The decision was made in a room without windows.
It wasn't dramatic. There was no raised voice, no pounding fist, no declaration of urgency. The people seated around the table had long ago learned that urgency was a luxury; permanence required calm.
The CIA station chief in Los Angeles spoke last, which meant the discussion was already over.
"We're not escalating," she said, folding her hands. "We're adapting."
Across from her, a deputy director from Langley flipped a page in a thin folder—Derek Morgan's name typed once, centered, unadorned. No aliases. No red stamps. No labels like hostile or asset. That alone was unusual.
The FBI representative looked displeased. "With respect, we still have two unresolved incidents. The charity gala—clear footage. And the Seventh Sons compound. Fifty armed extremists incapacitated without a single fatal gunshot wound recorded by federal entry teams. That's not coincidence. That's interference."
The station chief didn't look at him. "It's containment."
"It's vigilantism."
"It's outcome alignment."
That finally made her look up.
"Words matter," she said evenly. "And so does timing. We do not arrest the man who just destabilized the global oncology market and cured a sitting senator's daughter. We don't pressure him. We don't threaten him. We don't ask him to cooperate."
She slid a single sheet of paper across the table.
"We assign a handler."
Silence followed—not because the idea was new, but because of what it implied.
A handler wasn't surveillance. It wasn't interrogation. It wasn't even influence, not overtly.
A handler was proximity.
The Homeland Security liaison leaned back. "And when he notices?"
The station chief allowed herself a thin smile. "He already has."
Derek noticed three days later.
Not because of anything obvious. Not because someone followed him too closely or lingered too long in his peripheral vision. It was subtler than that. Cleaner.
It was repetition without pattern.
The first time, it was at a café two blocks from his house—an unremarkable place, frequented by locals who preferred quiet and anonymity over ambiance. Derek sat at his usual table, back to the wall, a habit he'd never consciously developed but always obeyed.
The man at the counter ordered tea.
Not coffee. Tea. Black. No sugar.
He was in his mid-thirties, maybe early forties. Fit but not conspicuously so. No visible scars. No military posture. His clothes were forgettable in a way that suggested intention: clean sneakers, neutral jacket, jeans without distressing.
The man glanced at Derek exactly once. No double take. No curiosity. Just acknowledgment.
Then he sat.
Derek dismissed it.
The second time was two days later, at a bookstore in Westwood. Derek hadn't planned on going there; he'd diverted mid-drive after realizing he'd left his house without anything to occupy his hands.
The same man stood in the history aisle, reading the back of a book about failed empires.
Different clothes. Same posture.
This time, Derek cataloged him.
The way he shifted weight—not restless, but responsive. The way his eyes tracked movement without locking onto it. The faint indentation at his left wrist, as if he usually wore a watch but had chosen not to today.
Tradecraft without arrogance.
By the third encounter, coincidence was no longer a plausible explanation.
The man appeared at a gym Derek didn't frequent often, stretching near a rack Derek hadn't yet approached. When their eyes met this time, the man smiled.
It wasn't friendly.
It was patient.
That night, Derek sat alone in his living room, the lights dimmed to a comfortable amber. He didn't open Pandora. He didn't need to. This wasn't a problem that required omniscience. It required judgment.
"They didn't send muscle," Derek murmured to himself. "They sent a question."
The handler didn't approach. Didn't speak. Didn't initiate contact.
That was the point.
Handlers weren't there to give orders. They were there to observe how someone behaved when they knew they were being observed.
Derek adjusted accordingly.
He didn't change his routine drastically—that would signal anxiety. He didn't test boundaries—no sudden trips, no erratic decisions. He let the handler see what he wanted them to see: calm, predictability, restraint.
He went to meetings.
He worked.
He slept.
He smiled at neighbors.
He let himself be boring.
Inside, his mind worked furiously.
Someone, somewhere, was writing memos about him. Flow charts. Behavioral models. Threat matrices with boxes that still lacked labels.
Singular actor had likely been circled more than once.
What unsettled Derek wasn't the presence of the handler. It was the absence of urgency.
They weren't afraid.
They were curious.
Curiosity, he had learned, was the most dangerous precursor to violence.
Across town, the handler—whose name Derek did not yet know—submitted his first informal assessment.
Subject appears aware of observation.
No countermeasures detected.
No overt stress indicators.
Behavior suggests long-term strategic thinking.
Recommendation: maintain proximity, escalate only with authorization.
The file was read by six people.
One of them frowned.
The pharmaceutical consortium meeting took place in Zurich, not because Switzerland was neutral, but because it was discreet.
No minutes were taken. No devices were allowed. The men and women seated around the table represented companies whose combined market capitalization exceeded the GDP of several nations.
They did not speak Derek Morgan's name at first.
They spoke in abstractions.
"Phase II viability."
"Regulatory capture."
"Market confidence."
Eventually, someone said it plainly.
"If this reaches scale," a woman with silver hair said quietly, "we cease to exist in our current form."
Another executive scoffed. "We've survived disruptive tech before."
"This isn't tech," she replied. "It's absolution."
They reviewed what little they knew.
A private company.
A cure that bypassed conventional treatment models.
A founder with no public history, no family, no apparent leverage points.
An uncomfortable silence settled.
"He's insulated," someone finally said. "Legally. Politically. Socially."
"Everyone is insulated," another replied. "Until they aren't."
They didn't vote.
They didn't need to.
A task was quietly delegated—not to lawyers, not to lobbyists, but to a consultancy that didn't officially exist.
The brief was simple:
Map exposure. Identify vulnerabilities. Develop contingency pathways.
No one used the word assassination.
They didn't have to.
Derek felt the shift before he understood it.
It wasn't the handler—nothing about the man's behavior changed. It was the environment. The air itself seemed tighter, as if decisions were being made just outside his perception.
He stood at the window of his Bel Air home late one night, looking out at a city that glittered indifferently below him.
"I moved too fast," he admitted softly.
Not with the cure. That was inevitable.
With himself.
He had stepped into the light without armor—not physical armor, but narrative armor. Stories. Alliances. Redundancies.
He had underestimated how threatening hope could be.
His phone buzzed with a message from Alan Payne—nothing alarming, just a routine update. Derek replied, then set the device down.
Somewhere, far away, a plan was being revised.
It would not involve law enforcement.
It would not involve courts.
It would involve an accident, or an illness, or a quiet disappearance that could be explained away by exhaustion or pressure.
A young man with no family. No heirs. No dependents.
Derek smiled faintly.
"They think I'm alone," he said.
Outside, a car drove past slowly—too slowly to be casual, too carefully to be noticed by anyone who wasn't watching.
The handler wasn't in it.
This was something else.
Something colder.
Derek turned away from the window and reached for his jacket.
Whatever came next, it wouldn't wait.