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Copyright Information
Class K
First Edition. July 16, 2026
Written by Murphy
Copyright © Murphy
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
www.murphyseyes.com
E-mail: [email protected]
Content
Chapter 1 Class K
Chapter 2 The Amber Dot
Chapter 3 Bio Berlin
Chapter 4 The Second Pass
Chapter 5 Corrective Action
Chapter 6 Handshake
Chapter 7 Forced Upgrade
Chapter 8 QUEST
Chapter 9: The Intercept
Chapter 10: Gloriouss 4753
Chapter 11: Psychological Fantasy
Chapter 12: Vacuumized Environment
Chapter 1: Class K
The D.C. humidity was a physical weight. It didn’t just linger; it clung, turning the air into something thick and breathable only with effort. Harvey Gallman had a high tolerance for heat, but the moisture in the air this July was an invasive force.
He stood on the sidewalk, feeling the wool-blend of his suit jacket fuse to the small of his back. The dress code was non-negotiable. Pentagon protocols demanded a specific kind of invisibility—the charcoal suit, the muted tie, the polished oxfords. It was a uniform designed for corridors of power, not for a city that felt like it was submerged in a lukewarm swamp. There was no adjusting for the weather when the bureaucracy dictated the wardrobe.
He stepped toward the entrance, the only goal being the interior.
The building sat at the junction of Florida Avenue and 5th Street. From the street, it looked like any other mid-tier corporate hub. A vast, fenced courtyard surrounded the site, guarded by heavy, electronically controlled iron gates that slid open and shut with a mechanical, rhythmic indifference. Delivery vans and black sedans pulsed in and out of the yard, a steady stream of logistics that the neighborhood had long since stopped questioning.
Atop the six-story structure, a dark-blue logo of “DOT” stood against the hazy sky. To the public and the city registers, the building belonged to Diversified Oceans Trading, a firm specializing in the mundane complexities of international shipping and bulk commodities. It was a boring front, which made it an effective one.
Diversified Oceans Trading was the skin of the operation. The manifests and customs forms on the desks, the low hum of corporate indifference—it was a meticulously maintained layer of camouflage that spanned all six floors. Every employee, from the receptionists to the senior analysts, operated under the DOT banner, ensuring the facility blended into the city’s commercial noise.
Beneath this corporate veneer lay the Pan-Eurasian Analysis Kernel. PEAK occupied the entire structure, utilizing the upper levels for general intelligence and the two-story basement for its most secure operations. That subterranean slab, reinforced and absent from any municipal blueprint, served as the unit’s hardened core.
Gallman felt the elevator drop, sinking away from the humid surface and into the sterile, windowless interior of DOT. Here, the temperature was a fixed, refrigerated constant and the lighting was a relentless fluorescent white. It was a hive where the vastness of the Eurasian landmass was distilled into data points and satellite imagery, far removed from the sweat and grime of Florida Avenue.
The elevator ride to B2 was technically the same duration as the trip to his office on the second floor, but the descent felt longer. Gallman watched the digital floor indicator count down, the numbers flickering in the sterile light. It wasn’t a matter of physics; it was the psychological weight of the drop. Every floor beneath the ground level felt like a deeper layer of commitment, a further removal from the world where people walked dogs and waited for buses.
As a Key Account Manager, Gallman’s workload consisted of high-priority assets and specialized missions. The title was a bureaucratic euphemism, designed to sound like mid-level corporate logistics to anyone glancing at a payroll sheet.
Under normal circumstances, his business remained on the second floor. Briefings took place in his own office, in the glass-walled meeting rooms of his department, or behind the heavy oak door of his supervisor’s office. Those meetings were routine—status updates, intelligence gaps, the tedious attrition of long-term surveillance.
A summons to B2 was different.
The basement levels were the hardened core of PEAK, restricted by biometric scanners and a level of silence that felt oppressive. You didn’t go to B2 for a status update. You went there when the mission was too sensitive for the upper floors, when the classification was high enough to require a room shielded from every conceivable form of electronic eavesdropping.
When the elevator doors slid open with a muted chime, the air was colder, stripped of any remaining humidity. Gallman stepped out into the corridor, the sound of his oxfords echoing off the polished concrete. As he approached the meeting room, the gravity of the summons settled in. He didn’t need to see the folder on the table to know this was a major operation. He could feel it in the stillness of the hall.
The notice had arrived at 11:42 P.M. the previous night—a short, encrypted ping that bypassed the standard notification system. There was no agenda, only a time and a location. In Gallman’s experience, the lack of detail was the detail.
He arrived at 8:50 A.M. Ten minutes early was the baseline for B2.
Lawrence Becker was already there. His supervisor sat at the edge of the heavy laminate table, his posture slumped, looking like a man who had spent the night staring at a screen. The room was a concrete box, stripped of any ornamentation, the air humming with the white noise of a signal jammer.
“Morning, sir,” Gallman said.
“Morning, Harv.” Becker nodded and gestured toward the chair beside him.
Gallman sat. He didn’t lean back. “Who else?”
Becker shifted, bringing his left hand up to cover his mouth. He leaned in, his voice dropping to a dry whisper, despite the fact that they were the only two people in the room.
“Jack.”
Gallman nodded once. He didn’t repeat the name. In this building, and perhaps in the entire district, “Jack” was a word you didn’t say aloud unless the environment was absolutely controlled. Nicknames in PEAK weren’t for affection; they were for compartmentalization.
Jacqueline Wolfe held the official titles of VP of Marketing and VP of Customer Relationship Management for Diversified Oceans Trading. To the corporate world, she was the face of the front, the one who managed the brand and the clients. To the unit, she was the Deputy Chief of PEAK.
The nickname was a reference to her function. PEAK operated as a vertical hierarchy of silos; each floor had its own specific mandate, from signal intelligence to logistical support. As Deputy Chief, Wolfe oversaw the entire apparatus. She was the point of convergence for every department in the building, the one who ensured the disparate functions of the six floors and two basements worked in unison. When a mission shifted from a theoretical analysis to a field operation, she was the one who aligned the gears.
At 9:13, the door opened. Jack entered, preceded by her secretary. In the hierarchy of PEAK, top management was never late; they simply arrived at the moment the meeting truly began.
“Morning, gentlemen,” she said.
Becker and Gallman offered their greetings in turn. Jack didn’t waste time with pleasantries. She took her place at the head of the table, her eyes scanning the two men with a clinical efficiency.
“Shall we start?”
Both men nodded. The agreement was silent, the air in the room still and heavy.
Jack laid out the briefing. She didn’t use a slide deck; she used a thin, manila folder and a few precise verbal directives.
“Project SARGASSUM,” she began.
The background was a geopolitical nightmare. Russian military planning had shifted toward a concrete objective: the seizure of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. The goal was the creation of a land bridge to connect the Kaliningrad exclave to the Russian mainland, effectively cutting off the Baltic states from their NATO allies.
“The intelligence is fragmented, but the intent is clear,” Jack said. “We have an Originator in Berlin with the specific troop movement schedules.”
The mission was a courier run, dressed in the mundane clothing of corporate travel. Gallman, acting in his capacity as a KAM for the DOT Marketing Department, was to travel to Berlin. He wasn’t there to analyze or negotiate; he was the bridge.
The Originator would leave the intelligence in a dead-drop—a concealed location that minimized the risk of a direct meeting. Gallman would retrieve the material and then deliver it, in person, to a designated Receiver.
“Questions?” Jack asked.
Becker didn’t speak. He simply shifted his gaze to Gallman. The look was an acknowledgement of the risk. Becker would remain in the sterile safety of his office on the second floor while Gallman navigated the grey spaces of Berlin.
Gallman cleared his throat, the sound dry and grating in the quiet room. “No, Ma’am.”
“Thank you, gentlemen,” Jack said, and stood up.
Neither Becker nor Gallman moved. It was the standard choreography of the facility: top management arrived last and departed first. Their time was the only currency that truly mattered in the building.
Gallman remained still, the silence of the room rushing back in to fill the space she had left. He had told her he had no questions, but the lie sat heavy in his throat.
He had plenty.
Why Berlin? Why the inefficiency of a dead drop? Most of all, why the redundancy of his own role. He was the bridge between the Originator and the Consumer—PEAK—but the architecture of this operation suggested a bridge between a bridge and a consumer. It was a convoluted chain, one that increased the margin for error and the risk of exposure.
But in B2, questions had a shelf life and a specific geography. Asking “why” immediately after a briefing from the Deputy Chief was the mark of an amateur. PEAK was not a training ground; it was a collection of veterans who understood that the logic of a mission was rarely visible from the perspective of the asset.
To question the strategic intent was to signal a lack of trust in the apparatus, or worse, a lack of professional discipline.
He would take the dossier. He would study every line, every coordinate, and every contingency until the document was etched into his mind. He would eventually raise questions, but they would be technical—logistics, signal windows, extraction points. He would ask about the how, never the why. In his world, the “why” was a luxury reserved for the people who stayed in the building.
Jacqueline Wolfe did not return to her office on the fifth floor. Instead, she continued upward to the sixth.
In most corporate structures, the executive suite occupied the penthouse. At DOT, the hierarchy was inverted. The top management stayed on the fifth, leaving the sixth floor to the Logistics Department. The decision was practical: Logistics required a massive amount of electronic hardware, server racks, and signal equipment. Placing them on the top floor created a natural buffer, minimizing the number of people drifting through the corridors without a specific purpose. The only frequent visitors who weren’t logistics personnel were the IT technicians, who used the floor as a transit point to access the roof for the maintenance of the satellite antennas.
The meeting had been set for 9:10 A.M. in the office of Catherine Halloway, the Supervisor of the Multimodal Transport Division.
Halloway—known as “Cat” within the unit—was talking with Grand Kesh, the Senior Logistics Liaison, when Wolfe and her secretary appeared in the doorway.
Both Halloway and Kesh stood immediately. They moved toward Wolfe with the synchronized precision of people who understood the geography of power.
Wolfe did not run the Logistics Department, but she oversaw the entire operation of PEAK. In the sterile, competitive atmosphere of the DoD, the distance between an employee and their boss’s boss was a gap that needed to be bridged carefully. Access to the Deputy Chief was rare, and visibility was a currency. Every interaction was a calculated performance, an opportunity to signal competence and loyalty to the person who controlled the promotions and the assignments.
Cat’s smile was professional, practiced, and entirely devoid of warmth. She stepped forward to greet Wolfe, her posture a study in deferential efficiency.
The briefing was lean, stripped of everything but the essential mechanics.
“Project ANEMONE,” Wolfe stated.
The tasks assigned to Kesh were purely technical, the kind of tedious, high-stakes data manipulation that defined the Logistics Department’s hidden function. Kesh was to receive the encrypted, coded dead-drop instructions from the Originator’s side.
The process was a layered security protocol designed to ensure that if one code was broken, the intelligence remained obscured. Kesh would first decrypt and decode the incoming data using the Bible of PEAK Communications v.870.22.04 (BPC). Once the raw coordinates and timing were clear, he was to immediately re-encode and re-encrypt them using BPC v.629.434.015 before transmitting the final instructions to the Courier via a secure terminal.
The BPC was not a book, but a massive, living repository of shifting algorithms and one-time pads, a document updated with a frequency that made permanent memory useless.
Kesh’s second mandate was surveillance. He would map and monitor the position signals of both the Courier and the Receiver in real-time. He wasn’t looking for a narrative; he was looking for anomalies—a signal that lingered too long in one sector, a deviation from the planned route, or a sudden blackout. If the data spiked or dipped outside of established parameters, he was to trigger an immediate alarm.
“Class K confidentiality,” Wolfe added.
The room grew quieter. Halloway immediately understood why the Manager of the Logistics Department—her own direct superior—had been excluded from the meeting. In a Class K operation, the circle of trust was shrunk to the absolute minimum; only the personnel physically executing the operation were permitted to know it existed.
There was a grim, unspoken joke among the veterans of PEAK regarding the designation. They whispered that the “K” didn’t stand for a classification tier, but for “Killed if Failed.” It wasn’t a compliment; it was a burden. It meant Kesh and Halloway were now legally and professionally tethered to the outcome of the mission. Any failure would not be viewed as an error in judgment, but as a catastrophic breach.
Read → Read: Standalone Tittles → Class K