Aurora Vermelha – The Red Dawn Conspiracy

[Bruno]

The rain had not stopped for three days. It beat against the cracked windows of the derelict warehouse in Barreiro, a forgotten relic of days past. Now the cavernous building served as a refuge for ghosts, rusted machinery, and the birth of a movement that sought to shake the nation. Inside, the light of a single bulb swayed with the draft, casting long shadows across the makeshift table in the center of the room. The men and women gathered there were not many, barely even a dozen souls, but their presence filled the silence with something heavy, dangerous. Their faces were mostly hidden: scarves, hoodies, caps pulled low. They were factory workers, students, the unemployed, fragments of society with little in common except their anger.

At the head sat the man they only knew as Silva. Nobody was certain if that was his real name. He spoke with the authority of someone who had studied revolution his whole life. A son of dockworkers, some whispered, a veteran of foreign wars, others claimed. What mattered was the conviction in his eyes, dark and unyielding. Laid carefully in front of him was a folded red flag, its edges frayed with time but its color still bright, almost defiant. The emblem of hammer, sickle, and star glowed in the dim light, a relic smuggled from some forgotten attic.

“Comrades,” Silva began, his voice steady and cold, “this democracy they worship is nothing but a cage. The workers live in misery, our youth are slaves to capital, and the ruling class celebrates in their palaces. We are here tonight because we refuse to kneel. Because we choose to act.” The group leaned in. A woman named Rosa, her hands still stained with grease from the devices she had been assembling, placed a small metal box on the table. Inside, coiled wires and a detonator gleamed faintly. “The materials are ready,” she said. “Enough to send a message across Lisbon, across the whole of Portugal. We strike once, and they will know our name. We shall shake the foundations of this false society.” Silva’s gaze fell upon the crate at his feet. Within it lay canisters and explosives, their silent menace filling the room with a tense electricity. He closed his eyes briefly, as though invoking ghosts of the past.

“Our fathers ended fascism in seventy-four. But the revolution was stolen, strangled by cowards and traitors. Now it is our duty to finish what they began. By dawn, the bourgeoisie will tremble. By dawn, Portugal will hear the voice of Aurora Vermelha.” The rain hammered the roof like a drumroll. One by one, the figures rose, fists clenched, muttering oaths of loyalty to the cause. Outside, the streets of Barreiro lay silent, unaware that in its abandoned corners, history was preparing to bleed once again.

 

[Bruno]

Marta’s eyes burned. The glow from the monitor etched tired crescents beneath them as she leaned closer, fingers moving almost unconsciously over the keys. Around her, the SIS operations floor hummed with the low, efficient noise of men and women who had learned to live on adrenaline and coffee and red dots on a map, a cascade of encrypted snippets, the soft buzz of a radio. It was the kind of place where secrets arrived as puzzles and the work was to make the pieces fit.

She had been following threads for weeks: throwaway social accounts that resurfaced with the same slogan, tiny transfers of cash that reappeared in different guises, a handful of travel stamps that seemed to orbit the same collection of names. Tonight the system had spat back something that felt like a hinge! A single decoded line that did not belong to the usual noise.

> “Tomorrow the bourgeoisie will tremble. Dawn belongs to us.”

Marta pulled up the surrounding metadata and felt the almost reflexive tug of her training. Time stamps. Waypoints. A manifest reference with a code string. The routing trail blinked across her screen: server hops through Eastern Europe, then, unexpectedly, a node that routed through Southeast Asia. An innocuous, almost apologetic name repeated in the backchannels Bangkok Logistics & Relief, and in the suppressed breath between analysts she sensed the first line of a carefully constructed illusion.

She clicked through public registries. Nothing. No tax IDs, no office address, no incorporation documents. She cross-referenced shipping manifests and port handling records. Blank. The name appeared everywhere in Aurora Vermelha’s encrypted chatter like an answer written before the question, but on the ledger of the world, the name did not exist.

Her pulse quickened. Marta opened the packet further: private messages where the group courted imaginary sympathy carefully worded queries about port access, veiled references to “relief convoys,” requests phrased to be intercepted and seen. It read less like coordination and more like auditioning: a script meant to persuade observers that there were hands beyond Portugal willing to help. The financial traces were small micropayments through obscure processors that funneled into shell accounts. A passport alias showed a stop in Bangkok on a convoluted route weeks before. None of it amounted to a neat typewritten confession. It amounted to a pattern: a group trying to build the impression of international support by any means necessary.

She pushed back her chair and carried the printouts briskly to Major Ricardo Esteves. He read them in silence, thumbs tapping his lip, eyes narrowing as the rain dragged down the glass outside.

“So they didn’t secure a partner,” he said at last. “They invented one.”

“Exactly,” Marta replied. “Bangkok Logistics & Relief is a fabrication on paper it’s charity; in their channels it’s a conduit. They’re broadcasting the existence of that conduit because a phantom lends legitimacy. They want the idea of Thai involvement to circulate. It’s recruitment theater. It’s propaganda.”

Ricardo’s jaw hardened. “That makes them more dangerous. The lie functions whether or not anyone answers. If people here believe a foreign line exists, they’ll act like it does. It inflates their credibility and their punch.”

She drew his attention to the micro-transfers. “Small sums, routed through Thai payment nodes. Not big enough to be state-sponsored, but sufficient to pay a fixer or buy forged documents. And look this alias traveled Bangkok–Istanbul–Lisbon two weeks ago. Not proof of complicity, but a breadcrumb. They are trying to stitch an international seam out of scraps.”

Ricardo inhaled slowly. “We can’t name a country. We can’t light a fuse under a diplomatic incident without proof. But we also can’t ignore the illusion. We treat Bangkok as a lead nothing more. We move tactically on the warehouse tonight and quietly follow the paper trail. No public mention of Southeast Asia. No speculation.”

Marta felt the familiar, heavy responsibility settle over her shoulders. Intelligence was not heroism; it was patience and restraint and the slow, surgical work of separating rumor from reality. Still, the image of the phantom NGO lingered like a smear on her screen: a hollow name conjured to magnify a small, violent intent. If the SIS could clip this fabrication at its root raid the warehouse, trace the tiny payments, find the men in Barreiro before they could claim the dawn the myth could be killed before it bred believers.

She closed the file. Outside, Lisbon breathed on, unaware. Inside, Marta keyed the encrypted channel to operations: warrants approved, strike teams dispatched, a diplomatic cable drafted for the Foreign Ministry careful, discreet, asking for verification through quiet channels. The plan was surgical: cut the local cell down, then follow the fabricated trail back through the shadow accounts and false documents until the lie had nowhere to hide.