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The Lion's of Jerusalem's striding men
She looked out of the window in the Marina in Dubai. It was shortly before dawn and he had left.
He had not tried nothing. She was used to being chat off after a view minutes playing. He was the only
ever that played along, but kept playing. He knew what he was and that she would be realy as expensive
as impressive for his friends and where they showed up. They did not even get drunk and she asked
him to bring her safe home. In Dubai? What do I have to be scared off?
Was his reply letting her speach less creating a moment of silence she did not know from the company
of men.
He had no friends there, was all alone in that bar and sober like not even the bar tender. She asked him out
and was wondering what was true and not. He was a Street Samurai and armed; Had a license for his heavy Pistol.
A Mohican in that real reptile leather jacket and heavy trousers outfit combined with extra clean shoes
that turned out to be boots, military boots she had not seen before, made him so different than the crowed
of outlaws and entrepreneurs that made it out of Europe's chaos that she could not resist getting closer.
He said, it was late or early and that he had to leave again Dubai heading back to Europe, he had a fighter jet plane that carried also a 1t cargo box with a sleep bay which was basically the seat flat, what ever that meant, to be saying Good Bye until another time just before she would ask him to leave now.
She had not taken the number and he not hers.
Then it struck her, he did only what she really wanted in that moments as the first human ever in her life.
WHO THE FUCK WAS THAT GUY?
***
The silence he left behind was a physical thing, a vacuum in the plush, sterile air of the Marina apartment. It wasn't the usual silence of a departed mark, filled with the faint hum of the climate control and the ghost of expensive cologne. This was different. It was the silence after a thunderclap, ringing with the echo of a presence that had, for a few hours, recalibrated her entire reality.
For three days, Zara moved through her life like a ghost in her own skin. The question was a splinter in her mind, festering: *WHO THE FUCK WAS THAT GUY?*
**Day One: The Echo.**
Lina, their de facto leader with optics for eyes that could spot a fake Rolex at fifty paces, knew something was off before Zara even opened her mouth. They were at their usual table at "Onyx," a club where the air was thick with synth-smoke and the scent of ambition. Their marks were already circling: a European industrialist with a nervous twitch and a Qatari prince's nephew who kept adjusting the gold rings on his fingers.
"Your aura is scrambled, sister," Lina said, her voice a low hum that cut through the bass. Her optical lenses cycled through a spectrum of analysis, no doubt reading Zara's elevated heart rate, her atypical micro-expressions. "The German last night? He seemed standard issue."
"He wasn't," Zara murmured, swirling the impossibly expensive champagne she had no intention of drinking. It was a prop, like her dress, like her smile. "He was... different. A Samurai. Real one. Not a corpo-security thug."
Lina's polished demeanor cracked for a nanosecond. A Street Samurai in their world was like a wolf wandering into a petting zoo. Dangerous, out of place, and utterly fascinating. "Armed?"
"Licensed heavy pistol. Military-grade boots. Said he had a fighter jet parked at the port." She left out the part about him reading her desires like an open datastream. That felt too intimate, too vulnerable to share, even with her sisters.
Lina’s lips tightened into a razor slash. "A ghost, then. Or a spook. Either way, he's gone. Wipe the memory, Zara. Ghosts are bad for business. They make you forget the marks who actually have credsticks to burn." She nodded toward the nephew, who was now preening for them. "Focus. That one is ripe, and his account is fatter than his ego."
Zara forced the smile back onto her face, but it felt like a poorly fitted mask. That night, she extracted a small fortune from the nephew by pretending to be fascinated by his collection of vintage sports cars. It was effortless, hollow. Her mind was elsewhere, in a quiet bar with a man who didn't try to buy her, who saw her, and who left without taking a thing.
**Day Two: The Glitch.**
The next day was for maintenance and intel. Chloe, their tech-wiz, had her wired into a data-slate in their cramped but secure apartment buried in the less-glamorous streets of Al Quoz. Wires snaked across the floor, connecting to chrome boxes that hummed and flickered with stolen data.
"Ran the facial recog you sketched out," Chloe said, her fingers dancing across a haptic interface. Lines of code reflected in her cybernetic left eye. "Nothing. Zero. Zip. It's like he doesn't exist in any system. Corporate databases, immigration, even Interpol's shadow records... he's a blank spot." She whistled, impressed. "That's some serious black-ops level ice. Whoever he is, he's a professional ghost."
Maya, their muscle, freshly augmented with new titanium knuckles, cracked her neck. "So he's a spook. Probably here to grease some corpo exec who stepped out of line. You got lucky he was a gentleman." She flexed her hand, the servos whirring softly. "Most guys with that much chrome and that little footprint are walking red flags."
"But he *was* a gentleman," Zara insisted, the frustration boiling over. "That's the point! He didn't try anything. He just... *saw* me. He knew the game and he played it perfectly, for *my* benefit, not his."
The three women fell silent. In their world, such a concept was more alien than any metahuman creature from the SOX. An act of man, with no price tag. It was the ultimate glitch in the matrix of their lives.
**Day Three: The Shadow.**
The night was hot, the air tasting of salt and exhaust from the marina. They were working a high-stakes party on a private yacht, the *Neon Scarab*. The target was a Russian oligarch's son, a viper wrapped in a silk suit. Zara was on point, her dress a weapon, her laugh a calibrated tool.
But she was off her game. She kept seeing the mohican cut against the glittering skyline, hearing the quiet certainty in the Samurai's voice: *"In Dubai? What do I have to be scared of?"*
It happened during the extraction. The mark, more paranoid than they'd anticipated, had his own security—two hulking orcs with obvious cyberware and bad attitudes. The deal for a "private tour" of the city was going south, fast. The orcs closed in, cutting Zara and Lina off from the exit.
"Time to go," Lina hissed, her optic eyes flashing a warning sigil only they could see.
Suddenly, the lights on the deck flickered and died, plunging the party into chaos and the deep blue glow of emergency strips. A comms signal, encrypted and tight-beamed to their internal agents, crackled in their ears. It was a voice, synthesized and genderless, but Zara felt a jolt of recognition deep in her soul.
*"Portside aft. Service ladder is clear. Security systems on a sixty-second loop. Move."*
They moved. They slipped through the panicked, drunk crowd, down the cold metal ladder into a waiting speedboat Chloe had idling below. They vanished into the dark water as alarms finally began to blare on the yacht behind them.
Back in the safehouse, hearts still pounding, Chloe was tracing the signal. "Came from a masked node," she said, her voice awed. "Bounced off a military-grade satellite. That wasn't a random hack. That was a surgical strike. Someone was watching. Someone with serious, *serious* firepower."
Zara looked out the window, toward the endless black of the Arabian Gulf. The glittering towers of Dubai seemed fragile now, a gilded cage.
He was gone. But he wasn't.
He was a shadow now, her shadow. A guardian ghost in a reptile leather jacket. He had re-written her code without even trying. The money, the marks, the game—it all felt like a cheap sim. He had shown her a glimpse of something real, something dangerous and authentic in a city of beautiful lies.
The question was no longer *Who was that guy?*
It was *When is he coming back?*
And more terrifyingly: *What happens to me when he does?*
The night held its breath, waiting for the answer.
###
Julia was missing. She went on a trip to London, supposed to visit Paris. Loads of shopping was expected, but the
connection was lost when they entered Gara Lazare.
No one could help her. No one.
She decided to go asking around. The bartender did not know only that the guy was first time in the bar and had
ordered the best of his Whiskeys zipping it like a Scotsmen would do.
The airport contact said there was no fighter jet and she knew he was not lying. It carried one 1t of cargo. She drove around town to get thinking to stand suddenly in her coupe hypercar infron of a street sign that showed to turn right saying Sea Port.
She took the turn
***
The turn into the Port Rashid access road was like driving into a different city. The shimmering glass and chrome of the Marina gave way to a canyon of corrugated steel, stacked containers, and the groaning symphony of heavy machinery. The air, once perfumed with wealth, now smelled of salt, diesel, and hot metal. Zara’s hypercar, a low-slung beast of carbon fiber and polished alloy, was a grotesque anomaly here, its engine purr drowned out by the shriek of container cranes.
She pulled up to a heavy security gate, the car’s nose looking impossibly delicate against the reinforced steel barriers. A guard emerged from a bulletproof booth. He wasn't private security; he was Emirati, wearing the crisp uniform of the Port Authority. His demeanor was not one of deference to a rich woman in an expensive car, but of stern, official inquiry.
Before she could formulate a question, his eyes flickered from her face to the car and back again. He gave a slow, almost imperceptible nod. "You are looking for the man with the jet," he stated. It wasn't a question.
Zara’s breath caught. "How did you—?"
"The *Sayadiqah*," he said, using a word she didn't know. "The Falcon. He comes sometimes. Not often. His bird is parked in the secured western annex. Air Columbia." He gestured with his chin toward a labyrinth of warehouses and hangars that seemed to stretch for miles. "They bring things from places others do not go."
The world tilted. The fighter jet was a cargo plane. The sleep bay was a crew rest. It was all real, just not in the way she had imagined. It was more real. Grittier. More tangible.
Back with the girls, the intel flowed like water. Lina’s optics bypassed corporate firewalls; Chloe’s code slithered into Air Columbia’s passenger manifest system. It was a shell company, a front with a switchboard that probably rang in a bunker somewhere. Yet, the number was called.
The callback came in ninety seconds flat. A voice, familiar in its stark, unadorned cadence, crackled over the encrypted line.
"Zara."
"Julia's missing. Paris. Gare du Nord. A cult. A black Rolls Royce." She spilled the data in a raw stream, the professional cool gone, replaced by a sister’s fear.
A beat of silence on the line, filled only with the faint hum of a secure satellite connection. "Seen the cam feed. Know the car." Another pause, shorter this time. "I'll look."
The line went dead. No platitudes. No promises. Just a statement of fact.
Chloe, working her magic from 2,500 miles away, had already sliced into the Parisian traffic cam network. The grainy footage showed Julia, looking confused, exiting the station's side entrance. The black Rolls, a Phantom so dark it seemed to drink the light, glided to the curb. A door opened. She hesitated, then got in. The car vanished into the traffic.
The cult was known to their circle. The *Étreintes Silencieuses* – The Silent Embraces. Old money, ancient perversions, and a reputation for making problems disappear into their chateaux outside the city. They were untouchable. The kind of people even the underworld feared. The girls had contacts, but none who would, or could, breach those walls.
They heard nothing for eighteen hours. A gut-wrenching silence.
Then, a single image arrived on a burner feed to Chloe’s deck. It was a security still from Charles de Gaulle airport. Julia, wrapped in a coarse grey blanket, hair a mess but eyes clear, was sipping a coffee at a terminal cafe, her phone charging on the table beside her. She was safe.
The story, when a shaky but relieved Julia finally called, was fragmented, surreal. She remembered little. A drugged haze. A old chalet in the woods, all dark wood and darker secrets. Then, a sudden violence that was both terrifying and precise. A shape moving through shadows like smoke. A hand over her mouth. The world going dark inside a rough sack. The smell of engine oil and leather. The roar of an engine. Then, waking up on a cold bench at CDG, her purse beside her, her phone in her hand, every single one of her kidnappers' credit card numbers and digital wallet keys mysteriously downloaded into her contacts list.
There was no call from the Samurai. No invoice. No boast.
But two days later, the whispers started filtering through the darknet channels. The chalet of the *Étreintes Silencieuses* had been hit. Not just hit. *Erased*. Everything of value—art, data-servers, a legendary vintage wine cellar, a vault of gold bullion—was gone. Siphoned away with surgical precision. And every single bank account, every hidden fund, every crypto wallet linked to its members had been digitally plundered, stripped clean down to the last centime. It wasn't a robbery. It was an annihilation.
The work was flawless, untraceable. The Parisian underworld buzzed with theories, attributing it to a rival syndicate or a内部 purge.
But Zara knew. She looked out at the Dubai night, no longer seeing a cage of pretty lights, but a network of possibilities. He hadn't just saved her friend. He had handed them the blueprint. He had seen a problem and solved it in the most absolute way possible. Not for payment. But because it was the mission.
The man wasn't a ghost. He was a force of nature. And he had just shown them what real power looked like.
###
Another week later someone with a very increbibly rich background approached the girls at their usual spot. He was also short in talking and with a dangerous smile asked them: "Who were these guys?"
They switched to silence and stared at the man.
"Ahm. He. Ah. They said we should give, in case anyone asking, this number here."
The Mr Smith, obviously specialized in recruiting Shadowrunners, being almost as off his normal turff, turned silent dropping his guard for too long second and left.
The girls had no idea that this was longitude and latitude coordinates.
