Silent Streets, Hidden Eyes

[Zak]

Madrid, Community of Madrid​

TOP SECRET - CLASSIFIED
The morning briefing in the National Intelligence Center's Madrid headquarters was swift and tightly scripted. Maps dotted with red pins stretched across the wall, each marking the presence of a person of interest. Today’s emphasis was on coordination in five cities, seven teams, and an expanding web of caution and coded behavior.

In Barcelona, Agent Ríos adjusted the miniature transceiver in his collar as he took his seat at the corner of the El Raval kebab shop. His cover, a freelance blogger journalist documenting immigrant food culture. His target was Dilan Serhat Koçer, Koçer had been seen twice in the past week exchanging memory cards disguised as loyalty coupons. The way he lingered near the espresso machine always with his back to the entrance, always scanning the window told Ríos this man had field experience.

Meanwhile, in Madrid, a separate team had taken up discreet positions around Lavapiés. The neighborhood, vibrant and crowded, made ideal camouflage. Agent Solana, seated on the terrace of a bakery under partial renovation, kept eyes on Şerzan Botan Özdemir. Her partner, Agent Navarro, had traced him to late-night meetings where cash envelopes and photocopied maps changed hands. The documents were crude but annotated with what appeared to be route codes which were possibly safe house indicators. Özdemir was a mover, the type who never stayed anywhere longer than necessary. Solana admired his discipline, but it made tracking him far more tedious.

In Valencia, Agent Duarte watched the ebb and flow of open-air market vendors. He was shadowing Nûda Şoreş Kalkan, “Nûda Botan,” a woman who rarely spoke in public and never touched a phone in view. On the third day of observation, Duarte noted a peculiar exchange—Kalkan received a bakery-wrapped parcel from an elderly woman, nodded, and walked away without a word. Inside, later analysis would confirm, was a microSD card sealed within wax paper. Duarte didn’t know what was on it yet, but the fact it was worth passing through human courier chains raised red flags.

Further north, outside Zaragoza, the air was colder. A van disguised as a maintenance vehicle sat parked near a closed kebab stand. Inside, Agents Martín and Peña watched a feed from a long-range camera pointed toward the storefront. Bawer Goran Keskin, was there, his movements fast and discreet. They watched him pass a passport and what looked like travel itineraries to a man with Belgian plates. Within minutes, Keskin vanished on foot, changing his coat and cap mid-block. “This one,” Peña muttered, “trains like a courier.”

Finally, in Bilbao, Agent Calvo reviewed footage from a bakery long suspected of being more than a bakery. Cemal Firat Cilo, rarely spoke to anyone directly. Instead, younger men came and went with canvas bread sacks, always zipped tight. Calvo’s informant who was a nervous dishwasher with gambling debts confirmed that some loaves weighed far more than bread should.

Each team operated independently but fed into the same system which was dubbed Operation Bruma. The name meant fog and it fit. The network they were watching didn’t move with force or flash; it moved in whispers, glances, nods. It moved through shops, markets, cafes, and alleys. It was cultural camouflage at its most refined.

What bothered the agents most wasn’t what they saw, t was what they couldn’t see yet.

Jay

 

[Zak]

​

CLASSIFIED
The fog of Operation Bruma began to dissipate at exactly 03:47 hours, when encrypted GO code signals were transmitted simultaneously to command centers in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Zaragoza, and Bilbao. From there, the operation transitioned from a low-burn intelligence-gathering phase to a fully mobilized joint-intervention effort.

At the heart of this coordinated strike were elite units of the Guardia Civil's Special Intervention Unit and the National Police Corps' Special Operations Group. Each team had been briefed in layers, with compartmentalized intelligence and sealed field orders that could only be opened on encrypted tablet systems seconds before their designated breach time.

Barcelona – 04:02 AM
In the shadowy side streets of El Raval, the UEI team, dressed in low-profile tactical civvies with concealed armor, entered through a staff entrance at the kebab shop. Agent Ríos, already in place at his observation post, gave a quiet click over comms, the “target seated, espresso machine, back turned.”

The takedown was executed in under 20 seconds. Dilan Serhat Koçer, stunned by the speed, didn’t even reach for the drawer where a collapsible phone had been hidden. He was restrained with carbon-fiber cuffs, face pressed against the espresso bar tiles.
Beneath a false floor panel behind the service counter, agents recovered a lead-lined pouch containing six microSD cards disguised as coffee shop coupons. The cards were later scanned at a secure mobile forensics lab, each carried snippets of encrypted voice logs, image files of metro system maps, and PDF schematics of tunnel access points beneath Madrid and Marseille.

Madrid – 04:08 AM
Lavapiés was already stirring when the GEO unit moved in. Five plain vans converged on the narrow street surrounding a half-renovated bakery. Şerzan Botan Özdemir had just returned from what intel suspected was a courier drop. Agent Solana maintained visual contact from the bakery terrace while Agent Navarro secured the rear fire escape.

On command, three GEO operators deployed a breaching charge to the rooftop access door and fast-roped into the stairwell. Özdemir was intercepted before he could destroy the contents of a thermal bag. Inside was a stack of laminated city bus passes encoded with what digital forensics would later identify as burner authentication tokens.

In the false ceiling above his bedroom, agents recovered a folded paper map annotated with dots and initials clearly referencing a travel corridor from Málaga to Paris through six intermediary safe points.

Valencia – 04:10 AM
At the busy Mercado Central, a Guardia Civil counterterrorism unit had already blended in with early delivery crews. Agent Duarte gave the callout when Nûda Şoreş Kalkan stepped away from her usual vendor route, clutching the bakery-wrapped parcel she'd received days earlier. The arrest took place near a fruit stall, swift and without resistance.

The parcel itself was rushed via armored convoy to a mobile containment unit outside the city. Once unwrapped, the microSD card inside the wax-sealed envelope revealed deeply fragmented storage, hidden inside faux image files. Data fragments suggested encrypted financial transactions routed through Istanbul-based NGOs with links to known trafficking channels.

Zaragoza – 04:15 AM
The GEO team assigned to Aragón had eyes on Bawer Goran Keskin for 72 hours before the go-order. Keskin, already known for disciplined counter-surveillance behavior, was believed to be planning an exfiltration via secondary rail lines.

The first location was an apartment safehouse near the kebab stand which was breached simultaneously with a traffic stop targeting the Belgian-registered van seen in the earlier handoff. Inside the van were blank passports, heat-sealed bundles of euro notes, and a biometric fingerprint scanner. But Keskin had slipped the perimeter.

What he hadn’t expected was the Guardia Civil helicopter team shadowing rooftops three blocks south. A FLIR signature pinged his heat profile near a municipal rail access tunnel. A foot pursuit ensued through a construction site before Keskin was taken down by a canine unit. He was carrying two SIM cards, a forged rail technician badge, and a portable decryption module.

Bilbao – 04:19 AM
The bakery raid had been in planning for a few days. Cemal Firat Cilo, always calm, always one step removed, was seated in the back, sipping tea from a chipped glass when the Guardia Civil’s UEI breached through the rear door with suppressed entry tactics. Inside, beyond the façade of bread and coffee, were layered packages beneath the counter:
- Three 9mm pistols with scratched serial numbers
- Over $120,000 in unmarked bills
- Canvas sacks containing fake documentation kits in Turkish, German, and Italian
- A torn receipt from a supply store in Rotterdam, timestamped one week prior

The informant identified only as “Círculo” had vanished hours earlier. But the wire transfer to his gambling debt account confirmed his tip had been genuine. By 05:00, at the National Intelligence Center in Madrid, screens displayed real-time biometric scans, GPS asset logs, and encryption keys undergoing deconstruction. Seventeen arrests were confirmed. Six more targets were in flight or underground. A liaison team had already been dispatched to cross-reference known identities.

While the web wasn’t fully unraveled, Operation Bruma had achieved its core objective: the simultaneous disruption of an embedded courier and communication network operating beneath the guise of ordinary commerce.

The cultural camouflage had been pierced. The fog had thinned.

Now came the harder task of figuring out who trained them. And who was still in the fog.

Jay