FALSE FLAG

FADE IN:

1EXT. THE ARABIAN GULF - NIGHT

Black water. On the horizon, Dubai in a long smear of gold.

SUPER: AUGUR // ARABIAN GULF, 11 MI OFF DUBAI // TUE 05 JAN 2027 // 05:20 GST

The SAHRA, three hundred feet of white yacht, lit to the mast. Somebody has more money than places to put it.

2INT. SAHRA - ENGINE ROOM - NIGHT

A dented kettle RATTLES to the boil. A hand spoons NESCAFÉ into a chipped mug and stirs it with a SCREWDRIVER.

LUC MALONE (38), borrowed coveralls. A leather bracelet on his right wrist, rubbed smooth at the knot.

A voice in the bone conductor behind his ear. Virginia, by way of somewhere colder.

3INT. SAHRA - CREW STAIRS - NIGHT

A service door stands open on the wind. Luc listens.

Waves SLAP the hull. A card SNAPS down two decks up. And from somewhere forward and high, a man HUMMING. Slow, off-key, the same few bars over and over.

Luc's shoulders come back. His chin comes up. Nineteen again, on a parade ground in Calvi.

The Legion's march. Luc's scared. He doesn't care for it. On his watch, 05:40.

4EXT. S STREET NW, SHAW, WASHINGTON D.C. - NIGHT

SUPER: AUGUR // SHAW, D.C. // MON 04 JAN 2027 // 20:40 EST

The same minute, the other side of the world. Christmas lights still up. The sleet's coming.

SKYE MONTGOMERY (31) walks the block talking low into her phone. Long charcoal Max Mara coat, five winters old, money dressed down on purpose. She files everything out loud.

A green door with a brass knocker in the shape of a fist. Subtle. She knocks once. It opens before the second.

BRUCE MALONE (74). Cardigan, corduroys, house slippers. Huge hands, the right knuckles healed crooked, eyes so pale they're almost no color.

He checks the street both ways and lets her in.

5INT. BRUCE'S HOUSE - KITCHEN - CONTINUOUS

Skye in her socks. On the table a LEGAL PAD and a square THINKPAD cabled to a gray box: UNCLASSIFIED TO SECRET // ONE WAY. A progress bar at 87%.

Bruce smiles. It takes ten years off him.

He writes on the pad in square capitals and turns it to her.

INSERT - THE LEGAL PAD

YOUR FATHER'S HOUSE KEEPS EVERYTHING.

BACK TO SCENE

He sets a KEY RING on the table. CLINK. Two old brass keys and a small steel one on a brass tag stamped C S.

She does. She thumbs the volume button on the phone face up on the table. It buzzes. A photo of the ceiling, probably.

She shoots the screen properly: the long string, the date. 100%. TRANSFER COMPLETE. HOLD STATUS: QUARANTINE (7D).

He holds her coat open, and she finds her arms going into the sleeves. He buttons the top button for her.

He squares the legal pad to the table's edge.

6INT. SAHRA - OWNER'S DECK CORRIDOR - NIGHT

In a chair by a teak door, KHALID (20s), a Glock on his hip, his boots off and lined up beside him.

A towel over his arm, a carafe on a silver tray. Luc walks up with his eyes down.

Khalid sighs and stands. Both his hands close on the tray.

Luc steps in under his elbows. Two fingers into the notch above the collarbone, HARD. The knees go. Luc catches the carafe an inch off the carpet and rides him down, a forearm on his throat. Heels DRUM twice.

On Khalid's lock screen a girl squints in a pink swimsuit. Luc puts the phone back in the sleeping hand and KNOCKS.

PRINCESS AMIRA (26) opens the door herself. Small and composed, gray cashmere tracksuit, barefoot. A laptop with a Soho House sticker closes under her fingers.

7INT. SAHRA - CREW MESS - NIGHT

A MAN steps out with a sandwich. Shaved head, earpiece, a white skull on his T-shirt over a word we can't make out.

He sees Amira. Nobody told this one. The sandwich DROPS. His hand goes for his hip.

SHOULDER to the chest. CRASH. They go back through the door, and a tray of cutlery goes over.

A fist in Luc's hair. YANK. The man throws him. WHAM. Into the bulkhead, across an extinguisher bracket.

The pistol's out. Luc gets the wrist in both hands and TURNS it in. BANG. The round WHINES off the deck.

A headbutt. CRACK. Copper in his mouth. Luc pulls the head down. KNEE. KNEE. The man sags.

Luc holds him up by a fistful of T-shirt. The man's heel lands on a fork and skates out from under him, and now only Luc's fist keeps him off the crew stairs.

Luc looks at the stairs. At the fork.

His free thumb finds the leather BRACELET on his right wrist. The worn place at the knot.

He opens his fist.

The man goes backward, all the way down, and the sounds he makes stop before he reaches the bottom. A fork on the floor. A wet steel stair.

8EXT. S STREET NW - NIGHT

The first sleet. Skye comes out of the alley. A fortune cookie and the back door. She's angry. She turns back.

Across from Bruce's, on the stoop of a flipped gray townhouse, a DOORBELL CAMERA. Its ring glows blue.

She walks the block counting doors with her lips. Six. Five. Through Bruce's bay window the lamp is on and his cardigan hangs on the recliner. There's no Bruce.

Four. A MAN IN A PARKA gets out of a car, hood up, and walks away fast toward Ninth. He's the only one on the street who doesn't look up at the sleet.

Three doors. She lifts her phone.

9EXT. SAHRA - STARBOARD SIDE DECK - NIGHT

The gray RHIB hangs on its davit over black water, the key in the switch. She was right.

The davit WHINES them down. A FLASHLIGHT beam swings over the water from above.

SPLASH. Luc turns the key, and both engines HOWL. Behind them the chase boat comes out running dark.

In the bow Amira holds the grab line, and the laptop zipped inside her top. She holds the laptop harder. Luc notices.

A MUZZLE FLASH behind. BRRAP. White spurts thirty meters left. Thirty right. Across the wake. Out ahead, where they'll be in two seconds.

Being let off bothers him. In the bow, Amira doesn't duck.

He rounds the Jebel Ali breakwater so tight the sponson LIFTS. And a ship is coming in.

10EXT. JEBEL ALI PORT - CHANNEL - CONTINUOUS

The container ship POLARIS fills the channel, a quarter mile of her, boxes ten high, her bow shoving up a hill of white water. To the right, a concrete berth. The gap is closing.

Luc kills the lights and goes for it. The HORN sounds danger. Five short blasts. He feels them in his fillings.

ONE. Black steel CLIMBS past his shoulder.

TWO. The bow wave picks up the RHIB. HURLS it at the berth.

THREE. Fender. BOUNCE. Concrete close enough to take paint.

FOUR. The draft marks go by in a column, 10M over 8M over 6M, close enough to read.

The bow wave lifts them to its peak. FIVE.

Same second, the other side of the world:

11EXT. S STREET NW - CONTINUOUS

Bruce's bay window turns WHITE.

The horn becomes the BLAST. A wall of air picks Skye up and puts her down on her back.

Silence. One high WHINE. Glass comes down out of the orange sky from every window on the block, RINGING on car roofs.

The front of Bruce's house is down in the street. The front room stands open, a dollhouse with its face off. The books are burning. Pages lift on the heat and sail up into the sleet, alight at the edges, and go out.

She can't hear her own voice. There's nothing back there that could be a man.

Then the screaming. Next door the shared wall's cracked roof to ground. An old woman, high and thin and on and on.

Skye's already running.

SHOULDER into the door. Nothing. She grabs the brass knob, and her palm comes off it with a small wet tearing sound. Scarf around the hand. She PULLS. The door GIVES six inches. She goes in sideways.

12INT. ODETTE'S HOUSE - FRONT ROOM - CONTINUOUS

Black smoke rolling on the ceiling. Skye crawls under it.

Beside an overturned walker with yellow tennis balls on its feet lies ODETTE FLEMING (81). Tiny, a pink housecoat, one leg at an angle that turns Skye's stomach.

Skye likes her already. Hands under the arms, backward on her knees through the smoke. Odette SCREAMS. The housecoat RIPS on the frame, and Odette comes through all at once.

13EXT. S STREET NW - CONTINUOUS

They go down the stoop in a pile, THUD, into the ice. SIRENS, far off. Odette holds Skye's coat in both fists.

Across the street, the doorbell camera's patient BLUE RING takes in all of it.

14EXT. JEBEL ALI - MARINE SERVICES JETTY - DAWN

Two black Land Cruisers, engines running. Amira turns back and looks Luc over. The split lip. Blood in his hairline.

She smiles. It doesn't change her eyes at all.

The Land Cruisers pull away. Luc takes his own phone out of a waterproof pouch, the one Bennett doesn't own.

INSERT - THE PHONE

WASHINGTON POST: Explosion destroys rowhouse in D.C.'s Shaw neighborhood; at least one dead

BACK TO SCENE

His father lives in Shaw. Luc hasn't been through that green door in nine years.

The phone rings in his hand: BENNETT.

We stay on Luc. Black water behind him, a lit city beyond.

MAIN TITLE: FALSE FLAG

15EXT. ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY - DAY

A caisson behind six gray horses, wheels CRUNCHING slush.

SUPER: AUGUR // ARLINGTON, VA // FRI 08 JAN

Luc at the grave in a black suit. He decided on the plane that he'd feel nothing. So far it's holding.

CALVIN ASHBY (63), Director of the CIA, takes Luc's hand in both of his. Luc looks at the hands. West Point ring, filed nails, no calluses at all. A politician's hands.

Behind him MICHAEL BENNETT (45), lean, navy overcoat, hair cut Marine-short. We know that voice. He nods once. Later.

Under a bare oak, the people Bruce left behind. FRANK CALLAHAN (71), the size of a refrigerator, a Hawaiian shirt collar under his overcoat, crying openly on a blackthorn cane. MARIA VASQUEZ (60s), buttoned to the throat, perfectly still. TERRY WALSH (68), English, a camel coat that was expensive twenty years ago, touching his tie, his collar, his scarf. A Toblerone corner shows in his pocket.

Three volleys CRACK. A soldier kneels and hands Luc the folded flag, warm from the soldier's hands. Something gives way in him. His hands dent the flag.

Range breathing, from Calvi. It goes back down.

LATER. Frank pulls Luc into a hug. Cigars and wet wool.

His eyes go to the black car where Ashby's getting in.

16EXT. ARLINGTON - BRUCE'S GRAVE - LATER

The cars are gone. A yellow backhoe waits. Luc stays, the flag under his arm.

Skye, three graves over, her hands in her coat pockets. He didn't hear her come up.

Luc didn't know his father remembered. He's jealous of a stranger at his father's grave.

Her left hand comes out with her keys, three old ones on a brass tag stamped C S. She puts them back. Her right hand is wrapped in GAUZE, knuckles to wrist. Luc stares at it.

She almost smiles, and walks off between the headstones. He still doesn't have her last name.

17INT. MURPHY'S, WILSON BOULEVARD, ARLINGTON - BACK ROOM - NIGHT

Guinness and wet coats steaming on hooks. Spooks, mostly. You can tell by who's taken the chairs facing the door.

A cheer. Then the room goes quiet, from the bar outward.

ON TV: FBI NAMES PERSON OF INTEREST IN D.C. ROWHOUSE BOMBING. Doorbell footage: a woman counting doors with her lips, and the bay window beside her turns white.

ON TV: SKYE MONTGOMERY, 31, DAUGHTER OF DEFENSE BILLIONAIRE WILLIAM MONTGOMERY. FBI: "LINKED TO ACTIVIST GROUP SUNLIGHT"

Now he has her last name.

At the bar a glass goes down on the wood. Only we catch who put it there. Terry, staring up at the screen, one hand frozen on the knot of his scarf.

18INT. SKYE'S APARTMENT, MOUNT PLEASANT - EVENING

Skye at her window, coat still on, FUGAZI leaking from the earbuds round her neck. On the phone, DANA OKAFOR (40s), her editor at the Interlock.

A pause on the line. Too long.

Skye hangs up and sets the phone on the windowsill very gently. Then she picks it up and finds the Post.

Down on the street, two gray sedans pull in nose to tail.

She puts her laptop in the OVEN and SLAMS the door. She opens the photo of Bruce's screen, drags her left sleeve up with her teeth, and copies the string onto her forearm.

BOOTS on the stairs. She deletes the photo, kills the phone, lays it face up on the radiator, where they'll find it, and goes out the window.

19INT. UNION STATION - NIGHT

CNN: FBI SEEKS SKY MONTGOMERY IN CIA OFFICER'S DEATH.

In a bathroom stall, in a gray knit hat, she tears a CVS burner out of its clamshell with her teeth. A number from memory. One word, for the worst day: Daybreak. It rings.

Low, an Estonian lilt, keys clattering under it. LENA KASK. Two years of texts, and Skye's never heard her voice.

Skye reads the string off her arm. KEYS, fast.

Smeared ballpoint. The first three characters: MSI.

Skye puts her bandaged hand flat on the stall door.

INSERT - THE BADGE

A girl of nineteen with long fair hair, practicing a smile. MONTGOMERY SYSTEMS. SKYE A. MONTGOMERY. SUMMER ASSOCIATE. In the corner: 0417.

BACK TO SCENE

20EXT. ROUTE 7, TYSONS - NIGHT

SUPER: AUGUR // TYSONS, VA // FRI 08 JAN

Skye in the gray hat. Across Route 7, MONTGOMERY TOWER, twenty-two stories of blue glass floodlit from the base.

Her mother's, switched off the year she died. He left Skye's on. Her throat goes tight.

21INT. MONTGOMERY TOWER - GARAGE - CONTINUOUS

A BADGE READER by the vehicle ramp, a black dome above it. Chin down. Skye holds up the BADGE. RED. A second. Two.

CHIRP. GREEN. Down the ramps, a steel door: S LEVELS. GREEN.

It keeps going green. Too easy.

22INT. MONTGOMERY TOWER - S2 DATA HALL - CONTINUOUS

The ROAR of ten thousand fans. Black server racks glittering off into the distance on a floor of raised white tiles. Her father's house, keeping everything.

Row nineteen, a chain-link cage: QUARANTINE ARRAY. She badges. GREEN.

A RASPBERRY PI into a port on the rack, a cable to the DRIVE. A row of tiny lights goes from red to green.

Outside the cage a black DOME WHIRS, turning toward her. She looks up before she can stop herself.

INSERT - AUGUR EVENT QUEUE

CAM S2-14 // 23:26:41 // 91% MATCH // MONTGOMERY, SKYE A. // FBI POI 18:40

BACK TO SCENE

48%. The doors SLIDE open. Skye steps back behind the rack.

Two men in FBI windbreakers, pistols along their legs. With them THE TEXAN (40s), big, ball cap, a suppressed rifle on a sling. On his shoulder a white skull patch, and this time we can read the word under it: REAPER.

Nobody's here to arrest her.

The Texan comes down the center aisle, rifle up. 67%.

The cage opens onto his aisle. Skye looks down. White tiles on steel legs. A SUCTION LIFTER clipped to the rack.

23INT. S2 DATA HALL - UNDER THE FLOOR - CONTINUOUS

The tile comes up with a gasp of cold air. Knee-high dark, steel legs and black cable. If she unplugs, she has nothing.

She slides in on her back, the drive on her chest, its cable running up to the Pi, and pulls the tile down over herself. It won't sit flush over the cable.

BOOTS on the tile over her face. It flexes. A FLASHLIGHT blade sweeps the cables an inch from her eyes.

The drive on her chest has a little BLUE LIGHT. She cups her bandaged hand over it.

The cable goes TAUT. He's pulling. She closes both hands on it and holds.

A harder TUG. It slides through her fingers. Under the gauze the burn TEARS open, and her eyes fill, and she holds on.

The cable goes SLACK.

God bless a lazy man. The boots go away.

The blue light on her chest goes out.

24INT. MONTGOMERY HOUSE, GEORGETOWN - WILLIAM'S STUDY - NIGHT

A green-shaded lamp. On the blotter a typed speech, DAVOS at the top, its margins full of a slanting blue-black hand. A MONTBLANC lies across it, uncapped.

WILLIAM THAYER MONTGOMERY (76). White hair, gray cashmere, perfectly still.

On his monitor, the Augur alert: a frozen frame of his daughter's face, looking up into a dome camera. 91% MATCH. Beside it the live feed from S2. The cage. Her rig on the rack. No Skye.

He watches it for a while. The phone at his elbow stays where it is.

Another window. BADGE 0417 // MONTGOMERY, SKYE A. // DO NOT EXPIRE. He clicks once.

INSERT - THE SCREEN

BADGE 0417 // STATUS: INACTIVE // 23:30:04

BACK TO SCENE

He caps the pen.

25INT. S2 DATA HALL - UNDER THE FLOOR - CONTINUOUS

East under the floor. Elbows. Stomach. The DRIVE dragged ahead of her in the roaring dark.

At the east wall she lifts a tile. A steel door marked EXIT, and beside it a red box: EXTINGUISHING AGENT RELEASE.

She climbs out, zips the drive inside her coat, flips the cover with her bleeding hand, and PULLS.

WHOOP. WHOOP. Strobes go WHITE down the whole hall. The exit lock CLUNKS open beside her.

Down the hall a windbreaker spins and sees her. His pistol comes up, and stops. He looks at the strobes. At her door. He runs for her door.

She's through. She CATCHES the door with her boot and JAMS the suction lifter in it, open a forearm wide.

For him.

26INT. MONTGOMERY TOWER - EAST STAIRWELL - CONTINUOUS

Yellow concrete, emergency lights, the horn coming up the well behind her. Up, two at a time.

At the P2 landing a door BANGS open above her. The Texan. Eight steps up. The rifle SNAPS onto her.

On the back of his left hand, on the handguard, the same white SKULL as the patch. Inked.

A wall extinguisher. She swings it up with both arms. It HITS the steps below his boots. BOUNCES. Goes CLANGING away down the stairs, pin still in.

The Texan LAUGHS. A short, surprised BARK.

He lets that sit.

She raises them. The gauze on the burned one is soaked red.

Far below, through the door she propped, a long enormous HISS. The GAS. His head turns toward it. One second.

She goes for the rail. Good hand on the yellow pipe, and her hips go over before the rest of her has voted. She lets go.

WHAM. Feet. Knees. Left shoulder. Something goes bright.

She rolls and comes up and goes down. He'll expect up.

27INT. MONTGOMERY TOWER - GARAGE P3 - CONTINUOUS

Three women in blue smocks push canvas carts toward a white van. Skye RUNS. Her shoulder SCREAMS.

The one in front turns. ROSA CALDERÓN (60s), small, glasses on a beaded chain.

The stairwell door BANGS open behind them. The Texan.

Rosa looks at him. At the bloody gauze. At the girl she used to feed. She lifts the lid off her cart.

28INT. ROSA'S CART / CLEANING VAN - CONTINUOUS

Garbage bags CRACKLE. Skye curls round the drive.

His footsteps go. The van pulls out past the SIRENS.

Her fingers find the brass tag in her pocket. C S. Then the burner BUZZES. A text, to a phone she paid cash for.

INSERT - THE BURNER

Come home, sweetheart. Love, Dad.

29INT. TYSONS GALLERIA - PARKING LEVEL P3 - BENNETT'S EXPLORER - MORNING

SUPER: AUGUR // TYSONS, VA // SAT 09 JAN

A gray Ford Explorer with government plates. A cup holder full of Altoids tins. Every tin is peppermint. In six years, Bennett has never offered Luc one.

Through a gap in the decks: a blue glass tower, cruisers, yellow tape. Two black Suburbans, engines running.

Luc gets in. Bennett's tie is coiled on the Altoids. He hands Luc a tablet.

The doorbell clip from CNN. Snow. The bay window turns white. Luc runs it back at quarter speed, his thumb walking the flash, frame by frame.

INSERT - BENNETT'S TABLET

Ceiling camera. Black racks. A woman in a gray knit hat inside a chain-link cage looks up, straight into the lens.

A yellow box draws itself around her face: MATCH 91.3% | MONTGOMERY, SKYE A. | FBI POI 18:40

BACK TO SCENE

Hazel eyes. Calm.

Luc knew it was coming.

It's a good plan. Luc has run it himself.

His phone buzzes. He holds it out. Luc puts it on speaker.

The line goes dead.

Luc looks at the tower. The tape. The two idling Suburbans.

If he says no, somebody else runs her a bath. And Luc never learns what his father mailed on the last night of his life.

30INT. MOTEL ROOM, LEE HIGHWAY, FALLS CHURCH - NIGHT

Burned dust from the heater. Cold pho on the TV. Luc on the bed with Bennett's laptop.

ON THE LAPTOP: AUGUR. BALTIMORE PENN STATION // 09 JAN 03:12 // 62%. A gray knit hat on the platform, looking at her feet. Then nothing. She learned.

Her file. A 2022 story on the port of Baltimore, and a photo of a huge white-bearded man behind a bar. Her line under it: "He's the only honest man in this story. I checked."

He picks up the motel phone, because it's cleaner than his.

He hangs up. So that much was true.

His own phone buzzes. A text from a Maryland number: This is Maria. Call me when you've found the book. Don't bring them.

He turns it face down. His thumb finds the LEATHER BRACELET on his right wrist.

31EXT. BWI MARRIOTT - PARKING LOT - NIGHT

A gray Toyota Camry under a sodium light. Keys on the tire. In the trunk, a scoped REMINGTON 700, a LASER MICROPHONE, lock picks, banded cash.

He photographs the rental agreement with his own phone, a little crooked: GRAY TOYOTA CAMRY. BWI AIRPORT. 01/09 22:40. BILLED TO: HARROW POINT LOGISTICS LLC. VISA ENDING 6620. He's photographed every one for six years.

Insurance.

32INT. GUTTED CONDO, ANN STREET, FELLS POINT - NIGHT

SUPER: AUGUR // BALTIMORE, MD // SUN 10 JAN

Blue tarps, bare studs. Luc on his belly with the Remington and the laser mic, earbuds in.

THROUGH THE SCOPE: across Ann Street, KEARNEY'S ANCHOR. Red brick, a green awning, a Natty Boh sign. A light upstairs.

Out front in an apron, DANNY KEARNEY (68), white beard, enormous, a mermaid on one forearm, looks up and down the street. Sentry duty nobody asked him for.

Luc catches himself smiling.

33INTERCUT - THE HIDE / KEARNEY'S ANCHOR - UPSTAIRS ROOM

A narrow iron bed. Crab soup going cold. SKYE, barefoot, a fresh dressing half on her right hand, on a burner. We hear only her.

Luc's hand tightens on the stock.

Luc closes his eyes. One white frame. A charge in the floor.

END INTERCUT

Luc's on his feet. The rifle stays on the tarp.

34INT. KEARNEY'S ANCHOR - UPSTAIRS ROOM - NIGHT

A rake in a cheap Kwikset. CLICK. The door opens. Luc comes in low and to the left.

Nobody's aiming at the door.

Skye stands barefoot, the bandaged hand against her chest. In her left hand, a black DRIVE the size of a paperback, over a bucket of water.

He closes the door.

Her voice is calm. Her hand shakes. The drive RATTLES in it.

Two steps, and he has the drive before her fingers open.

He turns her. Her back to his chest. His forearm across her collarbones. The KNIFE from his boot, flat under her jaw.

She stops breathing.

He doesn't have an answer.

Down on Thames Street, four car doors THUNK shut at once.

Luc's at the window, two fingers between the slats. A black Tahoe, crooked on the curb. Four men in black jackets. A shoulder patch under the streetlight: a white skull, and the word REAPER.

He drove them here. He's angry.

35INT. KEARNEY'S ANCHOR - FRONT STAIRS - CONTINUOUS

Danny fills the stairwell, a bar towel on his shoulder, a round NATTY BOH tray in his fist.

The first Reaper comes up with a hand out. Danny SWINGS.

BANG. The tray takes him flat in the face. He goes backward down the stairs, through a table of glasses. CRASH.

A rifle butt SLAMS his belly. Danny sits down hard, ROARING.

Skye picked her honest man well.

36INT. KEARNEY'S ANCHOR - CLOSET / ROOF HATCH - CONTINUOUS

Skye, boots on, the drive in her coat, goes up a STEPLADDER one-handed and shoves the hatch with her bad shoulder.

Boots POUND up the stairs. Luc follows and hauls the ladder up after him.

37EXT. KEARNEY'S ANCHOR - ROOF - CONTINUOUS

Tar, gravel, harbor wind. Luc DROPS the hatch, kneels on it.

A chair SCRAPES into the closet below. Boots climb onto it.

The hatch HEAVES three inches. Luc SLAMS his weight down.

Four fingers curl over the rim. A big pale left hand, a white SKULL inked on the back.

We recognize that hand from Tysons.

Skye stands Danny's folded ladder on end over the hatch. Looks at the skull. Lets it fall.

CRACK. The rail comes down edge first across the knuckles.

A SCREAM below, high and surprised. The hand is gone. A body HITS the closet floor.

He doesn't know what that means. She runs.

38EXT. ROOFTOPS, FELLS POINT - CONTINUOUS

East across flat roofs, chimneys, dead dishes. Over the black harbor, the red DOMINO SUGARS sign glows.

BANG. The hatch flies open. A flashlight finds Luc's back. A suppressed rifle COUGHS. Brick dust stings his face.

They go flat. A second round SPRAYS gravel over them.

He picks up a loose chunk of BRICK and weighs it.

He throws the brick high and sideways, out over the edge. Down on Thames Street it goes CRUNCH through the windshield of a parked BMW.

WHOOP. WHOOP. Then the plumber's van behind it, out of step.

The rifleman's head turns toward the noise. One second.

They go. The rifle COUGHS. Wide. COUGHS again.

The last roof ends in a parapet. Fifteen feet below, a DUMPSTER. Skye hangs by her good hand. Drops. BANG. Rolls off onto the cobbles.

Luc drops. His ankle ROLLS on the lid's edge. WHUMP. On his side on the cobbles.

Skye's good hand is in his collar, hauling.

39EXT. WOLFE STREET - CONTINUOUS

Out of the alley at a limp and a run. He catches her sleeve.

A Honda Civic idles at the curb, hazards on, outside a carryout with a neon crab in the window. Luc gets in behind the wheel. Skye takes the other side. No lights.

Somebody's walking out with a bag of crab cakes and no car.

40INT. STOLEN CIVIC - NORTH AVENUE - RED LIGHT - NIGHT

His ankle swells in the boot. Her gauze is red again.

He drives another block.

She looks at him a long moment in the dash light. Then she takes the black drive out of her coat.

He keeps his eyes on the road.

41INT. SILVER FORK DINER, WILMINGTON - DAWN

SUPER: AUGUR // WILMINGTON, DE // MON 11 JAN

The neon lost its F years ago. SILVER ORK. A back booth. Luc with his back to the wall and his eyes on the door. Two phones on the table, batteries out.

He holds her eyes. The WAITRESS fills both cups and goes.

He's already limping for the door.

MONTAGE - WILMINGTON TO BEIRUT

A Challenger jet over the Atlantic, stacked with crated dialysis machines. Skye wedged between them. Luc asleep sitting up, ankle on a crate.

Dusk. A wooden fishing boat out of Larnaca. ANDREAS (50s), a Karelia burning down to his knuckles, asks no questions at all. Skye likes him enormously.

Luc asleep on a pile of nets, mouth slightly open. Skye talks low into a cheap new phone:

Rain on a quay under the corniche. Andreas puts them ashore:

END MONTAGE

42EXT. RUE GOURAUD, GEMMAYZEH - NIGHT

SUPER: AUGUR // BEIRUT // TUE 12 JAN

Rain runs down the steep street. On the corner, a van-sized diesel generator hammers in a chain-link cage.

A narrow green door, a faded red sign in French and Arabic. COVER STORY.

43INT. COVER STORY - NIGHT

A dark wood bar, old men at backgammon. Against the back wall, a WURLITZER jukebox lit red and gold. It's the only thing in the room that looks loved.

HAGOP (60), heavy, a gold chain, a Liverpool tea towel washed nearly white on his shoulder, looks up.

He comes around the bar, takes Luc's face in both hands, kisses him three times. Pours arak. It clouds white.

He feeds the Wurlitzer a coin and presses B and 7. The needle comes down with a soft CRACKLE.

Charles Trenet. "La Mer." Warm, French, far away.

Luc doesn't move. His throat moves once.

Skye puts her good hand flat on the bar, an inch from his. It stays there. He drinks off the arak.

44INT. COVER STORY - CELLAR / BRUCE'S ROOM - NIGHT

The first brass key turns with a rusty GRIND.

He doesn't come down.

A vaulted cellar. A big green generator rattling in the corner. Luc walks the old barrels, counting, and shoulders the fourth from the end. It swings out on a hinge. Behind it, a gray STEEL DOOR. The second key opens it.

A concrete room. A cot. A filing cabinet. And the wall: a floor-to-ceiling CORKBOARD of photographs, clippings, cards in Bruce's square capitals, and red string.

Who actually uses red string? Bruce Malone, apparently.

Skye puts the flashlight on the map at the center.

Where all the strings meet, one card. One word.

A cash box in the cabinet's bottom drawer. The third key opens it.

Gray foam. One matte black USB DRIVE. A strip of white tape on the back, two letters in square capitals: L.M.

He zips it into his inside pocket. Skye's at the wall with the Larnaca phone. FLASH. FLASH. Every card, every face.

45INT. COVER STORY - BAR / KITCHEN - CONTINUOUS

The top of the stairs. Two bars of signal. She sends all forty-one photos.

No Hagop. A voice in the kitchen, low and fast, in Arabic. Luc comes up behind her and goes past.

Hagop at a steel sink, phone to his ear, other hand in his apron. His face is gray.

Hagop's hand comes out of the apron. A small black AUTOMATIC, the bluing worn to silver. It shakes.

Luc's thumb goes to the BRACELET on his right wrist. Just touches it.

Only Skye sees it.

One step. His left hand turns the pistol out and away. His right takes the back of Hagop's head and drives it sideways into the steel lip of the sink.

CLANG. Hagop's knees BUCKLE. Luc catches him and lowers him to the tile, gently.

A long ragged SNORE with a gap in the middle. Then the gap doesn't end.

CLUNK. The lights go out.

Under their feet the generator gives a long, dying RATTLE. Out on the corner the cage stops HAMMERING, and Rue Gouraud dies in one breath.

Skye drops to the tile. The phone lights her face. COMPLETE. 41 OF 41. Then Lena: YOUR UPLOAD WAS FLAGGED. SOMEBODY'S WATCHING THAT NETWORK. GET OUT NOW.

Hagop's call and her photos. They both did it. She looks at Luc in the glow. He's already worked it out. She's ashamed.

The dark comes down complete.

BANG. The front door flies open. SHOUTS in Arabic. A chair CRASHES over. Pistol lights sweep the ceiling.

He was twelve in this bar. He walked from this kitchen to that jukebox a thousand times, eyes on a deck of cards.

He's gone.

46INT. COVER STORY - BAR - CONTINUOUS

We stay with Skye. Three lights, jerking and sweeping. Every man stares down his own tunnel of white.

One light jerks UP. Into the ceiling. A grunt. THUD.

The flashlight CLATTERS and spins. For half a second: Luc, on one knee beside a man on the floor. The beam goes past. He's gone.

The old brass foot rail RINGS, softly, where a shoe touched it. The second light WHIPS toward the sound.

An arm comes out of the black and takes him across the throat. He goes down on top of his own light. CRUNCH. Out.

GUNMAN THREE in the front doorway, his beam raking the room. He heard two men go down and never saw it happen.

47INT. COVER STORY - KITCHEN - CONTINUOUS

Cold air on the back of Skye's neck. The alley door is open. A fourth man in it, a shape against the rain. His pistol light comes up off the floor to find her.

She doesn't think. She wakes the phone. Camera. FLASH.

POP. White, straight into his eyes. POP. POP. A strobe.

In the third flash: Luc, a step from her shoulder, his forearm thrown up across his eyes.

The man fires blind. BLAM. Plaster sifts into her hair. Luc goes under the gun. WHAM. They both go out the back door.

BLAM. BLAM. Gunman Three fires at the flash. Both rounds SPLINTER the frame by Skye's head. Then he runs. Tires SCREAM away.

Luc comes back in alone. Blood from his hairline over one eye. He blinks hard, again and again. He has the fourth man's pistol now, as well as Hagop's.

She goes. Through the black bar, a hand on the wood, her lips moving. To the door.

48EXT. RUE GOURAUD - NIGHT

Black from end to end, and full of people. Beirut doesn't stop drinking for a blackout. Hundreds spill into the rain, phone lights on. A whole street of little white stars.

At the bottom of the street, a black Range Rover, headlights on. Two men in the light, looking at faces.

Augur, the old way. By hand.

Luc stops in the doorway. He measures it. Where you'd run.

He pockets both pistols and takes her arm, close and slow. One more boyfriend walking his girl home.

Ten yards from the Range Rover, a flashlight crosses her back. Pauses. Moves on. Luc's hand on her arm stays easy.

49EXT. FISHERMEN'S HARBOR, AIN EL-MREISSEH - NIGHT

A concrete quay. One light at the end, on Andreas's wheelhouse, the diesel already CHUGGING.

Luc hands Skye over the gunwale and goes back for the line.

Headlights swing onto the ramp and go to HIGH BEAM. The quay goes white. A black Range Rover. The flashlight on her back didn't move on after all.

The rope comes free. A yard of black water opens between hull and stone. Luc runs for it on the bad ankle. JUMPS. THUD. One boot and one knee on the deck. Skye's fist in his jacket, hauling him in.

Men run down the ramp into their own headlights, pistols out. Luc comes up on one knee with Hagop's pistol, aimed into the white. He doesn't fire. One muzzle flash, and they'd know where the boat is.

Skye sees him not do it.

A muzzle flash on the quay. CRACK. The boat clears the breakwater into the dark.

Then there's only the engine. And black water at night.

50INT. ANDREAS'S BOAT - WHEELHOUSE - NIGHT

A mile out. Andreas lights a Karelia off the last one.

Skye on the nets, the burned hand unwrapped in her lap. Luc on a crate, blood dried in one eyebrow, a laptop on his knees. Her father's drive in one side, L.M. in the other. A progress bar crawls.

Skye plays the crossing memo low against her ear.

She trims that line.

She keeps that.

He rubs his eyes. He's been doing it since the bar.

The laptop CHIMES. Hundreds of files, 2002 to last October. At the top: README.

He looks up at Skye across the swaying wheelhouse.

We stay on Skye. Behind her, through the salt on the glass, Beirut lies along the black water. Gemmayzeh, at the foot of the hill, still dark.

51EXT. ANDREAS'S BOAT / LARNACA BAY - SUNRISE

SUPER: AUGUR // LARNACA, CYPRUS // WED 13 JAN

The engine that THUDDED all night drops to a mutter. Past the low white town, the SALT LAKE lies pink and still. Knee-deep in it, feeding, stand FLAMINGOS in their hundreds.

Skye at the rail. Gauze on her burned right hand. Gemmayzeh plaster in her hair.

He looks now, at her. He looks away before she catches him.

52INT. FLAT OVER A BAKERY - BATHROOM - DAY: THE ICE BATH

Two sacks of fish-market ice. RIP. The ice CLATTERS into a tub of cold water.

On the sink, a pharmacy bag: pale foundation, gray-blue eyeshadow, and a tube of stage blood he won't need. He bought the blood so the girl at the till wouldn't wonder about all that gray.

Skye sits on the tub's edge. Luc kneels on the tile and does her face. Close. She watches him the whole time.

She stops. She's heard herself.

He sits back. A dead woman's face.

She goes into the ice in her clothes, up to the collarbones. A GASP that turns into a long, shuddering HISS.

He lays her wet hair across her face. He lifts her bandaged right hand onto the rim of the tub.

He climbs up onto the rim with his phone. She's shaking so hard the water rings around her.

Gray-green eyes in a dead gray face. She breathes out, all the way. Her body goes still.

CLICK. CLICK. CLICK. Twelve photographs.

She comes up GASPING. He hauls her out, wraps her in every towel in the flat and rubs her arms hard. Watching her go still in that water scared him. He keeps rubbing.

They sit on the bathroom floor, her wet head on his shoulder. She stops on the close one.

53INT. CHRISTOS'S TOYOTA - LARNACA GENERAL HOSPITAL LOT - DUSK

CHRISTOS (50s), morgue attendant, counts three thousand euros twice. Amber worry beads CLICK in his other hand. Skye leans between the seats with her phone up, recording.

Luc counts out two thousand more. Skye doesn't apologize.

54EXT. FLAT - BALCONY - MIDNIGHT

A fresh Cypriot SIM. Below, a cat jumps between car hoods.

Relief in it. Real or very good.

He sends the photographs. _Read._ Somewhere in Virginia, Bennett is scrolling them with his thumb. Luc minds that.

55EXT. FLAT - BALCONY - DAY: TWO CALLS

SUPER: AUGUR // LARNACA, CYPRUS // THU 14 JAN

A red geranium on the rail. Skye in the sun with a burner. On the gray laptop, a silver-haired man in a polka-dot bow tie, his face circled in red. Luc in the doorway.

She dials. Luc steps inside, out of her sight.

Her voice cracks on "Graham." She didn't plan that.

She hangs up. She's just picked a nice old man's pocket.

The burner BUZZES. _(703) area code. 11:17._

56FLASH - DOCK, LAKE HOUSE, MAINE - NIGHT (2001)

Fireworks over black water. A little girl with her feet in the lake SCREAMS with joy at every BOOM. At the end of the dock, a small boy has both hands clamped over his ears. That's THOMAS.

BACK TO SCENE

Her mouth opens. Nothing comes.

She SNAPS the SIM in half and drops the halves in the geranium pot. Luc's in the doorway.

57EXT. SKY OVER BAGHDAD - EMBASSY HELICOPTER - DAY

SUPER: AUGUR // BAGHDAD, IRAQ // SAT 16 JAN

Rotors THUDDING. Below, by the Tigris, a hundred acres of green lawn and twelve-foot T-barriers. The biggest American embassy on earth.

Beside Skye in a headset, GRAHAM PELL (68). Camel coat. A red bow tie with tiny white anchors. A twinkle he can switch on for a room.

He presses a WERTHER'S into her palm, low, out of habit. Then a white badge on a red lanyard: EMBASSY ESCORT.

She'll be glad of it before dark.

Across from her, RAY DUTTON (60), ex-Diplomatic Security, folds each used Nicorette back into its foil.

In the back, two young TECHNICIANS asleep on crates stenciled WARRANT. A third sits apart. Late forties, short gray beard, a tan ball cap, sunglasses. He whistles softly. The same slow bars, over and over. We've heard it before.

58INT. EMBASSY HANGAR - DAY

Two WARRANT DRONES on cradles. Matte gray, the length of a car. A black SENSOR POD under the nose, beer-keg sized.

The bearded technician stands behind a rugged LAPTOP, past the light. A cable runs from it to an antenna on a tripod. We never get closer to him than Skye does.

The two young techs are closing the left drone's pod. One holds something inside it steady with both hands.

Nobody holds a camera with both hands.

An accent with corners in it. The bigger tech wipes his palms down his cargo pants. Sweating, in January.

Graham crouches with a grunt under the other drone. A panel near the tail. A keyhole. A keypad.

PIETER turns the laptop a few degrees her way and stays put.

INSERT - THE CONTROLLER SCREEN

The flight log. The last line:

AUTH OVERRIDE PKG LOADED // SIGNED: ashgrove

BACK TO SCENE

Skye reads it upside down. Her face doesn't move. She gives him the dinner-party smile. Her father's.

59EXT. EMBASSY - BEHIND THE T-WALL - DAY

Around the corner her legs go. She sits down hard on a curb.

On a tower over the chancery, a white dome turns, searching. A six-barreled gun hangs under it.

60INT. RESIDENCE - RECEPTION ROOM - SUNSET

Skye at the back in a BLACK DRESS, Lena's cellular DONGLE zipped into her clutch. Dutton by the hall door.

Graham beside her at the window. Through the glass, Pieter sets up a tripod and a folding table on the lawn.

His bow tie is crooked. He looks older than she remembers.

She opens her mouth. The SIREN.

61INT. RESIDENCE - INNER HALL - CONTINUOUS

A rising electronic WAIL. Glasses RING on the trays.

Trays CRASH. At the end of the hall, the SAFE HAVEN stands open: eight inches of cream-painted steel, a wheel on the back. A young AGENT holds it. Graham's inside already, by the water cooler.

A big hand CLAMPS Skye's arm above the elbow.

Dutton steers her at the sill.

Skye plants her left foot on the sill. STAMPS her right heel down into the top of his foot with all her weight.

Dutton GRUNTS. His grip opens. She TEARS out backward into the hall.

Dutton LUNGES. The agent grabs his jacket and HAULS him in.

At the back of the room, Graham's on his feet.

Once. He doesn't tell the agent to hold the door. He doesn't send Dutton after her. The steel SWINGS shut between them. CHUNK. CHUNK. CHUNK.

Ray Dutton will sit out the rocket attack on one foot.

62EXT. RESIDENCE LAWN - CONTINUOUS

Skye steps out of her shoes. Heels in one hand, her phone in the other.

The white dome SPINS. The gun OPENS UP. A long ripping BUZZ. Red TRACERS climb into the brown dusk.

The drone hangs thirty feet over the empty lawn, rock steady. Pieter alone at the table below it.

A dark streak drops out of the dust. The big dinner tent at the chancery end JUMPS off its poles. WHUMP. It comes down burning. Nobody's in it.

The drone turns on its own axis. Toward the chancery.

63INT. EMBASSY SUPPORT COMPOUND - DISH PIT - CONTINUOUS

Steam. Every man in the dish pit goes flat on the wet tile. Luc too, in an apron, badge MARC DELORME. Then he gets up.

MOSES (40s), Ugandan, grabs at his apron from the floor.

64EXT. SUPPORT COMPOUND - GATE 7 - CONTINUOUS

BRRRRRRT. The C-RAM is a pressure in his teeth. He runs along the T-wall on the bad ankle.

GATE 7. A steel door, a badge reader. It's open.

Skye's in it. Barefoot, hair whipping. One hand holds the door against the wind. The other holds up the white badge.

He's through. The door SLAMS behind them.

65EXT. RESIDENCE LAWN - CONTINUOUS

Beyond the west wall, the HABOOB: a brown wall standing up out of the city, taller than the palms.

The drone stops turning. Nose on the chancery. Then it LURCHES right. Back. Dips. Recovers.

She'd have made a decent terrorist.

Nobody at the table. A tan cap walks away into the dust. On a lull in the wind, WHISTLING. The same slow bars.

Luc goes still.

The two young techs come out of the hangar. The bigger one has a pistol down along his leg. The smaller one carries a TIRE IRON.

His thumb finds the leather BRACELET on his right wrist. Rubs the knot once.

Skye sees it.

He goes.

We go with Luc. Straight at them. Low, in the dust.

CRACK. Air TUGS past his ear. CRACK. Luc drops onto his hip and slides into second on the wet grass. The shot goes high.

He comes up inside the big man's arms. The pistol SPINS away into the grass. Elbow to the jaw. WHAM. Does the big man go down? Nope.

He drives Luc into the table. CRASH. The LAPTOP flies.

Luc's on his back. Two hundred and twenty pounds on top of him. Hands on his throat.

Past them, Skye runs barefoot for the laptop.

Luc digs a thumb under the man's ear. The man SCREAMS. The grip gives.

He SHOVES. ROLLS. The small one's tire iron comes down across the big man's back. WHACK.

Luc YANKS the small one down by the ankle, takes the iron and hits him once across the side of the head. CLONK. The small one lies still.

The big one finds his pistol. It comes up. Toward Skye, on her knees ten yards off, the laptop open, Lena's dongle blinking in its side.

Luc THROWS the tire iron. It takes the big man across the forearm. BANG. The shot goes into the ground.

Luc's on him from behind. An arm around the neck. A hand on the back of the head. TURN. An old corporal taught him that, in a muddy yard twenty years ago.

The big man goes down. He doesn't get up.

His lanyard reads H. BRANDT. The sleeve has ridden up. Inside the forearm, inked blue, a pair of parachute wings over the words _2e REP._

Luc's regiment. He feels sick. He picks up the pistol.

The rotors change pitch. A rising WHINE. The drone moves, gathering speed, toward the low wall.

She types six digits. ENTER.

Two flat KNOCKS, metal on metal. The tripod JUMPS and goes over sideways in the grass.

Sixty yards out, a tan cap walks away into the brown curtain. He might have stopped to tie a shoe.

She doesn't. She runs barefoot into the open, KICKS the folded leg straight and JAMS it into the turf. Runs back.

Luc's hands want to shake. He holds the pistol still. The third shot doesn't come.

Over the wall the drone's nose DROPS. It comes down through the black smoke at the chancery's long wall of slit windows.

ENTER.

The rotors STOP. All four at once.

It glides on for a long moment. Then the wind takes it. It ROLLS sideways and FALLS out of the sky.

CRUNCH. Onto a gravel strip by a row of oleanders. Rotor arms SNAP off. Twenty yards short of the chancery.

Does it blow? Not yet.

Skye makes a sound on her knees in the grass. Half a laugh, half a sob.

66EXT. GRAVEL STRIP BY THE CHANCERY - CONTINUOUS: THE DETONATOR

The sensor pod's split along a seam. No cameras. A gray block the size of two bricks in black tape. A slim SILVER DETONATOR pressed into the block.

A red LED. Blinking faster.

Skye doesn't move. He kneels in the gravel and goes calm.

We stay tight on two fingers going in through the split. They find the silver tube.

He pulls. Slowly. Straight back.

An inch.

Free.

The LED goes solid red. He FLICKS the tube away underhand.

CRACK. Stones STING his face. A hot sliver of casing goes into the back of his hand.

The gray block lies in the pod. Inert. Luc looks at his hand. All his fingers.

Overhead the C-RAM STOPS. The silence is ENORMOUS. Skye kneels beside him.

She puts her hand on his wrist. Just for a second. Her fingers are ice cold.

Her bare feet bleed on the gravel.

She waits. He hunts for the words.

She holds his eyes. She nods. Once.

SHOUTING across the compound. Skye's phone is up.

SNAP. The drone, the chancery behind it. SNAP. The split pod. SNAP. The gray block, the steady red light. SNAP. SN-0442 on the broken flank.

_SENT TO L.K._

The first gust of the haboob HITS them. A wall of sand. The light goes out.

67INT. FLAT OVER A LIQUOR STORE, ANKAWA, ERBIL - NIGHT

SUPER: AUGUR // ERBIL, IRAQ // SUN 17 JAN

A kerosene heater HISSES. Skye on the couch in a sweater with a reindeer on it, cut feet wrapped and propped toward the heat. On Luc's throat, two purple handprints.

She laughs before she can stop it.

He hasn't thought about that in twenty-three years.

He doesn't answer.

INSERT - A MONITOR, ENGINEERING FLOOR (2015)

A village market seen from straight above. A box rides a man buying vegetables. A boy holds his hand.

The box goes from yellow to red.

WHITE. Then the box comes back over the smoke: _CONFIRMED._

BACK TO SCENE

Luc has been the box. Somebody he never met drew a box around a face, and he got on a plane.

He doesn't say it. Skye watches him not say it.

68INT. ANKAWA FLAT - LATER: THE LIE

A burner on speaker, on the floor.

Skye's bandaged right hand closes around her left wrist. Luc sees it.

Click.

She knew that lodge the second she heard Medicine Bow. She's earned one lie. Maybe two.

Her hand finds her wrist again. Luc watches the hand.

69INT. LITTLE AMERICA TRAVEL CENTER, CHEYENNE - NIGHT

Skye waits by the beef jerky in a reindeer sweater and somebody's canvas sneakers, her cut feet taped inside them.

Luc comes back from the work-wear racks and puts a pair of SORELS in her hands. Felt-lined, big as buckets.

He goes to pay. Cash. She stands there holding them.

70EXT. MEDICINE BOW SPORTING CLUB, LARAMIE RANGE, WYOMING - NIGHT

SUPER: LARAMIE RANGE, WY // NO COVERAGE

Twenty below. The lodge: three stories of logs and river stone dug into the pines, bleached elk antlers over the door. The Montgomerys have never met a wall they couldn't hang something dead on.

Below, on a frozen lake, a little yellow SUPER CUB sits on skis with frost on its wings.

The front door BANGS open.

THOMAS MONTGOMERY (34, looks forty) takes the porch steps two at a time in untied Sorels, a Scotch in his hand that he doesn't spill. The golden boy, gone soft and red.

Same boots. He hugs her so hard her boots leave the snow.

Luc stands by the rented Tahoe with a calm, slightly stupid face. A big friendly man, paid to stand behind somebody and look bigger.

Behind her back, Luc's fingers close once on hers.

Thomas shakes, and SQUEEZES. He's done it to every boy she's brought home since she was fourteen.

Luc doesn't squeeze back. He lets Thomas squeeze.

Thomas flexes his fingers. Advantage, Brussels.

71INT. CAT HOUSE - NIGHT

Concrete stairs into the hill. Warm and rank with meat and musk. A long corridor, and down one side of it, a wall of heated GLASS.

Two LEOPARDS on a fake-rock ledge, tails hanging. At the end, behind the biggest glass of all: TSAR. An Amur tiger, longer than a horse.

The pale eyes go to the strangers. A long COUGH, lower than a roar, through four inches of glass. Skye steps back.

Luc's eyes travel the corridor. A ceiling camera. Low in the leopards' wall, a service HATCH with a steel BOLT on the corridor side.

Only Skye sees Luc counting.

72INT. LODGE - SKYE'S OLD ROOM - NIGHT

Thomas sways in the hall outside her door with most of a bottle of red, and points it at Luc.

He goes. Dark. Luc lies on the very nice couch with his boots on and his eyes open. Skye talks to the ceiling.

She laughs, one dry breath at the ceiling.

73INT. LODGE - WINE CELLAR - NIGHT

We go with Luc. Locks CLICK green ahead of him all the way down. Racks to the ceiling. At the far end, a gray steel door flush with the stone. No handle. A KEYPAD.

His PENLIGHT rakes the keys at a low angle. Four shine with finger oil. Zero. One. Four. Seven.

He knows the order before he's done thinking it. CLUNK. The door swings in on cold air and a HUM.

He doesn't want to tell her.

74INT. LODGE - THE WHITE ROOM - CONTINUOUS

Small, white, cold. Server racks. In the middle, a black glass table the size of a pool table wakes with a CHIME, and a gold GLOBE rises out of the black and turns.

This is a sales room. You bring a man with money down here and show him the world he's buying.

INSERT - THE GLOBE

Gold type turns with the world: NEW YORK // LONDON // LUXEMBOURG // HONG KONG // PHASE 2 // T+0
PANAMA CITY // MIRAFLORES // PHASE 1 // 21 JAN 06:00 EST
T- 49:49:12

BACK TO SCENE

He plugs a Raspberry Pi into the server. A light on the drive starts to BLINK.

The desk monitors WAKE on their own: the open cellar door, the kennels, the animal corridor. William's cameras sent the open door to Thomas. Professionally, Luc admires it.

The middle monitor holds two pictures with no labels. A power SUBSTATION behind chain-link. A squat brick building with steel louvers and a PATH sign. He photographs them.

On William's screen, Thomas crouches at the leopard hatch and draws the bolt.

Two gold shapes POUR out low past his knees.

75INT. LODGE - GREAT ROOM - CONTINUOUS

Luc comes up the cellar stairs at a RUN. Red coals. Glass eyes on every wall. A MOOSE head over the granite mantel, eight feet up.

Behind the shut west hall door, a low RASP, a saw drawn once across a log.

Luc takes the POKER from the fire tools. He looks at the kitchen door.

In the kitchen, Luc YANKS the fridge open. Five pounds of raw elk tenderloin. Half SLAPS onto the slate. He BANGS the porch bolt back and DROPS the rest outside.

Thomas is going to be upset about the tenderloin.

Back at the hearth. A foot on the stone. A hand on the slab. A knee onto the granite. He crouches under the moose's chin, the poker across his knees.

CLICK. The door SWINGS in. The first LEOPARD comes through low, belly near the floor, much bigger than it looked behind glass. The second comes in at its shoulder.

The first one looks up. It looks at Luc without any expression at all, the way you'd look at a shelf.

The kitchen door CLICKS open in the draft. Cold air. BLOOD.

The leopard GOES, and the second one follows. Claws SKITTER on slate. A copper pot RINGS across the floor, then THUMPS on the porch boards.

Thomas comes through the west hall door with a WEATHERBY, his face red and wet. He heads for the cellar stairs.

Luc SLIDES off the mantel. His shoulder takes Thomas in the small of the back. DOWN onto the Navajo rug.

CRACK. The Weatherby goes off into the ceiling. Plaster RAINS on them both.

Half a mile off, every bunkhouse light SNAPS on.

76INT. LODGE - THE WHITE ROOM - MOMENTS LATER

The globe turns. It's beautiful.

INSERT - THE MEMO

From: W.M. To: C.A. October 30, 2026. Re: Sunlight.

On the handle: use hers. It's the most credible signature they have. She will be cleared. I will see to it that it takes time, and that when it is over she has nowhere else to go but home. She will not be harmed.

The old man is a problem. Handle him. W.

BACK TO SCENE

We hold on Skye's face. Clipped behind the memo, a note in a looping slant she knows from twenty years of birthday cards.

INSERT - A SCANNED NOTE

November 2. William, I won't carry a Harrow Point card for ASHGROVE. Find somebody else. G.P.

Under it, a page from Calvin's own folder, in his hand: Card 6620 for ASHGROVE only.

BACK TO SCENE

Her eyes go back up the memo. To: C.A.

FLASH: the rug upstairs, the fire. Skye at sixteen with The Hunger Games. Slippers stop beside her. We tilt up. Silver hair, a kind face: CALVIN ASHBY, fifteen years younger.

BACK TO SCENE

A spreadsheet. CONTRACTOR: MALONE, L. (DELORME / VAN AKEN / BAUER). HANDLER: BENNETT, M. Her eyes run down twenty-two rows, too fast. Closed, closed, closed. One row stops her.

INSERT - ROW TWENTY-ONE

2024 (NOV). Niamey. MAÏGA, I. Cardiac. Closed. Requesting: WM via CA.

BACK TO SCENE

She stops.

She looks at the ceiling. Up there, the man who closed out Idrissa Maïga is kneeling on her brother.

She PULLS the drive and stands. Her legs work.

77INT. LODGE - GREAT ROOM - CONTINUOUS

Thomas on his knees on the rug, zip-tied, plaster in his hair. Luc stands over him with the Weatherby, and sees her face as she comes up out of the cellar.

Her voice is perfectly steady. His eyes go to her hands. They're pressed flat over the laptop, white at the knuckles.

He doesn't ask again.

She kisses the top of his head, in the plaster dust.

HEADLIGHTS sweep the windows.

78EXT. LODGE - PORCH AND DRIVE - NIGHT

Two PICKUPS climb the drive, high beams on, throwing snow. Luc steps out onto the porch with the Weatherby.

Porch light, OFF. Yard lights, OFF. In the dark, Luc shuts his eyes.

The lead truck tops the last rise.

THUMP. Every flood and roof light on the lodge FIRES at once, straight down the drive into the windshields.

The lead truck SLEWS. CRUNCH, nose-first into the drift below the woodpile, wipers SLAPPING.

BLACK. Luc's eyes are open now.

On top of the woodpile, in the trucks' headlights, two gold shapes crouch and watch. The ranch hands stay in their cabs.

Nobody in Albany County is paid enough for leopards.

A SKI-DOO comes SCREAMING out of the garage, Skye driving. Luc swings on behind her and his arms go around her waist. The laptop is inside her coat, with the name in it.

She lets him hold on anyway.

79EXT. FROZEN LAKE - NIGHT

Flat out down the slope and across the ice. She SKIDS up by the Cub.

She YANKS a heater cord out of the warm cowling.

They strip off their coats and SCRAPE. The top of the wing is out of her reach, so she goes up the lift strut.

A boot on the ski. A boot on the strut. The Tysons shoulder SCREAMS. She HAULS herself up, belly-down on the wing, the coat in her fists, and drags the frost off in sheets.

Light HITS the wing. A pickup has come down onto the ice. It stops broadside across the long run. DALE (50s), frozen mustache, gets out and lays a rifle across the hood.

Then a voice comes across the ice, enormous. Thomas, on the porch steps, hands still tied behind him.

Dale lifts his cheek off the stock. Looks up the slope. LOWERS the rifle.

He stays put. Nobody fires. Bless Dale.

Skye SLIDES off the wing. Her legs nearly go on the ice.

She puts both hands on his face. She can't feel it. She can see her hands on him, and that's all.

He takes her wrists, pulls his shirt open, and puts her palms flat on his bare chest. Under her right palm, his heart is going hard.

80INT. SUPER CUB - FROZEN LAKE - NIGHT

He leans out the door and shouts at the empty ice.

The prop turns over once and CATCHES. The ROAR fills the little cabin.

He swings onto the short run and shoves the throttle. The skis HISS. The pines come at them. The tail LIFTS.

She shuts her eyes. Pine tops SCRAPE the belly, and then there's nothing.

Below, the lodge with every window gold. On the porch, very small, a man with his hands tied behind him, looking up.

She waves. His hands are tied.

81INT. SUPER CUB - IN FLIGHT - NIGHT

In the back seat, Skye opens a folder she didn't open in the white room.

INSERT - A SCANNED REPORT, HALF BLACKED OUT

OPERATION LANTERN. 14 MARCH 2002. Team leader (MALONE, B.) confirmed target VIPER at [redacted] Provincial Hospital. Target confirmed killed. Collateral: 31 KIA, hospital staff and patients. Team leader's request that the collateral figure be entered as stated is noted.

Signed B. Malone. Under it, smaller: C. Ashby, Deputy Chief of Station.

BACK TO SCENE

She opens PHASE1: MIRAFLORES_EXEC_2027-01-21_0600EST.

She shuts the laptop and holds it against her chest.

In the side window, a last blue ghost of the screen. Luc's eyes go to the glass and stay there a second.

He banks them east without turning around.

82INT./EXT. FRANK'S FIELD STATION, GAMBOA, PANAMA - SCREENED PORCH - DAY

SUPER: AUGUR // GAMBOA, PANAMA // WED 20 JAN

A ROAR rolls out of the rainforest across the river. Something enormous is dying in the trees. A second ROAR answers it.

Frank Callahan has his bad leg up on a cooler, a cigar going and a glass of Abuelo, no ice. Hawaiian shirt, hibiscus flowers, red on blue. Somebody ironed it.

Skye sits on the swing with the laptop. Past the end of the lawn, through the jungle, slides a red container ship stacked twelve high.

Luc comes up the steps with a duffel. Behind him, Terry Walsh, narrow and English, linen jacket gone soft from travel, turning a straw hat in his hands.

He holds out a TOBLERONE. Luc takes it.

Skye watches Luc's face. We get as much from it as she does, which is nothing.

83INT. FIELD STATION - MAP TABLE - LATER

Luc's burner lies on the map table, on speaker. At the stove Frank smashes plantains flat with a rum bottle.

Luc LAUGHS out loud, once. Skye laughs too, her forehead down on the laptop lid. She stops first. He sees that.

Skye turns the laptop so Luc can see the scan. At the foot of the page: C. ASHBY, DEPUTY CHIEF OF STATION.

He closes his eyes. Nothing comes. That scares him.

84FLASHBACK - KITCHEN, MCLEAN, VIRGINIA - NIGHT (OCTOBER 2003)

Rain on the window. YOUNG LUC (15) in the doorway in his socks. BRUCE MALONE (51) at the table in a wet coat, big hands flat on graph paper half full of square capitals in groups of five. Beside them, a paperback face down, spine cracked white. Cream cover, a biplane low over the dunes.

85INT. FIELD STATION - MAP TABLE - DUSK

Lena finds a French library's scan. Skye works the square on graph paper, pencil in the fingers that stick out of the gauze. Page. Line. Word. Small square capitals, his father's kind. She pushes the page across.

INSERT - THE 2003 FOLDER

FROM: ASHBY, C., DEP. CHIEF NE. TO: MALONE, B. 29 OCT 2003. RE: AUBERT-MALONE, C. / DEATH OF

The Virginia State Police finding of accidental death stands. VIPER successor elements are now a priority asset. Continuity outweighs. You will not pursue this matter.

With sympathy for your loss.

INSERT - GRAPH PAPER, BRUCE'S HAND

FOR LUC. WHEN HE IS OLD ENOUGH TO HATE ME PROPERLY.

THEY KILLED YOUR MOTHER BECAUSE OF A HOSPITAL I CHOSE TO BURN. AND THEY WERE ALREADY OURS WHEN THEY DID IT.

CAL ASHBY TOLD ME TO BURY HER AND I DID. I TOLD MYSELF IT WAS FOR THE WORK.

IT WAS NOT FOR THE WORK.

I DID NOT HAVE THE COURAGE TO KILL HIM.

I AM WRITING THIS AT THE KITCHEN TABLE. YOU ARE STANDING IN THE DOORWAY AGAIN. YOU THINK I DO NOT SEE YOU.

I SEE YOU. B.

BACK TO SCENE

Luc reads the rest on his feet. He puts it face down on the table, carefully, and goes out the screen door.

86EXT. FIELD STATION - SCREENED PORCH - CONTINUOUS

Across the river the howlers ROAR, one troop answering another in the dark. Luc grips the porch rail. Something comes up from the bottom of his chest. This time he lets it come. He cries with both hands on the rail. The howlers cover it.

Through the screen, Skye at the table. She doesn't get up. She lets him.

87INT. BENNETT'S EXPLORER - CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY - NIGHT

SUPER: AUGUR // LANGLEY, VA // WED 20 JAN

The gray Explorer in the far corner of an empty lot. Bennett behind the wheel, turning an Altoids tin over and over. In the passenger seat, in his overcoat, Ashby files his nails with an emery board. He takes his time with the thumb.

The tin stops.

He holds out his palm. Bennett opens the tin and shakes a peppermint into it. Ashby hands him a business card in trade. A number on the back, in his own fountain pen.

Bennett takes the card. Ashby keeps two fingers on it. The West Point ring catches the dome light.

He lets go of the card, buttons his coat and gets out.

We stay on Bennett. He looks at the card a long time. Then he dials it on his own phone.

88INT. FIELD STATION - MAP TABLE - NIGHT

Frank dishes arroz con pollo out of a dented pot. The old black landline on the wall RINGS. Frank stares at it.

He answers. Listens. Hands it to Luc, who hits SPEAKER.

Skye's hand finds the edge of the table.

CLICK. Outside, a million frogs start up at once.

Luc pops the back off his phone, SNAPS the SIM in half and drops the halves in Frank's rum.

Keys CLICK. A progress bar fills. SENT 23:02.

Skye's hands go still.

She understands him perfectly well. You already did it.

She looks past him, out through the screen. At the end of Frank's little dock, a small low light swings once in the dark. A flashlight, or a phone. Then it goes out.

89INT. FRANK'S PICKUP - CANAL ROAD - NIGHT

Jimmy Buffett low on the cassette deck. Frank drives with the cigar unlit. Skye in the middle with the laptop, Luc against the door.

Nobody answers. Frank turns Jimmy Buffett up.

Skye opens the laptop to the lodge ledger, row twenty-one. MAÏGA, I. She hasn't told him. She shuts the lid.

90EXT. MIRAFLORES LOCKS - CENTER WALL - NIGHT

SUPER: AUGUR // MIRAFLORES LOCKS, PANAMA // THU 21 JAN // 03:48 EST

A GUARD waves Frank's pickup on. In the bed, Luc slides out from under a tarp onto the center wall of the Panama Canal.

Fifty feet down in the east lane sits the PACIFIC CONCORD, a white windowless car carrier ten stories high. A parking garage that learned to float. Six MULES hold her on cables.

Ahead of her bow, the upper gates, closed in a V. Behind her stern, the lower gates, where LOCK CREW in orange vests smoke on the walkway across the top.

At the bow, Luc lies flat at the lip of the wall and looks down at the foot of the gate seam. A dark round shape bobs on the surface, no bigger than a coffee can. A thin line runs from it into the water.

Luc checks his watch. 03:58. Ninety minutes early. Somebody told them.

He goes. A big old man in a hibiscus shirt limps fast down the center wall with his cane swinging. A thousand feet to the lower gates.

91INT. MIRAFLORES LOCK CHAMBER - CONTINUOUS

Luc goes over the edge and down the iron rungs. His watch reads 04:22. He puts the knife in his teeth and lets go.

SPLASH. Black water. Warm. Diesel. He comes up GASPING and swims. His fingers SMACK plastic. A cable runs down from the float's belly into the dark. He sets the serrated back of the knife on it and saws. Steel braid inside. Somebody paid for the good cable.

He saws harder. The old wound on his hand opens. The braid PARTS. The float goes dead in his fist.

Twenty feet off, against the other leaf: a SECOND FLOAT. His watch reads 04:29. He swims.

92INT. MIRAFLORES CONTROL HOUSE - SAME TIME

Salsa low on a radio. INÉS CARRASCO (30s), small, hair in a bun, radio in hand, works the senior console by the big windows. In the back, Skye watches the gray rectangle.

93INTERCUT - LOCK CHAMBER / CONTROL HOUSE

Halfway to the second float, Luc hooks an arm over a steel rib on the gate to breathe, his left cheek on the wet iron.

The water in front of him goes flat. The gate moves. An inch. A GROAN comes through the rib into his skull.

THUD. Forty feet down. Deep and short.

The water JUMPS. His ears go to a high clean WHINE. Something warm runs out of his LEFT ear and down his neck. The shock tears him off the rib and shoves him under.

In the control house every east-lane screen goes RED. A two-tone ALARM. On Skye's screen the gray rectangle starts to slide backward.

Inés SHOUTS into her radio in fast Spanish. Nobody answers. Skye goes to the glass.

The seam of the upper gates SPLITS. A white column of water as wide as a road comes through. The ROAR fills everything.

On a mast across the lane, the canal's public webcam takes the spray full in the lens. On Skye's laptop, the live stream goes WHITE.

Luc comes up choking into white water. The current SLAMS him into the corner. He grabs for the wall and misses. Grabs again. A RUNG. He holds.

The Pacific Concord moves. Sixty thousand tons slide backward. Slow. Then faster. The hull GRINDS along the wall.

The mule cables SING. Then they SNAP. CRACK. CRACK. CRACK. One cable knocks a silver mule off its rack, and it falls end over end into the gap below. CRASH.

Through the glass, a thousand feet off: the walkway on the lower gates. Orange vests run along it for the walls.

In the middle of the walkway stands a big man with a cane. Skye knows him by the shirt.

Frank has one arm up, waving the last man off. The last orange vest is frozen at the rail.

The man runs.

Frank turns to follow, too fast on the bad leg. It goes out from under him. He drops to one knee on the steel.

The stern SLAMS into the lower gates. A long grinding SHRIEK of steel. The gates bow outward, folding under the weight of the ship.

Spray comes up over the top in a white sheet. It hides the whole walkway.

The spray comes down. The walkway is still there, twisted, hanging off one wall, its far end dropped toward the water.

It's empty.

Inés has stopped shouting.

She goes back to her console and types fast with her mouth set. Tears run down her face.

At the foot of the upper gate, Luc hangs off the rung with blood running out of his ear.

He can't hear himself. On the left there's nothing at all.

Skye turns to her terminal. The package is still open. There's a second line.

INSERT - THE PACKAGE

B2 // SEND 06:00 // BOTA-E2-P4

BACK TO SCENE

Luc looks down the lower approach. Five miles off, the lit truss of the bridge stands over the Pacific entrance. He climbs. SIRENS all over the locks. He runs for Frank's pickup. The keys are in it, where Frank always leaves them. The engine catches, and Jimmy Buffett comes on mid-chorus. Luc's gutted. He thumbs the tape out, puts it in his shirt pocket and drives for the bridge with the lights off.

END INTERCUT

94INT. MIRAFLORES CONTROL HOUSE - LATER

05:09 on the wall clock. The DUTY ENGINEER (50s), canal authority polo, has a phone at each ear.

He lays both phones face down and types with two fingers. A drawing: approach spans E1 to E7 on the Balboa side. He taps E2, where it meets the main truss. P4.

Inés throws her a set of keys.

95EXT. BRIDGE OF THE AMERICAS - EAST APPROACH - PRE-DAWN

Frank's pickup on the shoulder where the span meets the truss, hazards flashing, driver's door open. Skye pulls the Hilux in behind it. Trucks ROAR past. Her watch reads 05:41.

She looks over the rail. Two hundred feet down to the black channel. Her legs go weak. Downstream, a low black boat with no lights holds its place on the water. Under the road hangs a catwalk with a single rail. Twenty feet below her, at the joint, is Luc.

96EXT. BRIDGE OF THE AMERICAS - CATWALK - CONTINUOUS

An inspection platform the size of a kitchen table. Girder on one side, one rail on the other. Past the rail, air.

Clamped to the girder: a gray plastic case the size of a carry-on. Orange ratchet straps. A stub antenna. A light blinking GREEN.

Luc kneels with one arm around the girder, sawing at a strap, shaking in the wind.

One strap SNAPS. The case DROPS an inch. It hangs by one. The light goes from green to AMBER.

Skye climbs over the rail onto an iron ladder. A truck THUNDERS over. The ladder HUMS in her hands.

Halfway down a gust swings her out. Her feet hang in the air. She SLAMS back against the steel. Rung. Rung. The grating comes up under her shoes.

She pins the case to the girder with her shoulder and hip. The amber light blinks on her cheek. His hands come in under hers on the last strap. They shake too hard to cut. He gives her the knife and holds the case to the steel.

She saws with her bandaged hand. The strap PARTS. The case DROPS onto the girder's bottom flange and stops against her. Forty pounds of gray plastic over two hundred feet of air. She can feel him shaking through it. She's shaking too. Her watch reads 05:56.

Headlights swing across the underside of the deck. Up top a white Hilux pulls in, its windshield cracked in one long silver line. A man comes down the ladder, fast and easy, a pistol in one hand with a light under the barrel. On the last rungs his sleeve rides up. Inside the forearm, parachute wings inked blue, and under them, 2e REP.

PRICE (40s) steps onto the platform. Lean, a dark Kathmandu windbreaker, hair cut down to the skull. New Zealand vowels pressed flat.

Luc lets go of the case and stands up between them with his hands empty.

He reaches past Luc for the case handle.

Luc goes into him. FAST. Inside the gun. Both hands on the arm. Drives it up. The light whips across the girders.

They hit the rail. It RINGS. A truck goes over and the platform BUCKS.

Price is good. He turns out of the grip and steps round. To Luc's LEFT.

The wind eats it.

CRACK. The pistol butt, short and hard, behind his left ear.

He never turns his head. He drops. One knee slides off the edge, under the rail, into nothing. He hangs by an arm hooked through the rail.

The light swings into Skye's eyes, white and flat.

Her phone is already in her hand. She hits the STROBE.

WHITE. BLACK. WHITE. BLACK. Ten times a second, a foot from Price's face.

Price throws an arm over his eyes. He comes for the case anyway, blind. He finds the handle and PULLS. The case comes off the flange, and her shoes SKID toward the rail.

Luc comes up off the grating with his eyes shut. He's had this platform by heart since he got here. Rail, girder, bolts, edge.

In the strobe the fight comes to her in frames. Luc's hand on Price's wrist. The wrist laid across the top of the rail. Luc's weight coming down.

SNAP. Through the wind and trucks, she hears the bone go.

The pistol goes over the rail, its light turning over and over all the way down to the channel.

Price lets go. The case swings back into Skye. She pins it to the girder with her whole body.

Price backs onto the ladder with his right hand clutched to his chest. His radio lies by her shoe. A voice comes out of it, flat and unhurried. One word, in Dutch.

Price goes up the ladder one-handed. Above them a door SLAMS. Tires SPIT grit.

Luc stays on his knees, eyes shut, his head turned toward the handset. Her watch reads 05:58.

Her arms won't open. He puts his cold wet hands over hers and opens them one at a time.

He takes the case against his chest and stands. He turns at the waist and THROWS it.

We go with the case. It turns over once, small against the lit water, and hits. Silence. Two seconds. Three.

A white column of water stands up out of the channel a hundred feet high. It hangs there, then falls in on itself.

BOOM. The sound reaches them a second late and rattles the rail under them.

Luc sits down very slowly with his back against the girder. He closes his eyes.

SKYE'S POV: two hundred feet down, a black RHIB runs into the floodlight at the foot of the pier. One man at the wheel. One standing in the bow with a stubby radio, looking up at the catwalk. At her. Gray beard, tan ball cap, sunglasses pushed up on it. She's seen that face across the hangar in Baghdad.

Beside her, Luc's eyes stay shut.

The man in the bow touches two fingers to the brim of his cap. A little salute. Almost friendly. The RHIB turns in a long white curve and runs for the anchorage. It's gone among the ships.

97EXT. BALBOA YACHT CLUB - PARKING LOT - DAWN

The sky over Panama City goes from black to gray. Pelicans work the water off the causeway, folding up and dropping into the bay one after another. Somewhere a rooster. Sirens behind everything.

Luc stands beside Frank's truck. Wet clothes, cut hands, a bleeding scrape down the side of his face.

Skye gets out of the Hilux. Ten feet of cracked asphalt between them.

Her phone has buzzed all the way down off the bridge. She turns it around and holds it up so he can see.

INSERT - SKYE'S PHONE, 06:10

TELEMETRO // AP // REUTERS

EXPLOSION AT PANAMA CANAL'S MIRAFLORES LOCKS. AT LEAST 9 DEAD. OFFICIALS: "CYBERATTACK" ON GATE CONTROLS. ACTIVIST HACKER NETWORK "SUNLIGHT" CLAIMS RESPONSIBILITY.

BACK TO SCENE

He looks at her across the asphalt.

She says it before she's decided to.

Nothing in his face.

His hands hang at his sides.

Luc doesn't move.

We watch him remember the tea.

His face goes gray.

The pelicans work the water behind him. A siren goes up the road toward the locks.

He looks at her one second more. Then he gets into Frank's truck, backs out and drives up the ramp toward the city.

She watches the truck till it's lost in the morning traffic.

Then she sits down on the curb in the red dawn with the alert still glowing in her hand. Her own name, and Frank's, and nine.

98INT. INÉS'S FLAT, ANCÓN, PANAMA CITY - DAY

SUPER: AUGUR // ANCÓN, PANAMA // THU 21 JAN

A ceiling fan TICKS on every turn. Across the water, the long green truss of the Bridge of the Americas.

Skye sits on the couch under a blanket. Inés sits across from her, crying without a sound.

On the TV, white water pours through the split gates of Miraflores. Then gray-green eyes, straight into the lens. SKYE MONTGOMERY. SUNLIGHT. BUSCADA.

Then William Montgomery at a podium in his own lobby, with Graham half a step behind him in a polka-dot bow tie.

Skye laughs. It comes out of her as a cough and she can't stop it. Then it isn't laughing.

99INT. FONDA, CHITRÉ BUS STATION - CONTINUOUS

The same broadcast, over the steam trays. Luc sits under it with one side of his face scraped raw and salt dried white on his shirt.

On the screen, her face. Then a big white-haired man in a Hawaiian shirt, grinning, holding up his fish.

At the ticket window, a CLERK with a ledger doesn't look up.

The clerk's pen stops. Luc turns his right ear to the glass, the good one.

100INT. FRANK'S FIELD STATION - NIGHT

SUPER: AUGUR // GAMBOA, PANAMA // FRI 22 JAN

Police tape on the door. Skye's phone light held low against her leg. Inés at the window.

Upstairs, Luc's room. The pillow still dented. She stays in that door longer than she means to.

Downstairs, the black Panasonic on the kitchen wall. REDIAL: a Panamanian mobile, dialed the day Terry flew in. She photographs it.

Frank's address book on its nail. W. WALSH, T. In newer ink: CHALET ALPENROSE, KLOSTERS, CH.

She tears the page out of Frank's book.

The router. CONNECTED DEVICES: TERRY'S IPHONE, and a nameless string, joined 23:10, gone 23:14. SCREENSHOT.

The torn page and her phone go into one of Frank's specimen bags, with a yellow toucan feather in the corner. ZIP.

101EXT. UNDER FRANK'S DOCK - CONTINUOUS

BLACK water. WARM. Mud and diesel.

Skye hangs from a crossbeam by one hand, the BAG held up out of the river in the other. Inés hangs beside her.

A police SPOTLIGHT comes UNDER the dock. It finds the whites of Inés's eyes. The yellow feather.

It HOLDS. Skye's arm SHAKES.

The light MOVES ON. Across the water the howlers start up, ROARING. Frank loved those monkeys.

102EXT. PEDASÍ - THE SEA - NIGHT

SUPER: PEDASÍ, PANAMA // NO COVERAGE

The end of the road. Fishing boats pulled up on gray sand. After midnight, Luc stands knee-deep in warm black water. Every wave lights up green as it breaks. PHOSPHORESCENCE.

He looks down at his hands in it.

103FLASHBACK - BENNETT'S GRAY EXPLORER, ROUTE 7, VIRGINIA - NIGHT (2024)

Parked behind a Wegmans. Bennett turns an Altoids tin over and over. He doesn't offer one.

A street. A description. No name. There never is, and Luc never wanted one.

104EXT. A QUIET STREET, PLATEAU, NIAMEY - NIGHT

SUPER: NIAMEY // NOV 2024

A two-story house. One front window open to the heat. Inside, a man works at a desk with his back to the street. A small glass of green tea. Pinned over the desk, a child's crayon drawing: a house, a sun, six people holding hands. RFI on a radio.

We stay across the street, where Luc stood four nights.

A SHAPE comes up behind the man. We don't go in.

A hand reaches past his shoulder and turns off the radio.

The street goes SILENT. The window stays lit. The man is still bent over his laptop. He doesn't move again.

105FLASHBACK - AMETETTAI VALLEY, MALI - DAY (2013)

SUPER: AMETETTAI VALLEY, MALI // FEB 2013 // NO COVERAGE

Black rock, red rock, sand the color of rust. A section of the 2e REP works up a dry riverbed. LUC, twenty-four, sweat running into his eyes.

SERGEANT DEKKER walks point. We never get his face, only his back: a sun-bleached cap, lean shoulders, a rifle carried easy. He HUMS under his breath. LE BOUDIN, at half tempo.

CORPORAL PRICE, rangy, sunburned, cheerful. KOVAČ (22), Croatian, big and gentle, always the last to finish eating because he talks so much.

CRACK-CRACK-CRACK. A burst off the ridge.

Luc's behind a boulder before he knows he moved. Rounds SMACK the rock.

Somebody's SCREAMING. Kovač. In the open, thirty meters back, both hands clamped on his thigh. Bright red SPURTS between his fingers. FEMORAL.

Luc goes back for him. Dust KICKS up around his boots. He DRAGS Kovač behind a rock by the webbing.

The TOURNIQUET off Kovač's own chest rig. High on the leg. He CRANKS the windlass. Kovač SCREAMS.

Dekker crawls back along the riverbed with Price behind him. The cap. The shoulders. Never the face. He looks at Luc's hands, red to the elbows.

Luc CRANKS. Kovač's back ARCHES up off the sand.

It's too high to get all of it. The blood keeps coming. More FIRE off the ridge, from two places now.

Luc looks at Kovač. At the ridge. At his own red hands.

He takes his hands away.

He RUNS up the riverbed after the cap and the hum. Behind him, getting smaller, Kovač CALLS out in Croatian, once.

Then nothing.

INSERT - A LEGION CASUALTY REPORT

KOVAČ. LÉGIONNAIRE. 24.02.2013. MORT SUR LE COUP. Three signatures across the bottom: J. DEKKER. L. MALONE. PRICE.

106EXT. PEDASÍ - THE SEA - NIGHT

Luc's hands in the water. The green breaks around them and goes out. He hears it now. LE BOUDIN, hummed on a bridge deck in the Gulf. A whistle out of the Baghdad dust. And under the bridge at Balboa, Price's dropped radio, one word in Dutch from a voice with corners in it: WEG.

He stands in the sea until the sky goes gray.

107INT. INÉS'S FLAT - SATURDAY - DAWN

Skye hasn't slept. Frank's torn page and the router screenshot on the table, the Baghdad delegation sheet on her laptop, Lena on speaker.

Lena starts reading the digits. Skye's finger runs down the Baghdad sheet and stops before Lena gets to the last one. PIETER. TECHNICAL LEAD.

Nineteen minutes later, somebody moved the attack up to four-thirty. Skye puts her hand over her mouth. She's so angry her fingers shake against her lips.

A KNOCK at the door. Two, then one. Skye's hand is on the bolt before she understands it can't be Luc.

A young COURIER, white shirt pressed, holds out a slim leather folder.

Catherine Ashcroft. Who knows that name? Luc. Lena. Graham. And anybody Graham told.

Inside the folder, a WHITE BADGE on a blue lanyard. WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM. SKYE A. MONTGOMERY. PARTICIPANT. A boarding pass to Zurich. And a card in her father's blue-black fountain pen.

INSERT - THE CARD

Sweetheart, come to Davos. Stand next to me on Thursday and tell the world you have nothing to do with Sunlight. By Friday this will all be over. Love, Dad

BACK TO SCENE

She slides down the door to the floor with the white badge in her lap.

It's the front door. The one door she can walk through that Luc never could.

108INT. HARDWARE STORE, PEDASÍ - DAY

An old computer between the rope and the machetes. Luc logs into an account he gave one man, for one emergency that never came. It's always empty.

It isn't empty.

INSERT - THE EMAIL

You know who this is. I know she's alone in Panama City, and I know you left her there. Bring her and the drive, and we both walk away with clean names. Saturday, 6 p.m., Plaza de Francia, under the obelisk. Come alone. Nobody else knows I'm offering this. M.

BACK TO SCENE

Bennett. Luc's angry. His hands lie very still on the counter. He types one word: SATURDAY.

109EXT. PLAZA DE FRANCIA, CASCO VIEJO - DUSK

SUPER: AUGUR // CASCO VIEJO, PANAMA CITY // SAT 23 JAN

A long square at the tip of the old town, open to the sea. Above the old Spanish vaults, a promenade under bougainvillea. In the middle, a white obelisk with a bronze rooster on top.

On the obelisk steps, gray suit, jacket folded beside him: Michael Bennett. Turning an Altoids tin over and over.

Luc watches from the shade of a tamarind. A straw hat. A folding knife. The BRACELET. His thumb goes to the knot. He takes it away.

He reads the plaza. A couple on a bench, kissing. Nobody kisses for ten minutes in this heat.

A RASPADO MAN under a striped umbrella hasn't sold a thing.

Up on the promenade, a white guayabera leans on the rail with his back to the view.

Four. Maybe five. He takes off the hat and walks out into the open.

Bennett thumbs the tin open and holds it out. Peppermint. The first one he's ever offered Luc. He doesn't take it.

Bennett's face empties.

A small gesture with one hand.

He lifts one hand an inch.

The raspado man LETS GO of his cart. The couple STOP kissing. Up on the rail the guayabera straightens, and something LONG comes up.

Luc's already moving. Left, at the cart man. He SLAMS the man's arm at the elbow as the pistol clears the apron.

CRACK. The round goes into the paving. PIGEONS EXPLODE off the obelisk.

Luc TURNS the wrist. The pistol is his. He DRIVES the cart man into the obelisk and goes round behind it.

Stone between Luc and the rail. The long gun has nothing. The bench man comes round the other side, gun UP.

BANG. BANG. Luc fires twice. The bench man DROPS.

Up on the rail, the rifleman leans out for an angle. His eye goes to the scope.

His head SNAPS sideways. No sound, or nobody hears it under the screaming. He goes OVER the rail, slack, twenty feet DOWN into the bougainvillea.

Bennett stares at the empty rail, then up at the iron balconies behind the plaza. He never finds out.

A small DARK MARK appears on his white shirt, just under the left side of his chest. He looks down at it, mildly surprised, and puts his hand over it.

Then he sits down on the steps of the obelisk, slowly, the way you'd sit on the steps of your own front porch at the end of a long day. He looks across at Luc.

He TIPS over sideways against the stone, under the bronze rooster, and is still.

Luc looks up at the houses. On the third floor of a blue one the balcony doors stand open, the curtains moving in the breeze off the bay. Nobody's there.

Bennett's hand rests on the folded jacket. A PHONE has slid half out of the breast pocket, screen lit.

INSERT - BENNETT'S PHONE

A red dot. REC 16:37. 16:38.

BACK TO SCENE

Sixteen minutes of the plaza. OF COURSE I KNEW. And under it, Luc's own voice, handing Niamey back.

He stops it at 16:38. Airplane mode. Pocket. The pistol CLATTERS into the gutter, and he RUNS.

110EXT. CASCO VIEJO - ALLEY - CONTINUOUS

Under laundry, SIRENS behind him, his thumb goes to the bracelet. It finds the knot and stops.

He fired twice on the plaza. He never touched it.

Beside him, a heavy old door in the wall opens six inches. Painted blue, iron studs.

Low, hoarse, impatient. He hasn't heard it in nine years.

He goes in. A BOLT SLAMS across.

111INT. BLUE HOUSE - STAIRWELL - CONTINUOUS

An old man stands three steps up in the dark, a long rifle case on his shoulder. He turns. White stubble. Pale gray eyes with almost no color in them.

He props the case under the stairs and leaves it.

112EXT. BLUE HOUSE - COURTYARD - CONTINUOUS

Under a mango tree, a red delivery moto with an insulated box on the back. On the lid, a cartoon CHICKEN.

Bruce climbs on behind and takes hold of Luc's belt. Luc forgot the size of those hands.

113EXT. AMADOR CAUSEWAY - NIGHT

The moto WHINES out along the causeway, palms down the middle. Bruce leans in to Luc's good ear.

He keeps it.

Headlights FLARE in his mirror. A white Hilux, windshield cracked in one long line. Price drives one-handed, his right forearm in a white splint.

At the causeway gate a camera on a gray pole swings round to follow them.

The Hilux CLOSES. Fifty yards. Twenty. Grille HEAT.

Beside the road, the bike path, fenced off by steel bollards set a moto's width apart. Luc swings for the bollards.

THROUGH. A post at each knee and nothing to spare. Bruce's shoe RINGS off the steel. CLANG.

Price sees it too late, and with one hand. The Hilux SLAMS the end bollard. SPINS on it. Through the seaward rail and OFF the edge.

NOSE FIRST down the riprap. The rear wheels still SPINNING. Water POURS in through the cracked windshield, and the taillights light it RED.

114EXT. AMADOR CAUSEWAY - THE ROCKS - CONTINUOUS

Luc puts Bennett's phone in his father's hand.

OVER the rail. Down the big squared blocks, wet and slick. Waist-deep. COLD.

The cab is FILLING. Price hangs in his belt, face on the glass, the splint floating.

A rock the size of a loaf. SMASH. The window goes in. The belt. The folding knife. He CUTS.

Price goes UNDER. Luc GRABS him by the collar.

FLASH: a riverbed in Mali. Red hands coming off a windlass.

He keeps them on.

He HAULS. Price's shoulders JAM in the frame, then come through. Up onto a flat rock, where Price COUGHS up half the bay and breathes. His eyes find Luc's face.

Luc looks up. The camera on its gray pole is looking down the rocks at them.

AUGUR FEED - AMADOR GATE CAMERA

Three faces in three white boxes.

MALONE, L. // MATCH 96.8%

NO MATCH

MALONE, B. // DECEASED 04 JAN 2027 // MATCH 94.1%

BACK TO SCENE

Blue lights at the gate. SIRENS. Luc climbs.

115INT. OLD LAUNCH - CABIN - NIGHT

An old wooden launch off Flamenco, engine cut, drifting dark. Two bunks, a chart table, a brass lamp.

Bruce hands Bennett's phone back and draws the curtains across every port. In the light, Luc sees the gap. Upper jaw, left side, where something gold always was.

They sit.

Bruce takes a PASSPORT out of a drawer and lays it on the chart table. Luc opens it. His own face, a year younger. A name he's never used. DATE OF ISSUE: 08 JAN 2027.

He puts it in his shirt pocket, with the phone.

He stands, stooped under the cabin roof, and puts one big crooked hand on Luc's shoulder. The last time he touched him, Luc was nineteen, in a kitchen doorway in McLean, leaving for the Legion.

116EXT. LANDWASSER VALLEY - DAY

SUPER: AUGUR // DAVOS, GR // MON 25 JAN

WHITE. Dazzling. At a barrier in the mountains a young SOLDIER with frost in his eyebrows looks at the white badge around Skye's neck, then her face, and SALUTES. He's saluting the badge.

Her fingers find the hem of her coat, where the lining runs stiff along the seam.

FLASH: Ancón. Inés with BLACK THREAD, sewing a tiny earbud and a phone no bigger than a matchbox into the lining.

117INT. BELVEDERE - FOURTH FLOOR - DAY

The elevator opens. Her father stands in the doorway of the Presidential Suite himself. Gray cashmere, slippers, reading glasses pushed up on his head, a MONTBLANC in one hand.

His face does something she's never seen it do. It comes apart, a little, at the edges.

He puts his arms around her. Thinner than she remembers. The same soap. Ink.

She puts her arms around him. She holds on.

118INT. PRESIDENTIAL SUITE - CONTINUOUS

Inside the door a SWEEP MAN waits with a wand. Big, square, black leather gloves. Two fingers of the left glove are stiff and thick, splinted underneath.

We linger on that glove a beat longer than she does.

Graham gets to her first. Tweed, a green bow tie with tiny foxes on it. He hangs her coat on the hook by the door himself and stands between it and the wand.

Her father sits across from her and sees the bandage.

He looks at her a long moment with pale, steady eyes.

Plainly. He filled the room with her mother's white roses.

She can't. That's the worst thing about him.

By the fireplace, Graham makes a very small sound. Her father lays a white plastic card on the coffee table. A girl of nineteen with long fair hair.

INSERT - THE BADGE

MONTGOMERY SYSTEMS. SKYE A. MONTGOMERY. 0417.

BACK TO SCENE

She picks it up. It's warm from his pocket.

A bedroom door opens. Amira steps out in a cream wool suit and a single strand of pearls.

Amira holds on to Skye's hand one second too long.

At the hook by the door, Amira stops. Her hand goes down Skye's coat, idly, a woman admiring good wool, and stops where the lining runs stiff along the seam.

One second.

She goes out. Graham is looking at the floor.

Out in the corridor, a man LAUGHS. A short, surprised bark.

We've heard that laugh before.

The skin on Skye's arms goes COLD before she knows why. A door SHUTS down the hall.

119INT. PRESIDENTIAL SUITE - DINING ROOM - NIGHT

Lit cable cars crawl up the black mountain. Her father watches every bite.

He goes to the window, hands in his trouser pockets.

Skye puts down her fork.

She's so relieved her eyes sting. She keeps her face still for him.

He turns around.

120INT. PRESIDENTIAL SUITE - GUEST ROOM - NIGHT

Alone at the window. Over the hill, Klosters. BADGE 0417 still warm in her hand.

A train HORN sounds down the valley, on the Klosters line.

She takes her coat.

In the hall, Graham is already in his camel coat, car keys in his hand. He doesn't ask where.

121EXT. CHALET ALPENROSE, KLOSTERS - WOODPILE WINDOW - NIGHT

SUPER: AUGUR // KLOSTERS, GR // MON 25 JAN

Knee-deep powder. It SQUEAKS under every step. Old larch gone black, hearts cut in the shutters, firewood stacked along the south wall higher than a man.

Down the lane, lights off, a black VW Touareg with no snow on it. Three sets of tracks go to the door. None come back.

Luc at a gap in the woodpile. Bruce behind him on one knee, breathing hard through his nose, a rifle across his back in a cheap RED SKI BAG.

Through the glass: low beams, a green tile stove, a bookcase crammed to the ceiling. Over the door a cuckoo clock ticks.

Terry Walsh duct-taped to a straight-backed chair. Cardigan, corduroys, one slipper off. His face is a mess. A man in a black fleece stands over him with a pistol. A second man pulls books off the shelf, shakes them, drops them.

At the stove, back to the window, a third man. Tall. Lean. Gray wool cap. He warms his hands behind his back and rocks on his heels, humming. Le Boudin, half tempo.

Luc's shoulders come back and his chin comes up. A legionnaire, nineteen, on a parade ground in Calvi.

Bruce UNZIPS the bag. A Swiss straight-pull, walnut stock.

He feeds it a round and lies down behind the woodpile corner, eye to the scope.

Luc's thumb goes to the LEATHER BRACELET on his right wrist. To the worn place where the knot is.

122INT. CHALET ALPENROSE - BOOT ROOM / HALL - NIGHT

Ski wax and wet wool. Luc eases toward the stove light, the SIG P210 out.

CRACK.

123INT. CHALET ALPENROSE - BIG ROOM - CONTINUOUS

The window by the stove BLOWS IN. The book-shaker drops, clutching his shoulder, SCREAMING in Dutch.

The chair guard swings toward the window. He never sees Luc. BANG. BANG. The guard goes over the dining table. CRASH.

Luc swings to the stove. Nobody. The cuckoo clock TICKS.

The book-shaker comes up with a KNIFE. Luc gets his left forearm up late. The blade SLICES in at the wrist and runs along the bone to the elbow.

They go back into the bookcase. All of it comes down. A brass BAROMETER CLANGS off Luc's head. The shelves RIP the firebox door off the stove, and burning logs roll out across the books. The SIG CLATTERS away.

The man's on top. The knife point hangs over Luc's eye. On the inside of the wrist, a tiny white skull.

Luc's hand finds the barometer. THOCK. Once, to the temple, with everything he has.

Luc rolls him off and finds the SIG under a shelf.

The books are burning. Terry starts to SCREAM.

In the open front door, a pistol down at his side: JOOST DEKKER (late 40s). Tall, lean, a gray beard cropped close, skin tight over the bones. Older than Luc remembers.

We recognize him. Sunglasses across a hangar in Baghdad. A man in the bow of a boat under a bridge. Pieter.

Blood pumps bright red out of Terry's thigh, high on the inside, through the corduroy. Dekker already fired. Luc never heard it over the bookcase.

FLASH: A RIVERBED IN MALI. Rocks too hot to touch. Luc at twenty-four, red to the elbows.

BACK TO SCENE

Luc crawls through the burning books, cuts the tape with the dead man's knife, rolls Terry onto the boards and leans the heel of his hand into the crease of the groin.

Terry HOWLS. The spurting slows. It doesn't stop.

The doorway's empty. An engine starts down the lane. CRACK. CRACK. Metal TEARS. The engine ROARS off toward the village.

Bruce comes in with the rifle, his face gray.

Luc leans harder.

Headlights sweep the ceiling. A silver Audi THUMPS into the snowbank. Bruce brings the rifle round.

He knows how she gets out of a car.

Skye comes through the door in a long black coat with snow in her hair. The fire. The bodies. The old man with the rifle. Then Luc on the floor. Her eyes stop on him and stay.

She's already pulling her belt. Black leather, a silver buckle. She kneels in the blood in her two-thousand-dollar coat and passes it under the thigh above his hands.

He threads it and hauls, his knee on the leg. Terry SCREAMS, then stops screaming.

He holds it.

Skye puts Terry's glasses on him, crooked, one lens cracked.

Bruce goes out. The paneling over the stove catches. WHOOMP.

The pulse stutters. Catches. Stops.

We stay on Luc. His knee on the belt. The clock ticking. Ash coming down onto Terry Walsh's cardigan.

Then he takes his hands away. He looks at them, red to the wrist, and then at her. He's ashamed, and lets her see it.

There's ash in her hair. She stands and holds out her hand. He takes it. They go out bent double under the smoke. Behind them the beams catch with a long TEARING sound.

124INT. THE AUDI - BOTTOM OF THE LANE - NIGHT

Graham Pell at the wheel, camel coat buttoned to the throat. Bruce in the back with the rifle and a FORTNUM & MASON TIN on his knees. The chalet burns in the mirror.

He takes out a little red penknife without asking which knife and turns in his seat. His fingers run once along the stiff seam in her lining. He doesn't hunt for the end of it.

He cuts Inés's black thread, stitch by stitch. The MATCHBOX PHONE drops into her palm.

125INT. BRUCE'S FLAT OVER A BAKERY, KLOSTERS DORF - BATHROOM - NIGHT

Luc on the floor, his left arm across the edge of the tub. Bruce kneels on the bath mat in his undershirt and reading glasses, stitching the forearm with a needle from the kitchen drawer. A bottle of Kirsch on the tile.

Bruce cuts the thread with his teeth. On the right side. There are no teeth on the left.

126INT. BRUCE'S FLAT - KITCHEN - NIGHT

Skye at Terry's ThinkPad. Luc slides his phone across.

She stops on a crooked shot of a glovebox: a Camry rental agreement, BWI, billed to HARROW POINT LOGISTICS LLC.

She sends it to Lena. He sets down a second phone. Locked.

She seals it in the freezer bag from Terry's tin and pushes it down her RIGHT BOOT, between liner and shell.

Bruce comes out of the bathroom drying his hands. Skye stands in his way.

He goes past her without answering.

On the ThinkPad, Terry's files. NEW YORK. LONDON. LUXEMBOURG. HONG KONG. THU 28 JAN 05:00 EST. A gray HARD-SHELL CASE, lid open on a flat white panel: SAT TERMINAL, OSIRIS, NEEDS SKY TO THE SOUTH.

127INT. BRUCE'S FLAT - KITCHEN - LATER

03:00. Bruce is asleep. Cold tea. Snow past the streetlight.

Skye's hands stop on the keys.

04:30. Headlights under the window. Skye lays the matchbox phone flat against her ankle and pulls her left sock over it. The coat's stiff down one side with Terry Walsh's blood.

Her hand on the door. She turns, crosses the kitchen in two steps, takes his face in both cold hands and kisses him. Short and hard.

She's gone. Luc stands in the kitchen with his stitched arm and the cold tea. He's happy.

From the dark bedroom doorway, Bruce clears his throat.

128EXT. LANDQUART RIVER - FOOTBRIDGE, KLOSTERS - WEDNESDAY - DAWN

In Luc's hand, a page torn from an oilcloth notebook: GOTSCHNA 0800. SOLDIERS WATCH THE ROAD, NOT THE HILL. / B.

No "son." Bruce is gone, and so are the rifle and the tin. Luc drops the SIG into the gray water.

129EXT. THE DORFTÄLI, ABOVE DAVOS - DAY

SUPER: AUGUR // DAVOS, GR // WED 27 JAN

Over the mountain. Blue ice. Luc in a red rental jacket plants the left pole. The stitches PULL. The skis SKID out and he SLAMS into the orange netting on the bad arm. The inside of his sleeve goes warm and wet.

130EXT. DAVOS PROMENADE - SCHATZALP FUNICULAR - DAY

Forum week. Soldiers in white camouflage watch the road. Luc comes down off the hill behind them with skis on his shoulder, his left cuff stiff with blood. 10:04. Skye steps into the queue behind him. Dark glasses, a WHITE WEF BADGE.

Something warm passes from her bare hand to his: a blue badge, R. HALLER, MONTGOMERY SYSTEMS. A long face, glasses.

Pharmacy glasses, gray fleece, hair combed flat with tap water. Skye takes his arm and hands him her bag. It weighs nothing at all.

Luc LAUGHS, under a borrowed face, in a street of soldiers.

131INT. CONGRESS CENTRE - BOOTH CORRIDOR - DAY

Glass booths over the plenary hall. The last one: MONTGOMERY SYSTEMS / LIVE CAPTIONING. Outside it, THE GRAY CASE, and a tall lean man in a gray suit, back to Luc. Humming.

Forty feet. Luc starts walking.

From his left, his deaf side, Princess Amira and a man with a wire in his ear. Luc sees her at ten feet. Too late.

Dekker turns, and smiles. He takes Luc's left forearm, right on the stitches, and SQUEEZES. Luc's face doesn't move.

A BIG MAN on his other side. A muzzle through the fleece, just above the belt.

132INT. CONGRESS CENTRE - LOADING BAY - DAY

A white Montgomery van at the dock. Amira follows them down, her perfume first. Oud, a lot of it.

The Big Man takes his phone, the glasses, the badge. He turns Luc's right wrist to the light. The bracelet, dark with twenty-four years of skin.

A BOX CUTTER. The leather parts with a small soft sound.

Amira holds out her palm. Dekker shrugs and gives it to her.

We linger on Luc's wrist. A pale band of skin. It's been under there since he was fourteen.

133INT. MONTGOMERY HOUSE, DAVOS PROMENADE - NIGHT

A string quartet under SEE WHAT MATTERS. William in a dinner jacket goes to meet men in white thobes. Skye sets down her champagne and slips through a door marked PRIVAT.

Downstairs, a new steel door. BADGE 0417, warm from her skin. Green. CLICK. Server racks ROARING. Augur: every camera in Davos at once, in her father's basement.

She types MALONE, LUC. 11:19, the loading bay, a box cutter at his wrist. 12:06, the Jakobshorn summit, going in under the station beside a tall man with a gray case.

She types THURSDAY.

INSERT - THE TRIGGER FILE: CUE: "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants." WTM / THU 28 JAN / 11:06. ON MATCH: OSIRIS (JAKOBSHORN). WINDOW 15 MIN. Four live tiles: a substation, a PATH sign, a hut on a shingle beach, and a kitchen in Queens, men at a lemon-print tablecloth, one asleep with his arms folded, a KETTLE on the stove.

BACK TO SCENE

She deletes one word. RED: EDIT REQUIRES WTM AUTHORIZATION.

The door CLICKS. She knows the step. Slow. Never in a hurry.

He rolls a chair over and sits beside her. He used to sit like this for her long division.

Row nine of the ledger, under his finger: 2021. C. America. FUENTES MOLINA, R. Cardiac. Closed. Requesting: MS via CA.

She looks at row nine. A radio, turned off.

He doesn't answer. He stands.

134EXT. THE BELVEDERE - FRONT STEPS - NIGHT

Arm in arm with her father up the iced steps, two Montgomery men behind. Her heel slides.

She knows the voice. He pulls off his left glove with his teeth: a WHITE SKULL on the back of the hand, two fingers splinted with tape. He sees her knowing him.

135INT. THE BELVEDERE - PRESIDENTIAL SUITE - NIGHT

Graham takes her coat without looking at her. William goes through every seam of the lining himself. He never looks at her boots, not since she needed help with the laces.

She gives him 0417, and he pockets it. She lifts the white one over her head. He hands it to Graham.

She goes into her bedroom. A key TURNS, and is taken out. He does everything gently.

136INT. JAKOBSHORN SUMMIT STATION - MACHINE ROOM - NIGHT

A concrete box under the summit platform: a twenty-foot yellow BULL WHEEL, haul ropes through slots in the wall, a narrow window high up.

Luc zip-tied to an upright on a steel gantry under a diesel-stinking furniture blanket. Behind his back his thumb keeps reaching for his right wrist, and finding skin.

The wheel TURNS for one cabin, and stops. Boots on the iron stairs: two MONTGOMERY MEN, then WILLIAM in his dinner jacket, snow on the shoulders, a flute of champagne in his hand. Dekker gets up off the grating.

Dekker takes his YOUNG REAPER (20s) out. He doesn't hum.

Luc reads his hands first. No gun. The champagne. A brass Belvedere room key on a red tassel, turning over in the long fingers. Blue-black ink on the second finger.

William drinks his champagne.

William's disappointed. He came up a mountain in a dinner jacket to be asked.

William thinks about it. It's worse.

William looks at him a long time.

William finishes the champagne.

He sets the empty flute on the rail a foot past Luc's reach and goes, the key shut in his fist.

137INT. MACHINE ROOM - LATER

Midnight. Dekker sits on the grating and holds a steaming cup to Luc's mouth.

Hot, sweet, condensed milk. Legion tea. The best thing that's happened to Luc all day.

He stands with the empty cup.

He goes. Luc loved that man once.

138INT. THE BELVEDERE - SKYE'S BEDROOM - NIGHT

00:40. Outside the door the guard's chair CREAKS. Her father hired a guard with a squeaky chair. Small mercies.

On the next balcony a MAN IN A HOTEL BATHROBE finishes a cigarette and goes in, leaving his door wedged open on a WHITE HOTEL SLIPPER. The matchbox phone at her ear, she watches that slipper.

She dials a number she's known by heart since she was nine.

She's never known which way Graham will jump.

139INT. MACHINE ROOM - DAWN

06:00. Dekker comes in with the gray case and the second cup. At the south window he stands a flat white PANEL against the glass and cables it to the case. AMBER. GREEN.

He holds the cup to Luc's mouth. At the door, he turns.

Behind the post, Luc's right fist closes on a BOOTLACE.

FLASH: 04:00. The kid asleep. Luc works the lace out of his right boot by feel and saws it through the zip tie between his wrists. Nylon on nylon. Nothing gives but the skin.

BACK TO SCENE

The kid CLIMBS the gantry, boots RINGING on the steel, and YANKS the tie. It BITES the raw place. Luc keeps the fist shut tight.

He wipes it on his parka. Blood, and nothing under it.

140INTERCUT - THE MACHINE ROOM / SKYE'S BEDROOM

THE MACHINE ROOM. 06:10. A KLAXON. The yellow wheel turns. The haul rope SINGS in its slot. Through the high window, two lit cabins on the span. In the operator's booth a man in a red jacket presses something with the flat of his hand.

The wheel STOPS DEAD. Both cabins JOLT at once, and swing. Luc's lips count. Eleven, before the rope hangs still.

One rope. Two cabins. They stop together.

SKYE'S BEDROOM. A whisper of paper on carpet. Inside the door, THE WHITE BADGE, its blue lanyard wound tight. Folded round it, Belvedere notepaper and one WERTHER'S. Three words in fountain pen: Go home, Catherine.

Her Baghdad name. She loves Graham again, a little.

She puts the lanyard over her head and laces her boots tight, the right one heavier than the left. Down the hall, slippers going slowly away.

END INTERCUT

141INT. THE BELVEDERE - SKYE'S BEDROOM - MORNING

SUPER: AUGUR // BELVEDERE, DAVOS // THU 28 JAN // 10:21 CET

Skye hangs her boots round her neck by the laces. The right one swings heavier: Bennett's phone.

142EXT. THE BELVEDERE - THIRD-FLOOR LEDGE - CONTINUOUS

Minus ten. Socks and a black sweater. Three stories down, the Promenade: black cars, soldiers, lanyards going to work.

Nine feet to the next balcony, along a stone cornice as wide as her foot is long. Face to the wall. Her bandaged hand finds the iron hook of a shutter. She shuffles.

Halfway, her right foot hits ice. It GOES. Her whole weight HANGS on the hook.

The hook HOLDS. She gets the foot back, finds the far rail, and goes over it onto her knees in the smoker's snow.

143INT. CONGRESS HALL - TOP TIER - DAY

The white badge on its blue lanyard, on her black sweater.

Sixteen hundred seats fall away below her into the light. A clear acrylic lectern. A twelve-foot screen either side of it, each with a caption bar, blue and empty.

At the end of the glass booths, booth six: MONTGOMERY SYSTEMS / LIVE CAPTIONING. A gray rack HUMS inside.

On a folding chair at the booth door: THE TEXAN. A lip full of Copenhagen at the World Economic Forum.

His left hand rests on his knee. The white skull. Two fingers splinted and taped.

She's sick of being scared of that hand.

He sees her. A short BARK of a laugh. He fills the doorway.

She shows him. Empty. One bandaged.

He gets a fist in her collar and SWINGS her.

BOOM. Her back HITS the glass of booth three.

The skull hand PINS her breastbone. Wintergreen breath. Along the tier, an AISLE CAMERAMAN swings toward the noise.

The same fingers she dropped a ladder on in Fells Point. She takes them in both hands and BENDS them back. All the way.

CRACK.

On both screens: the skull hand, fingers bent the wrong way, his face above it SCREAMING. The whole hall hears it.

She goes over the rail. Tysons again: she hangs from the brass at the end of her arms, and lets go.

WHAM. Both boots, one knee. Her hand goes wet in the gauze.

144INT. JAKOBSHORN SUMMIT STATION - MACHINE ROOM - DAY

SNAP. A small dry sound under the ROAR of the bull wheel.

The zip tie parts. Luc's hands come round, white and swollen. His left thumb goes to his right wrist. Bare skin.

By the door the KID watches a livestream on his phone, rifle across his knees. 10:59.

Luc is across the room before the rifle comes up. BANG. The round SCREAMS off the bull wheel. Luc CHOPS him across the throat, and the stock goes once above the ear. The kid goes down, breathing.

Luc zips the kid's parka to the chin, slings the carbine, and goes up the stairs into the light.

145INT. CONGRESS HALL - AISLE STAIRS - CONTINUOUS

Skye goes down fast, one hand on the rail.

Faces turn as she passes.

The nearest rows laugh, high and startled, not sure yet if they're allowed to.

An aisle camera finds her. On both screens, where the skull hand was: her own face. White. Frightened.

TWO FORUM SECURITY MEN come up the stairs and take her arms.

146INT. CONGRESS HALL - STAGE - CONTINUOUS

William looks up the long bright aisle at his daughter between two men. Her face is twelve feet high on both sides of him.

For one second his face does the thing at the edges. Then eyes down, and he goes on.

He turns to page four.

INSERT - THE MARGIN NOTE

His blue-black Montblanc, slanting forward: Slow here. Look up. Let them hear it.

BACK TO SCENE

He looks up, straight at his daughter.

147INT. CONGRESS HALL - AISLE STAIRS - CONTINUOUS

One breath before he says it. She can't shout. A shout is the clip they'd loop tonight.

Breakfast-table volume. The voice from the top of the stairs in Georgetown when she was six.

The hall's so quiet it carries. Fifty rows down, her father looks up from the page.

The caption bar stays empty.

148EXT. JAKOBSHORN SUMMIT STATION - DAY

WHITE. Sun off snow, straight into Luc's eyes. He throws a hand up, blind.

When he can see: DEKKER, walking fast and easy to the platform, the gray hard-shell case in his left hand, a REAPER at his shoulder. A red cabin waits in its bay.

By the station door, two more REAPERS, smoking. They see a Reaper parka. Then the taller one sees the face.

Both rifles SNAP up.

Luc drops to a knee and drags the carbine off his back.

BAM. The taller one sits down in the snow.

The other one has him cold. Luc's muzzle is a foot short.

CRACK. Flat and far. A K31, from the east.

The other one goes over backward and lies still.

Three hundred meters along the ridge, in the black rocks, once, a wink of light. Then nothing.

Who's up there with a Swiss rifle? Luc doesn't need to look.

The cabin doors SLAM. It JERKS, and slides out over the edge of the mountain.

Luc RUNS. Over the railing at the end of the platform. Four feet down, sliding away: the cabin roof.

149EXT. CABLE CAR - ROOF - CONTINUOUS

THUD. He lands on his chest. The cabin SWINGS. He SLIDES.

His hands CATCH the roof railing. His legs go over the edge. Below him, two hundred meters of air and a white couloir.

He's scared. He drags himself onto the grating.

BANG. BANG. Two rounds PUNCH up through the roof a foot from his hip.

The hatch. A T-handle rimed with frost. He SLAMS it with the heel of his hand. It turns.

150INT. CONGRESS HALL - STAGE - CONTINUOUS

William doesn't say the line. He takes his glasses off.

The captions print it. Her guards trade a look. They let go.

She walks down. Every head in the hall turns to follow her, the way heads follow a bride. She looks only at him.

Up three steps, into the light. Hot. White. There's nothing in front of her but white.

151INT. CABLE CAR - CONTINUOUS

The noon sun drops straight through the open hatch into the eyes of the REAPER under it, pistol up.

Luc DROPS through the white, forearm across his eyes.

Both boots SLAM into the man's chest. The pistol FIRES wild. BANG BANG. The side window goes white edge to edge. Laminated, it holds.

Luc's knees come down on him. Something in the chest GIVES.

Dekker kneels over the open case: a lit laptop, and a flat white panel the size of a pizza box on a black cable.

INSERT - THE LAPTOP

A caption window, white on blue, empty. A row of tiny live tiles: a room, a parked car, a kitchen. And a red clock, starting: WINDOW 15:00. 14:59. 14:58.

BACK TO SCENE

A gust SLAMS the cabin broadside. The crazed window bows in, and GOES, out of its frame in one sheet.

The wind comes in SCREAMING.

152INT. SUMMIT STATION - OPERATOR'S BOOTH - CONTINUOUS

The OPERATOR saw a man go over his railing. He SLAPS the red E-STOP with the flat of his hand.

153INT. CABLE CAR - CONTINUOUS

The cabin stops DEAD.

Everything SLIDES. Case, Reaper, carbine, Luc. The cabin swings out over the rocks, and back, and out. Luc's lips count. Eleven.

One rope. Two cabins. They stop together.

The other cabin hangs across the gap, a body length away, full of skiers on their way up. A CHILD IN A PINK HAT. And phones. Eighty of them, flat to the glass.

Dekker sets the white panel flat against the south window. Glass, at a pinch. A green light comes on.

154INT. CONGRESS HALL - STAGE - CONTINUOUS

She stands beside him at the lectern, where he always wanted her. Up close he's old. Camera powder in the lines by his mouth. His hand on the acrylic is shaking.

The microphone is six inches from his mouth, its little green light on. She doesn't touch it.

Kitchen-table volume. To him alone. Half a second later, the screens print it for sixteen hundred people.

In the wings a SOUND WOMAN reaches for the cutoff. William lifts two fingers off the acrylic. The hand stops.

155INT. CABLE CAR - CONTINUOUS

In the caption window: Because Calvin Ashby sent a man to kill me.

The line isn't coming.

CLICK. One keystroke clears the screen.

INSERT - THE LAPTOP

MANUAL AUTHORIZATION. ENTER CODE. Six empty spaces. The red clock: 13:41.

BACK TO SCENE

He types one digit. The screen asks. He types it again.

Luc reads her sentence in the caption window. Every digit Dekker types is a second Luc can use. He grins, blood in his teeth. Proud of her.

156INT. CONGRESS HALL - STAGE - CONTINUOUS

The screens print it.

BZZT. His breast pocket.

She's never seen him look at a phone on a stage. He looks at this one.

INSERT - WILLIAM'S PHONE

A crooked photo of a rental agreement in a glovebox: TOYOTA CAMRY. BWI AIRPORT. JAN 9. HARROW POINT LOGISTICS LLC. VISA ENDING 6620. Under it, a page from his own folder, in Calvin's hand: Card 6620 for ASHGROVE only.

BACK TO SCENE

On the screens: No.

157INT. CABLE CAR - CONTINUOUS

Four digits in. The red clock: 13:05.

Luc goes downhill with the tilt and SLAMS a shoulder into Dekker's ribs. They go over together. The panel peels off the glass.

Dekker comes up FIGHTING. Nearly fifty. The best soldier Luc ever saw.

An elbow. CRUNCH. Luc's nose goes. His eyes fill.

Blind, by feel: the laptop, the thick black cable. He PULLS. The plug comes free in his fist.

WHAM. The carbine barrel across the back of his head. The floor HITS him in the face.

When he can see again, Dekker is fitting the plug back in. Steady fingers. He's HUMMING. Le Boudin, half tempo.

Luc gets both hands on the white panel. He turns toward the empty window, where the wind screams.

Dekker stops humming.

Luc THROWS it.

The cable SNAPS taut, RIPS out of the laptop, and whips out the window after it. The panel tumbles away, white, over and over, into the rocks.

INSERT - THE LAPTOP

Under four digits, in red: NO LINK. The red clock keeps running: 12:48.

BACK TO SCENE

158INT. CONGRESS HALL - STAGE - CONTINUOUS

On both screens, enormous: Name one you've broken.

William looks past her at the feed. Her first line still hangs near the top. He reads it twice. Contract speed.

She watches him do the arithmetic. Forty years of Calvin. Thirty-one of her.

He looks at the margin note. He folds the page in half. Both hands on the lectern, he looks up into the dark.

The hall doesn't make a sound.

He looks down at her. His voice breaks.

159INT. CABLE CAR - CONTINUOUS

Dekker types the fifth digit. NO LINK. He types it again.

In the caption window: I paid for them. All three.

His hands stop on the keys. For a second he doesn't move.

Then he grabs the carbine by the barrel and SWINGS.

Luc takes it on the stitched forearm. Every stitch RIPS. His good hand finds Dekker's collar, and they slide together with the swing into the empty frame.

The cabin swings back and takes the floor from under Dekker's boots. He goes OUT the window.

Luc's hand CLAMPS on his wrist.

160EXT. CABLE CAR - WINDOW - CONTINUOUS

Luc flat on his belly, his arm out the window to the shoulder. Dekker hangs from his hand over two hundred meters of nothing.

Across the gap, the phones. The child in the pink hat, held back by an arm.

The cabin SWINGS. Luc's shoulder starts out of its socket. Blood from the opened arm runs down into Dekker's hand. The grip slides.

Luc gets his other hand onto the wrist. Both hands. "Tighter." "It won't go tighter." Nobody says it. He holds.

One hard twist of the wrist, the grip-break they both learned in the mud at Castelnaudary. It turns in Luc's slick red hands, and comes free.

Dekker FALLS without a sound, past the other cabin's window.

The child in the pink hat watches him go by.

The couloir takes him. A small white cloud of powder rises, and settles.

161INT. CABLE CAR - CONTINUOUS

Luc's hands are empty. Red and shaking. Across the gap the phones are still up.

He puts the guns out the window, one at a time.

The kid's phone, cracked across one corner. The livestream: the old man who came up the mountain last night, at a clear lectern, head bowed, men in gray coming at him from both wings. Beside him, very straight, in a black sweater and a white badge: Skye.

Nose broken, arm open, shoulder out, Luc sits on the floor of a cable car swinging over the Alps and looks at her.

He's very glad to see her.

INSERT - THE LAPTOP

The red clock runs out. 00:02. 00:01. It CHIMES once.

11:21. CONFIRM WINDOW CLOSED. NO CONFIRM. STAND DOWN.

BACK TO SCENE

In one of the tiny tiles, a kitchen. We push into it.

162INT. KITCHEN, QUEENS - NIGHT

A lemon-print tablecloth. A box of donuts. FOUR MEN at the table in their coats, a laptop open between them. On its screen, in red: STAND DOWN.

Nobody moves for a while. The microwave clock reads 5:21.

One of them gets up, fills the kettle at the sink, and puts it on. Outside, a 7 train RATTLES past on the el.

163INT. DAVOS HOSPITAL - LUC'S ROOM - NIGHT

Luc in bed: arm in a sling, nose taped, both eyes black, a gown with little blue flowers. Skye in the chair by the bed.

In the doorway, ANNA WYSS (50s), tall, gray-haired, FEDPOL on her parka, with a half-knitted gray sock on four needles. Six hours of questions, and she's turned the heel.

She looks at the bed. Luc says nothing.

She knits a stitch, and goes.

Luc reaches across himself for the water glass, wrong arm. The new stitches let go. A red line comes through the bandage and spreads.

Skye's hands get there first, flat over the bandage.

She holds it. Under her palms the warm wet spreads, slows, and stops. Skye puts her forehead against his. Once.

The grin goes. She looks at the door.

The door opens: a tired young PROSECUTOR from Bern with a digital recorder, Wyss behind him.

Skye unlaces her right boot. Out of the shaft: Bennett's phone, in Terry's freezer bag. She puts it in his good hand.

The recorder's small red light comes on.

Luc looks at the small red light a long time.

Skye's hand finds the edge of his blanket and stays.

164INT. THE BELVEDERE - LIBRARY - SUNDAY MORNING

ASHBY in the leather chair by the fire, cold hotel coffee beside him. Skye takes the chair across from him.

He turns his cup a quarter turn on its saucer.

His hand stops on the cup.

Ashby laughs, almost fond. He stands, buttons his overcoat, and turns for the door. Luc's in it, arm in a sling.

165EXT. DAVOS HELIPORT - FROZEN LAKE - DAY

A white helicopter at the water's edge, rotors turning. AMIRA walks to it in dark glasses, a man with a wire in his ear carrying her bag.

At the door she stops, walks back to Luc and Skye alone, and takes off her glasses.

From her coat pocket, the bracelet. Cut through, and tied back together with a small neat knot.

Luc takes it with his good hand. He doesn't put it on.

Amira smiles a little. It doesn't change her eyes at all.

She goes back to the helicopter. Skye takes off her glove and holds out a folded page in her backward-leaning hand.

He unfolds it one-handed. An address. A river. A name. We don't get to read it. He pockets it with the bracelet.

She walks away into the falling snow and doesn't look back. A MAN IN A VERY GOOD COAT steps aside to let her pass.

The helicopter lifts over the frozen lake.

MONTAGE - THE SUNLIGHT FRAME

A phone, SAT 30 JAN, 6:00 AM EST: THE SUNLIGHT FRAME. By Skye Montgomery. At the top, before any other name, a photo: IDRISSA MAÏGA at a desk in Niamey, a glass of tea beside him. Fourteen paragraphs down, one sentence: On January sixth, the District's medical examiner identified Bruce Malone's remains by his dental work.

NIAMEY. A front room, the radio on. MARIAMA MAÏGA (40s) with two reporters, notebooks closed.

The older reporter nods.

TARTU. Over a bakery, LENA KASK, about nineteen, watches the numbers climb. A cat walks across her keyboard. On her second screen, Skye's face, over a new word: JOURNALIST.

A LOADING BAY. William, between two policemen, stops at the car and looks back at a steel door. He can't see her behind it. He looks anyway.

END MONTAGE

166EXT. SAÔNE TOWPATH, LYON - NIGHT

SUPER: LYON // NO COVERAGE

Black water, running fast and high with snowmelt. Across it the whole city is lit, Fourvière floodlit white on its hill.

Luc comes down the wet steps, arm strapped. He's nervous.

The last barge on the towpath: black steel, a Dutch bow, freshly painted LA MER. In the wheelhouse, on end: a long red ski bag.

On the stern, BRUCE on an upturned crate. Watch cap and pea coat. A rod on the rail, wine and one glass.

Luc sits on the other crate. Bruce is thinner. His hand shakes on the glass, and Luc watches him make it stop.

Luc sets Frank's Jimmy Buffett tape on the crate.

Bruce takes a black oilcloth notebook from his pea coat, tears out a page, and holds it out.

Luc pockets the page. He takes out the bracelet and holds it on his palm. Cut and tied. Bruce touches it with one finger.

Bruce's thumb stops on the reel.

Bruce looks across the water at the basilica a long time.

An old man with a fishing rod, on a barge called La Mer in his dead wife's city, under a dead man's name. Luc doesn't answer. He doesn't know yet. He finds he doesn't mind it.

Later. The stern line in his good hand, hard with the river. His phone buzzes: a new one, in his own name. Four people have the number.

INSERT - LUC'S PHONE

A Washington number. No name.

Where are you?

BACK TO SCENE

He looks at it a long while. His father fishing behind him.

Black water. The lit city.

FADE OUT.

THE END