All fiction

Ongoing series

The Shrike

A freelancer of no country and no file, hired through cutouts by agencies with positions they can’t advertise.

He takes the jobs nobody can afford to own, and he is the best alive at becoming other people. Therein lies the problem: somewhere beneath the aliases, the man himself has gone missing.

Nobody knows his name. Nobody knows why he lights a candle in every city, or what the chalk bird means.

But he does.

Stories in the series

Provenance

Spy fictionComplete2,773 wordsJuly 2026

A Belarusian rail clerk walks into a Western embassy offering the paperwork that could catch a sanctioned economy in a lie. Three services want him. None of them dares touch him first. So the job drifts to the man who belongs to nobody, a freelancer the trade calls the Shrike.

Read the story