it.
—“If you ask me, this doesn’t look like corruption,” he finally said . “Nor is it classic blackmail. It’s not simple emotional manipulation either.”
He looked at Sonja first. The doctor knew how to recognize authority when it was in front of him.
—“In my opinion, it’s suggestive invasion, my dear Sonja.”
Steve didn't react. Though not an expert, he recognized those old words from his training days. That's when he remembered Holms better . He had met him when the specialist was giving some training seminars, years before. The memory wasn't reassuring.
—“I’ve seen this before,” Anselm Holm continued . “Not on this scale, of course. Nor with this sophistication. But ultimately, the symptoms are the same.”
He listed the symptoms without drama, as if reading a psychiatric autopsy:
—“Hyperrealistic, not symbolic, dreams. Operational. Scenarios where the subject mentally rehearses decisions, which they then execute while awake. Sudden eroticization of choices that were previously neutral or even repulsive. Desire is not merely sexual: it is a libidinal charge applied to action. And the persistent feeling of being watched when no one is there. The liberating idea that says: I want it and I deserve it. Why not?”
Steve felt a dry fit in his chest.
“This is all part of a package deal that requires gradual work. It’s not a simple bribe paid like a transaction,” Holm added . “It requires specifically studying the victims and working with them. Setting the stage beforehand.”
Sonja crossed her arms as she asked:
—“Does it have any background… an origin?”
Holm gave a short snort. He found a folder in the library and opened it. Inside were copies of old documents, incomplete reports, and handwritten marginal notes. He showed them to him.
“I have many more folders. These are declassified files from Ingo Swann,” he said . “Remote viewing. Extended consciousness. Implantation of suggestive ideas. It was forbidden territory… even when it was being officially investigated.”
Steve exhaled slowly as he said:
—“MKULtra.” —
Holm nodded as he explained:
—“But this isn’t MKULtra as we knew it. That was crude. Violent. Initial. And it depended on trauma. This is… much more elegant and sophisticated. Enhanced for a world saturated with stimuli, networks, prefabricated and unfulfilled desires. And I think it’s focused on repressed personalities.”
He leaned towards them.
—“If this is real,” he said , “if I’m not mistaken, there are many potential targets in danger. On many levels.”
He didn't raise his voice. There was no need.
“Not because they know too much,” he continued , “but because anyone can fit the profile. Who doesn’t have dreams, hidden desires, unfulfilled longings? For any psyche, the primal idea that we deserve something and have the right to achieve it is as old as human civilization. It’s simply a matter of wearing down cognitive resistance, breaking strong emotional bonds, and increasing the level of self-awareness. We all have a solid foundation for applying these methods.”
Steve rested his forearms on his knees as he asked:
—“How do we know if they are trying to interfere, to influence us during the investigation?”
Holm didn't respond immediately. He looked at them as if assessing how he could explain years of research in a few sentences.
—“We must pay attention to the shifts,” he finally said . “Thoughts that don’t arrive as ideas, but as permissions. Internal phrases like ‘this isn’t so bad , ’ ‘no one will get hurt , ’ ‘this is also me,’ ‘I deserve it, why not?’ ”
—“Subtle changes in the perception of the other. Sudden idealization. Or unjustified irritation. The goal of implanting ideas is to isolate without breaking the individual.” — Sonja
thought aloud.
—“Exactly. If there is a disruption in the victim's thinking, a break that is inconsistent with their personality, it is immediately repressed, and it achieves the opposite effect. The implantation must be subtle. Something intimate brings about the desire or temptation to say nothing, to keep it secret. The impulse must be kept as the symptom of something intimate, very personal,” stated Dr. Holm.
Sonja nodded slowly.
—“As colleagues, talk,” Holm concluded . “Even when you’re not sure. Or especially then.”
For a couple of seconds, silence settled in the room. Steve asked:
—“Can it stop… block?”— he asked.
Holm denied it.
—“It can only be detected, and resisted, if the individual is not off guard. They will have to search for all the individuals involved.”
When they stepped out into the corridor, the Homeland Security headquarters looked exactly the same as always. People were working. Systems were functioning. Everything was normal.
Steve walked a few steps and stopped.
Paranoia would begin to creep in slowly. As a reasonable idea.
And that was what was truly dangerous.
The next day, Leipzig greeted them with a persistent, fine drizzle. The kind of rain that doesn't force you to run, but still soaks through. The sky was a flat, gray sheet with no depth. Steve thought the city seemed designed to avoid provoking strong emotions. That, for the moment, struck him as suspicious.
Local Homeland Security agents were waiting for them in a makeshift office, set up in what had once been a cultural center. Tall windows, poor heating, weak machine coffee… and bad.
“We’ve had them under surveillance for weeks,” said the local official . “There are no visible irregularities. We’re trying to identify all the members of the network.”
Steve skimmed the profiles on the screen hanging on the wall. Men and women of the old Novgorod Pact . Classic intelligence, solid training. Now elegantly recast.
—“University professors.”— he read —“Executives of strategic consulting firms. Cultural curators. Doctors. Lawyers. Accountants.” —
“They’re never armed,” the agent added . “They work like any other civilian. And they have little contact with each other. That makes it difficult to identify the members.”
Sonja looked up.
"That was to be expected," he said . "They're very well-trained agents."
Steve wondered how much time they had before the Orpheus agents knew they were being searched for.
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Steve Crettan & Sonja Holten Saga
Invisible Anchors
by Rodriac Copen
Chapter 3: Freedom as Collateral Damage
The days were tedious. Boring surveillance, with little else to do. Before arresting the agents, they needed to identify them as members of the network. Sonja immersed herself in studying the Orpheus agents' reports , which were being released little by little. Steve focused on the fieldwork.
The hotel where the couple was staying was near the historic center. Functional, impersonal, and with a discreet bar on the ground floor, it had a warm, ambiance with soft music. One night, Steve had to stay longer than planned for a strategy meeting.
He sent Sonja a short message: “ I’ll be a while. Wait for me at the bar.”
She answered briefly and with little enthusiasm. She felt exhausted, and sleep was slowly winning the battle.
She was sitting at the bar when the man approached. He sat a couple of places away, careful not to encroach on her space. Like someone who knows how to keep their distance.
—“Is Leipzig always like this?” the man asked casually, in soft, almost academic German . —“Or only when you arrive tired?”
Sonja looked at him. He was tall and well-dressed. He didn't stand out. He looked like a teacher… or a doctor, not very rich in any case. She didn't find him suspicious.
—“It depends on what you're expecting from the place.” — Sonja replied .
He barely smiled, as if evaluating whether it was worth continuing the conversation.
—“Visiting Professor,” he said . “History of Political Ideas. You seem to be a colleague, if I may.”
Suddenly, someone dropped a glass, which shattered with a clatter. Sonja turned around for a couple of seconds. An elegant woman was apologizing to a waiter, who was proceeding to clean up the small mess.
She resumed talking to the stranger, who now smiled somewhat more suggestively. She thought the man had finally decided it was worth talking to her.
Flattered, they continued talking about trivial matters. After a few minutes, Sonja felt a subtle sense of well-being. Nothing overt. A suggested, unspoken affinity with the man. A rare, almost sexual excitement . For a moment, she thought of Professor Holm 's warnings . But she was in public, in her own hotel. The atmosphere was safe. As an agent immersed in her work, she felt she was obsessively overreacting.
He finished his drink and the professor ordered another round for both of them. Just one more, he thought. Then he would go to his room.
They continued talking about innocuous things: universities, books, the decline of institutions. He didn't ask anything personal. And their conversation was pleasant. He listened attentively. With every sentence he spoke, he gave her space to respond. She felt cared for. It was nice.
Steve 's message arrived a few minutes later: “ Sorry, I'm still detained. I'll come as soon as I can.”
Perceptive, the man subtly leaned in to say:
—“She doesn’t seem happy.”— he said . —“Sometimes… a change of scenery helps to distract us. Don’t you think?”
At that point, she couldn't think straight. The man's room was only two floors up. The hallway smelled of deodorant. Sonja walked with a strange feeling: light, but not free. As if someone had turned down the volume of an internal alarm.
For a moment, she stumbled. Gently, the man placed his arm around her waist, preventing her from falling. As he drew closer, she could smell his mahogany-scented cologne. The touch on her hip was pleasant. Before he reached her, almost by chance, his hand slid down, brushing against her thigh. She felt a surge of excitement.
Inside the room, the light was dim. Through the window, the city appeared blurred. The man closed the door and approached slowly. He looked directly into her eyes. And Sonja held that gaze longer than necessary, as if in response. Or a provocation. The man circled her body gently and slowly. He drew her body to his. The alcohol, the skin, the ambiguous phrases they whispered that promised nothing concrete.
He undressed her without haste. The dress fell to the floor. Without clumsiness, he unhooked her bra. Then he slid her panties down. Just before the point of no return, the door burst open.
Steve burst in. Focused, he didn't shout or demand explanations. The officer reacted immediately. Too fast for a university professor.
The struggle was brief and messy. They slammed against some furniture. Sonja roused from her stupor with the action and the sound of ragged breathing. The man pulled out a small, precise knife. Steve felt the cut on his left hand: a burning sensation at first, then pain. He seized a second of fury and surprise to lunge at him.
Orpheus 's agent broke free. He jumped to the side window, opened it, and leaped into the garden one floor below. He vanished into the rainy night without a word.
The silence in the room was significant.
Sonja sat on the bed, barely wrapped in a sheet, her eyes glassy and filled with tears. The ragged breathing that precedes crying seemed to be winning the battle. She stared at the floor. She remembered the glass that had shattered, the couple of seconds she'd left it unattended.
—“I…”— he began to stammer.
Steve closed the door. He placed his good hand on Sonja 's shoulder . His other hand was bleeding. He didn't seem to mind.
—“You’re intoxicated.”— he said curtly —“Get dressed.”
She looked up, broken inside.
—“I should have known.” —
Steve nodded slowly.
—“That’s right. Luckily, this didn’t end with your death.”
Steve lifted Sonja 's underwear . He handed it to her without touching her.
There were no recriminations or scenes. Just a contained, deep pain, which Steve kept where he kept everything he didn't want to share.
Outside, Leipzig remained gray and indifferent. Orpheus had made their move. They had been discovered.
After the Leipzig incident , Steve stopped sleeping through the night.
I didn't have nightmares in the classical sense. They were complete, self-contained scenes, with their own internal logic. Dreams where I made quick and effective decisions, without moral conflict. Upon waking, the sensation lingered for a few seconds longer, as if my body hadn't received the order to leave the scene.
Impulses too. Brief. Acceptable. Thoughts that came in the form of shortcuts: this would save time , it wouldn't be so bad , no one would notice . Steve dismissed them with discipline, but it bothered him not to recognize their origin. He knew it was a psychic attack, one of those Holm described as typical of MKUltra . Perhaps they were combining it with ultrasound.
I was walking with Sonja toward the underground parking garage, talking about an agent's financial trail, when he mentioned dreams. She stopped dead in her tracks.
—“Now they are attacking you.”— he said.
Steve frowned.
—“I’m afraid so.”—
Steve opened his mouth to continue, but didn't. An echo from underground enveloped them. There was a lot of wet concrete. And flashing white lights. Too many blind spots.
They didn't reach the car. The first shot rang out sharply and without warning. The second was immediate. Steve pushed Sonja behind a pillar as he drew his weapon. Two figures moved between the vehicles. Coordinated, without shouts or haste.
One fell from a well-aimed shot. The other lunged straight at Steve .
Hand to hand, he was too close to think. Steve managed to disarm him with a clumsy blow, his left hand responding late and weakly. He felt the pull on the wound. The man smiled. He pulled out a short, functional knife.
Steve took a step back, but it wasn't enough. The blade rose, searching for his neck. Sonja fired twice without hesitation. The shots were precise. His body fell before she could complete the swing.
The silence returned suddenly, thick and unreal.
Steve leaned against the car. He was breathing heavily. Sonja came quickly to him and hugged him tightly, as if the gesture preceded the thought.
—“Almost…”— she said, without finishing.
Steve rested his forehead on her shoulder. He closed his eyes for a second. They separated slowly. They didn't say anything else; there was no need.
Hours later, at the university, the office of the supposed professor who had seduced Sonja was empty. Too clean. No physical files, no digital traces. No recent fingerprints to identify. It made sense.
—“She cleaned up and disappeared before we arrived.”— said Steve .
Sonja observed the bare space.
—“Or it was never really here at all.”
Steve felt the weariness like an outgoing tide. He thought about dreams, about impulses. About the knife stopped inches from his throat. Orpheus didn't need to kill them. He just needed to disturb them. And now they knew he was seriously trying.
They continued investigating without needing to move around much. There were no spectacular raids or fierce chases. Just hours of cross-referencing, psychological profiles, behavioral patterns that didn't quite fit together until, suddenly, they did.
They were at the hotel, reading reports for the umpteenth time. The illegal faction of the Boreal Confederation didn't need physical proximity, nor visible terminals. They didn't need psychic mind-control agents either. They used highly persuasive people.
—“Emotional intermediaries.”— said Sonja , leaning against the window frame, a report in her hand —“They don’t operate, they don’t transmit orders. They just… anchor .”
Steve looked up from the table as he sipped his cold coffee. He had dark circles under his eyes that he no longer bothered to hide.
—“Psychic anchors?”—
—“People with a specific emotional charge,” he continued . “They inject attraction, desire, idealization. Orpheus doesn’t control his victims like puppets. He uses them through contacts that operate as points of resonance. Human amplifiers.”
Steve slowly closed his fingers.
—“So many of the victims…”—
—“They don’t know they’re collaborating,” she finished . “Like the second victim we interviewed, the Minister’s secretary. Remember her? Impeccable record, a solid marriage. She herself said it was just a fling. She never imagined that Orpehus eliminated someone he trusted implicitly to weaken the political structure. The victims believe they chose freely. That’s the cleanest part of the method. And the dirtiest.”
The silence that followed was uncomfortable.
Steve thought about the hotel incident. If he hadn't arrived in time, Sonja would have thought it was just a casual fling. He let out a short, humorless laugh.
Sonja seemed to read his mind. She said:
—“For a moment…”— she broke off, as if the phrase weighed more than expected —“For a moment I wanted to give it all up.”
He didn't say it as a dramatic confession, but as an inconvenient fact.
Steve approached slowly and sat down opposite her. There was no judgment in his expression. Only mindfulness.
—“That’s what they want,” she said gently . “For you to choose your worst self, believing it’s freedom.”
Sonja held his gaze. There was weariness, yes. But also something more vulnerable, more exposed. As if her usual armor had cracked just enough.
The outside world was suspended for a few minutes: the latent threat of the Northern Confederation , the code names, the unresolved hypotheses. Everything took a step back.
Sonja reached out from the sofa. It took Steve a second to take it. When he did, it wasn't a firm grip, but rather a confirmation that the contact was still real.
He sat beside her as Sonja climbed on top of him with a somewhat awkward, human gesture. Steve wrapped his arms around her and rested his face against her neck . They felt each other's breathing… slow, steady. They synchronized without thinking.
Just bodies recognizing each other as a temporary refuge. Sonja ran her fingers along Steve 's face as he closed his eyes, enjoying the caresses. They kissed slowly. They stayed like that for a while. There were no promises or interpretations. Just an intimate, small, and firm closure, in the midst of an investigation that offered them no solace.
When they finally separated, Sonja slowly led him to the bedroom. There, the world fell back into place. The threat was still there. Orpheus was still operating. The anchors were still active. They hadn't won anything definitive. But they had held out.
The following morning, local agents confirmed their working hypothesis. The supposed Orpheus hub in Germany was not a mobile operations base, but a repurposed facility. A former Soviet-era telecommunications center, buried in the industrial outskirts, had been recycled with private funding, operating under the guise of a center for applied neurostimulation . Experimental cognitive research treatments. A legal facade with polished language.
—“If Orpheus has a training center for its agents,” said one of the German analysts , “that’s the place.”
The infiltration was planned for the early hours of the morning. No grandiloquent pronouncements or victory speeches. It would be swift, efficient, and deadly. They organized a small group, with carefully calculated entry and exit routes. There were too many variables to believe they would succeed without a hitch.
The night was dense, windless. The building rose from the ground like a blank block, with no visible windows, its old antennas repurposed as inconspicuous towers. Steve felt a strange pressure as soon as they crossed the perimeter. It wasn't a physical sensation, but something more intimate. Like a murmur. Another ultrasonic attack.
—“Do you feel it?”— Sonja whispered through the inner channel.
—“Yes,” he replied . “Like someone’s adjusting the volume. I don’t know if it’s standard security… or if we’ve been discovered.”
They forced their way in. The first impact was brutal: blows, bodies slammed to the floor, a gun fired too close to Steve 's ear . The second wave was pure chaos. Alarms that didn't sound like alarms, with erratic pulses. Lights that weren't meant to illuminate, but to disorient the intruders.
The shooting started soon. Real and unmistakable. Steve stumbled down a narrow corridor when a bullet struck him. A brutal blow to the thigh. Sharp, it stole his breath and sent him to his knees. His leg didn't respond immediately. A patch of warm blood soaked his pants.
He gritted his teeth, without screaming. Sonja covered his position with two controlled shots. Steve managed to get up, leaning against the wall and dragging his leg. In addition to the ultrasound attack, a psychic operator was urgently drilling into his brain. The ideas were pouring out of his own mind.
— “They can stop this. Pursuing us is useless,” their thoughts seemed to say.
—“Fucking lies.” — Steve muttered , and fired toward the control core.
The node seemed to be there: a cluster of vibrating modules, cables, screens displaying patterns that weren't data but mental states. Sonja placed some charges with steady hands.
The explosion was contained, while the heart of the system collapsed into an electric silence. The inner voice that felt was cut off.
All that remained was a residual buzzing sound and the smell of burnt metal.
They left with some wounded. The certainty was an uneasy feeling that told them they had won something small.
Once safe, Steve slumped against a vehicle. The pain came late, throbbing and pulsating strongly. Sonja knelt in front of him, checking his wound and stemming the bleeding.
—“This wasn’t the end.”— he said, without drama.
—“It never is.”— she replied.
They had destroyed the node, but they knew that Orpheus was still intact.
They returned to Copenhagen with the uneasy feeling of having closed a door that actually opened onto a much longer corridor. The report to the directors was brief, realistic, and discouraging: Orpheus was still operational, fragmented, but adaptable. A faceless organism that had lost an organ, but not its nervous system.
The official responses came quickly. Formal thanks. Tacit acknowledgment of the risk. And then, the administrative silence that always precedes a convenient closure.
Sonja wanted to speak privately with Anders Holm before the case was closed. She didn't tell Steve anything .
The doctor's office remained unchanged: hundreds of books and no personal belongings in sight. Holm listened silently, without interrupting. He took no notes. And he didn't observe her as a patient, but rather analyzed the overall phenomenon. When Sonja finished, the doctor gave her his honest opinion:
—“You didn’t fall,” he finally said . “You were chemically pushed off your axis.”
Sonja clasped her hands to her knees.
—“I should have noticed.” —
—“Like every agent, you’re human,” she clarified . “And in a moment of weakness, your training failed. You left the drink unprotected.”
He paused to let Sonja process it. Then he continued:
—“If they hadn’t intervened with targeted poisoning, your training would have been sufficient. This wasn’t weakness. It was human error. And on their part, it was a reinforcement and an update of the attack method.” — Holm was confident about this .
He stood up and activated a side screen. Ancient diagrams appeared, buried names: MKUltra , Stargate , Ingo Swann , erotic conditioning, desire engineering.
—“What’s coming back,” he continued , “isn’t the primitive techniques, but the new context and the renewed attack protocols. Before, they appealed to fear. Now it’s pleasure. Seduction, lust, greed. They call it freedom, but it’s still control. We’re going to have to rewrite the protocols from the ground up.”
Sonja nodded. She didn't feel absolved, but she understood the map.
Meanwhile, the Northern Confederation denied everything with the elegance of those who can afford the best lawyers. Think tanks, consultancies, cultural foundations—nothing illegal or verifiable bound them. The clandestine faction didn't exist on any document that linked them.
The decision came at nightfall: the classified investigation would be officially concluded.
Steve read the message on his portable terminal, sitting on a cot, his left hand bandaged and stiff. His thigh was also stiff. He barely smiled because he had already received his orders.
—“Another administrative victory for the masses,” he told Sonja . “We will continue our unofficial investigation. Orpheus must be contained and eliminated from old Europe.”
Later they walked together along a beach on the outskirts of the city. The water was still, almost black, and the sky broke in shades of orange and gray. Steve moved slowly and with a limp, his body struggling to cope with his injuries. They sat down together on a rock.
—“It’s becoming a habit,” he joked . “Finishing missions incomplete.”
Sonja didn't respond immediately. Exhaustion weighed on her perhaps more than shame, but both were still there. She took a deep breath and sought refuge in his arms. Steve embraced her without questions or reproaches.
The silence between them was not emptiness. It was a shared presence.
—“The world isn’t going to end,” Steve said , gazing at the horizon . “Mistakes can be avoided if we work as a team. And we did that well, didn’t we?”
Sonja rested her head on his chest.
—“Thank you for protecting me.” — she barely managed to say.
They knew they were being watched. That their names were already marked in some hidden database. Next time there would be no drinks, no seduction, no promises. Next time they wouldn't even try to seduce them.
They would try to eliminate them. Even so, they were still there. Alive, lucid, and prepared.
For now, that was enough.
THE END
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