The Sparrow Directive (eBook)

In a world where the past cannot be forgotten, the future is at risk

Bilal Salman (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
220 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
978-0-00-112522-3 (ISBN)

Infos

By Bilal Salman

What if the future was erased before it ever began?

In 1910, Nikola Tesla unlocked something far more dangerous than wireless energy - a way to store and transmit human memory across harmonic fields. Terrified of what it could unleash, governments buried the project, wiped the records, and silenced those who knew the truth.

Over a century later, the signals have returned.

Cassandra Grey doesn't remember the collapse of time.
But time remembers her.

Vaults are waking beneath cities that never knew they were built on secrets. Echoes of erased lives are slipping into dreams. And a covert group known as the Directive is watching, desperate to stop what Tesla started from rising again.

Now, Cass must piece together a forgotten history, follow the last message of a woman who never existed, and make an impossible choice - preserve the broken past, or risk everything for a future no one remembers.

The Sparrow Directive is a gripping alternate-history thriller that blends memory, conspiracy, and sacrifice into a story you won't forget. Perfect for fans of Dark, Tenet, and The Silent Patient.

Textauszug

Chapter 1

 

 

Elia Marrin dropped his coffee before he even realized his hand had let go.

The paper cup hit the pavement with a muted smack, the dark liquid spreading in a jagged pool that steamed faintly against the morning chill. Bitter scent rose up, mixing with damp earth and rust from the old pipes that ran beneath the archive courtyard. He didn’t notice the burn searing his ankle or the trickle soaking through his sock. His entire body had stilled, locked by the impossible sight rising beyond the chain-link fence.

A tower.

It cut the sky in a shape that didn’t belong — copper and steel glinting through a fog that smelled faintly of rain and iron. The structure loomed more than a hundred feet high, a narrow column topped with a wide copper crown that shimmered as though it had just been polished. Its spire pierced upward with the confidence of a century that no longer existed.

Elia’s throat tightened. He blinked once, rubbed his eyes, even dragged his glasses off and cleaned them with the edge of his sleeve. The tower didn’t vanish. It remained, steady, real, humming against the quiet air like a ghost daring him to call it false.

Wardenclyffe.

Tesla’s tower.

He had seen its likeness before — but only in cracked sketches, faded blueprints, grainy photographs hoarded by collectors who barely understood what they held. For years he had traced those scraps like holy scripture, chasing whispers through abandoned archives, begging for grants that never came. Always ridiculed, always dismissed as the man who hunted after shadows. But this wasn’t a replica cobbled together by some eccentric preservationist. The lines were too precise, the materials too raw, the proportions exact to a degree only the original could hold.

This wasn’t restored.
It wasn’t rebuilt.
It was preserved.

Elia stepped forward, gravel crunching underfoot, each sound echoing louder than it should have in the empty morning. The air shifted as he neared the fence — heavy, electric, like the sharp breath before lightning claws down from a storm. Tiny hairs along his arms lifted. Static clung to his skin in restless pulses. His phone buzzed once in his pocket, screen flashing white before collapsing into black. He fumbled with the buttons, trying to coax life back into it, but the device was gone — swallowed whole by the field radiating from the tower.

No power. No signal. Only that low vibration, constant, alive.

He circled slowly, keeping his eyes fixed on the structure. The ground closest to the base had changed. Grass that should have been knee-high lay flattened in a perfect radius, pressed as if some vast hand had smoothed it down. Not burned, not scorched, simply subdued by force that had no business existing here. No scaffolding. No cranes. No tool marks. Not a single footprint in the soil.

This hadn’t been constructed. It had arrived.

Elia’s chest heaved. His heart hammered so hard it seemed to echo through his ribs, a drumbeat too loud for one body to carry. His laugh cracked, half-sob, half-joy. Years of being ignored, belittled, his lectures called fantasies, his name written off as a cautionary tale for young researchers — all of it blazed inside him as he stared at proof that he had been right all along.

The tower existed. Tesla’s dream had never been erased. And if the tower had survived, then the Directive — that whispered cabal spoken of only in rumor and half-burned letters — had to be real as well. They had destroyed everything, yet somehow this remained.

His hands trembled as he dug into his worn leather satchel, pulling free the archival scanner he had customized himself, a device built from scavenged parts no grant committee had ever funded. The screen flickered to life, weak but functional, its glass faintly fogged from the morning air. He raised it toward the tower. For a heartbeat, readings burst across the surface — wild signatures, impossible harmonics, patterns no machine should register. His lips parted in awe. Then, with a sharp hiss, the screen cracked. A spiderweb fracture bloomed across its face before the entire device sparked and went dark, the acrid stench of melted wiring filling the air.

The tower hummed louder.

Something shifted behind him.

Elia froze, breath caught halfway between inhale and scream. The gravel whispered again — deliberate, slow, the unmistakable crunch of footsteps closing in. He spun halfway, pulse choking his throat, but before his eyes could find the source, cold metal pressed against the back of his neck.

A gun.

His stomach dropped, every thought scattering into primal fear. He smelled oil and steel, felt the unyielding weight of the barrel against his skin.

A woman’s voice followed, calm and sharp as a scalpel.

“Step away from the tower, Mr. Marrin.”

Elia’s chest burned. He didn’t breathe. He didn’t dare.

“Slowly,” she added, voice steady, each syllable controlled. “And tell me exactly what you’ve done.”

Cass Wynter kept the gun steady against the back of Elia Marrin’s neck. The weight of the weapon was familiar, but her pulse wasn’t calm. Not yet. A steady breath fogged the air in front of her as she studied the figure in front of them. He hadn’t moved, hadn’t resisted — too transfixed by the tower rising out of the earth like a relic exhumed from another century.

She didn’t blame him.

Even she had to force herself not to stare.

The structure glowed faintly in the haze, copper and steel catching what little morning light broke through the clouds. It was elegant, too clean to be modern construction, too precise to be accidental. There were no weld lines, no scaffolds, no signatures of a team that had spent years assembling it. The tower stood like a fossil reborn — something time had hidden until now. The air around it buzzed with a low charge, a vibration Cass could feel in her bones. It smelled faintly of scorched copper and ozone, the tang of a storm that hadn’t arrived.

“Turn around,” she said, voice calm but low.

He obeyed. Slowly. Hands visible. His tweed coat was patched at the elbows, his messenger bag worn to the point of collapse. Glasses hung crooked on his face, the lens cracked from where it had fallen. And still, his eyes shone with a hunger Cass recognized all too well — the look of someone who had chased ghosts his whole life and suddenly found one staring back.

“You’re not Black Chamber,” he said carefully.

She arched a brow. “No.”

“They disbanded in the seventies.”

“Officially.”

The way his gaze flicked across her, Cass knew he was assessing her with the same fervor he’d given the tower. His thoughts ran faster than his words. He didn’t see a government agent. He saw something worse.

“You CIA?”

She hesitated only a breath. “Not anymore.”

He frowned, confusion creasing the corners of his eyes. “Then what are you now?”

Cass stepped back just enough to lower the gun, but her grip stayed firm. “You could call me… recovered data.”

His mouth twitched in frustration. “That’s not helpful.”

“Wasn’t meant to be.”

For a moment, silence pressed between them, filled only by the tower’s low hum. Then Elia’s focus drifted back to it. He walked closer to the fence, his voice slipping into awe. “It’s not reconstruction. There’s no foundation work, no anchors. No power feed. Look at the copper coil — it’s original metallurgy, early industrial grade. This is… impossible. They dismantled it in 1917. Sold it for scrap. And yet—”

Cass didn’t interrupt. Her eyes swept the treeline, rooftops, anywhere a scope could gleam or a drone might linger. Nothing. Too quiet. But quiet never lasted.

He kept speaking, his voice growing steadier, faster, like someone whose obsession had finally been given flesh. “This isn’t powered by anything external. It’s emitting. It’s alive. Tesla’s prototype wasn’t destroyed, it was buried. Preserved. And if it survived this long—”

“Who else knows you’re here?” Cass cut in.

Elia blinked, dragged out of his spiral. “No one. I’m the only staff member left in this branch. The others think I’m a lunatic. They stopped listening years ago.” He gestured vaguely toward the archive behind him, a long brick building leaning under the weight of its age. “I was tracking residual frequencies, anomalies no one else cared to catalog. And then last night…” He gestured at the tower. His voice faltered. “That.”

Cass holstered her pistol, but her hand remained near it, a constant reminder of what silence could conceal.

“You need to come with me,” she said.

His laugh was short, sharp, almost bitter. “I’m not leaving until I understand what this is.”

She studied him for a long moment. His posture screamed nerves, but his eyes carried something else: not fear, but wonder. Genuine. That was more dangerous than defiance.

“That,” she said finally, nodding at the structure, “is what they buried. Tesla’s future. The world he tried to build.”

“And ‘they’ would be who, exactly?”

“The ones who couldn’t afford for the world to run without wires. Without switches. Without control.”

Elia’s face shifted — disbelief curdling into anger. “So the sabotage was real. It wasn’t failure. It was murder.”

Cass met his gaze. “Not by the government. Not entirely. Something older. Something quieter. And they didn’t just bury Tesla’s work. They buried him.”

His breath hitched....

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 18.12.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Science Fiction
• ISBN-10: 0-00-112522-2 / 0001125222
• ISBN-13: 978-0-00-112522-3 / 9780001125223