The phone rings thirty-seven seconds after Marine One’s rotors fade into the Washington night, thirty-seven seconds after Peter Sutherland steps onto the South Lawn believing he has finally earned the right to breathe, and in that single ring the fragile illusion of victory shatters like thin ice under a boot heel, because the voice on the other end is not the calm dispatcher he expects but a panicked woman whispering coordinates and the word “containment failure” before the line erupts in automatic-weapon fire, dragging him instantly, mercilessly, into a shadow war that has already begun without him, a war that will burn across ten cities and ten sleepless nights, a war in which the enemy is not foreign but frighteningly domestic, funded by American billionaires who have decided democracy is an outdated operating system and the only patch is a hard reset paid for in blood, a war where every ally is provisional, every order is deniable, every second of hesitation is measured in body counts, and Peter, no longer the wide-eyed rookie who once asked permission to save the republic, now moves like a man who understands that permission was never part of the job description, his reflection in rain-slicked windows no longer showing the earnest FBI analyst who believed in the chain of command but a predator sculpted from scar tissue and sleepless certainty, eyes that have learned to read betrayal in the flicker of a smile, hands that no longer tremble when they chamber a round.

He walks into the Lisbon safe house still smelling of jet fuel and cordite only to find Rose Larkin waiting for him not as the terrified civilian he once carried out of a burning building but as a woman forged in the same furnace, her fingers dancing across encrypted keyboards like a pianist playing the end of the world, her voice steady when she tells him the grid is already compromised and the first blackout is scheduled for 0300, and in the electric space between them the air itself seems to ignite, because the reunion is not soft or sentimental but a collision of two weapons finally pointed in the same direction, a kiss that tastes of gunpowder and goodbye pressed against the crumbling plaster of a safe house that will be ashes by dawn, and from that moment forward the season never pauses for breath, never grants mercy, never allows the audience the luxury of believing anyone is safe, because the Vice President smiles too warmly on morning talk shows while quietly moving Marines loyal only to him, because the Director of National Intelligence signs Peter’s death warrant with the same pen she uses to autograph memoirs, because the Iranian ghost whose brother Peter killed in a Prague alley has traded his old face for a new one and now walks the corridors of Langley wearing an American flag pin.

Then comes the final night, the night America is scheduled to go dark, arriving with the precision of a Swiss watch and the cruelty of history rhyming, seven simultaneous strikes converging on the Capitol while the President delivers her State of the Union address to a nation that still believes applause is the loudest sound it will hear that evening, and Peter, bleeding from a wound that should have killed him twice already, races through subway tunnels turned into killing boxes, through marble hallways slick with blood and broken glass, past Secret Service agents who no longer know which side their oath belongs to, until he reaches the Roosevelt Room where the last red phone waits, the phone that was never meant to ring again, the phone that now offers him a choice no Night Agent has ever been forced to make: save the President or save the country, because tonight those two things have become mutually exclusive.

And when he lifts the receiver the only sound on the line is his own heartbeat echoing back at him like an accusation, like a countdown, like the final heartbeat of a republic that never saw the blade until it was already buried to the hilt, and somewhere in the darkness beyond the camera’s reach Rose is still fighting to keep the lights on just long enough for him to decide, and the screen cuts to black while the heartbeat keeps going, louder, faster, merciless, refusing to stop even when the credits roll, because the night shift never ends, and neither will you sleep once January 23 arrives and the phone starts ringing in your living room too.