9:57 PM, March 5th 1770

  Hans gripped the gun. He knelt by the window in the darkened room above King Street, snow collecting on the sill where he’d cut a precise circle in the glass. Fifty-two men pressed against the Custom House steps below, their faces twisted with rage in the torchlight. Behind them, more colonists emerged from taverns and workshops, drawn by the commotion of the mob.

  Everything was proceeding as he’d calculated.

  “Fire, you bloody lobsterbacks!” a voice cut through the night air.

  Hans adjusted his position at the window, the musket’s barrel now protruding through the circular cut in the glass. Below, nine British soldiers stood in rigid formation, their young faces pale with fear as the mob pressed closer. Captain Preston barked orders, but his voice was lost in the roar.

  Through his handcrafted telescopic sight, Hans brought the chaos of the scene below into sharp focus. The brass tubing contained precision-ground lenses he’d crafted. Each lens had been ground to perfection, creating magnification that transformed distant faces into intimate portraits. Born from techniques he’d learned in the workshops of European masters who served kings and companies with equal discretion.

  Faces twisted with rage in the moonlight. Dockworkers gripped clubs and stones. Apprentices shouted curses. Their individual fury combined into something larger and more dangerous.

  Then Crispus Attucks stepped forward.

  The crowd opened around him. Tall and broad-shouldered, with dark skin and sharp cheekbones. His hands were scarred from rope work, his coat patched but clean. His white shirt stood out against the dark mass of bodies. Hans knew what the crowd didn’t. Attucks carried secrets that would die with him tonight.

  Attucks, who’d been selling Sons of Liberty secrets to Governor Hutchinson for eight months, compromising operations across Boston while posturing as a patriot.

  Hans centered the crosshairs on Attucks’ chest.

  The brass tube was cold against his eye. Attucks’ face filled the scope. The scar through his left eyebrow. The silver locket chain at his throat. The determined set of his jaw as he raised his arm toward the British soldiers.

  No wind. Hans’s hands remained steady.

  Below, the choreographed chaos accelerated. The mob surged forward. Hans could see the soldier’s fingers trembling on their triggers, fear etched across their young faces.

  Hans had come to Boston to start a rebellion. Not the street riots that flared and died, but something far more dangerous. He was creating a chain reaction that would shatter the British Empire’s grip on thirteen colonies.

  One gear turning would set the entire machine in motion. Hans understood that one well-placed bullet would transform Crispus Attucks from Company informant into colonial martyr. The soldiers below would panic, fire into the crowd, and create a symbol of tyranny and violence for the people to rally against.

  If Hans had calculated correctly—and he always calculated correctly—tonight’s single shot would echo across continents. History itself would pivot on one man’s death. All Hans had to do was pull the trigger.

  They built him for moments like this. Center of chaos. Gun in hand. Clear targets. Dispatched across Europe’s shadowy corridors of power for five years. He had dismantled intelligence networks in Rome. Sabotaged coups in Marseille. But tonight was different.

  A child slipped through the crowd. Ten years old, perhaps eleven. Hans’s finger twitched away from the trigger.

  “Fire, if you dare, you miserable bastards!”

  Nine scarlet-coated soldiers of the 29th Regiment stood at rigid attention before the Custom House, their brass buttons he could see in the night. Young faces, most barely twenty, with the hollow-cheeked look of men living on military rations and three shillings a week. Their brown bess muskets were loaded and primed, bayonets fixed, but their hands trembled with cold and fear as the mob pressed closer. Captain Preston stood slightly apart, his officer’s gorget catching the light as he barked orders that were swallowed by the crowd’s roar.

  Through his scope, Hans studied his target. Crispus Attucks wasn’t just another angry colonist. For months, the man had played a dangerous double game, feeding Sons of Liberty secrets to Company agents while posing as a patriot. Hans had tracked the meetings. Watched gold change hands behind taverns as he stood in the shadows. Documented how colonial plans somehow reached Governor Hutchinson before Samuel Adams had finished forming them.

  The British East India Company had tentacles that reached far beyond tea and textiles. From Bengal to Boston, they manipulated governments, toppled rulers, and carved empires from the application of gold and violence. What they couldn’t buy, they destroyed. What they couldn’t control, they eliminated.

  Hans had seen their work before. Always the same pattern. Identify local power structures, insert their agents, then profit from the chaos that follows. Now they were testing their methods on thirteen colonies that were unaware they were under attack.

  Crispus Attucks was their weapon here.

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  Hans exhaled slowly. Training took over. His heart rate dropped to forty-eight beats per minute. The stock pressed against his cheek with a familiar weight.

  Time compressed. Steady. Controlled.

  Through the scope he saw Attucks raise his arm, now pointing at the soldiers, shouting something Hans couldn’t hear over the mob’s roar. Wind speed: negligible. Distance: eighty-seven feet. Target motion: predictable.

  Eighty-four beats per minute. Attucks’ pulse was elevated but controlled. Not the racing panic of a man about to die, but the heightened awareness of someone who sensed danger. The Company had trained Attucks well, but not well enough to recognize a rifle aimed at his chest from ninety yards away.

  Fear leaked through his performance. Hans could read it in the slight tremor of his raised fist, the way his eyes darted to the soldiers’ faces rather than holding steady contact. A man truly confident in his cause would have stared them down. Attucks was calculating escape routes.

  Smart. But not smart enough.

  Below, the arranged chaos accelerated. The mob surged forward. More than a hundred men now stood in front of the Custom House.

  Their breath clouded in the frigid March air as they hurled both projectiles and profanities at the nine redcoats who stood in rigid formation.

  “Fire!” A voice cut through the riot’s roar.

  He moved the sight over the crowd. Hans observed slight tremors in the redcoats’ hands. Their muskets wavered at the muzzle. Enough to guarantee wild shots. Collateral damage would be significant.

  The rebellion that had been envisioned needed martyrs. But the timing was essential. The shot would do more than silence a threat. It would transform him into something far more valuable.

  He saw Ebenezer Mackintosh, the South End gang leader Hans had been cultivating for months. Mackintosh stood at the mob’s edge, his scarred face twisted with fury. He was performing his role perfectly. He was the dangerous agitator who pushed British soldiers past their breaking point and kept the energy of the mob high.

  Mackintosh moved through the mob now. A word here, a gesture there, and angry men shifted position exactly where he needed them. Hans watched the leader direct his South End gang.

  The South End, laborers and dock workers who owned nothing but their calloused hands. Exhaustion from twelve-hour shifts lingered in their hunched shoulders. Still, cheap rum and collective rage had transformed fatigue into dangerous energy. Just as was planned. Hans recognized the faces in Mackintosh’s mob. Boston’s most dangerous brotherhood. These weren’t desperate colonists driven to random violence. They were seasoned street fighters who’d earned their territory through organized brutality.

  Last November, Hans had watched from a rooftop as they’d clashed with the North End gang on Pope Day. Hundreds of men fighting with clubs and chains until the cobblestones ran red. The South Enders had won decisively, parading their captured effigy through the streets while ordinary citizens cowered behind locked doors.

  Now those same battle-tested fighters surrounded the Custom House. Mackintosh had brought his best men, who knew how to move as a unit and apply pressure without breaking formation. They pressed forward with disciplined aggression, not the wild fury of untrained rabble.

  Hans adjusted his sight. He spotted something that made him pause.

  Green ribbons. Three of them, maybe four, scattered through the South End mob. The North End’s colors. Hans tracked each one through his scope, recognizing the hardened faces from the rope walks and shipping yards. Silas Ware’s men, fighting alongside their sworn enemies.

  This wasn’t part of the plan.

  Hans had spent weeks calculating the variables and vectors of the problem. South End versus British soldiers. Manageable chaos. Predictable outcome. But North End and South End fighting together? The gangs had been at each other’s throats for decades. Territorial wars over dock work and smuggling routes. Now they stood shoulder to shoulder, unified against a common enemy.

  Hans felt the timeline shifting.

  He ran through the numbers. If he fired now, the redcoats would panic and shoot into the crowd. Distance and angle meant their shots would go wide. Two casualties, three at most. Wait thirty seconds for the mob to press closer, and the equation changed. Tighter grouping. Better targets. Five or six dead colonists.

  They needed martyrs.

  Hans watched the crowd surge forward. This was the moment he needed. Hans’s finger tightened on the trigger. His sight back on Attucks.

  Time slowed, and he noticed a locket at Attucks’ throat, silver against skin. For one fractional second, Hans saw not a Company agent but a man with hopes, fears, and people who would mourn his passing.

  Training took over. Hans’ heart rate dropped. The stock pressed against his cheek. He felt his watch pressing against his chest, its steady tick marking seconds. Snow continued to fall, dusting the shoulders of the mob below as they pushed closer to the soldiers’ bayonets, now just inches away from their faces. He centered the crosshairs on Attucks’ chest. The maximum target profile, minimum margin for error. Hans steadied his breathing. His finger tightened.

  CRACK-KA-THOOM!

  The rifle bucked against his shoulder. Through the sight, Hans witnessed the moment of impact as Attucks stumbled backward, surprise replacing rage on his face as crimson spread across his white shirt.

  Blood hitting snow.

  Below the window, chaos erupted. The soldiers, panicked by the unexpected shot, fired into the crowd without orders within a second. Smoke filled the air. Men screamed. Bodies fell.

  Hans moved without conscious thought. Muscle memory took over, having been honed over years of training, in just twelve seconds of fluid motion. Strip the barrel. Wipe the bore. Dismantle the stock. Each component vanished into tailored pockets sewn throughout his coat.

  The room looked exactly as he’d found it. No spent powder. No oil stains. No evidence that death had been dispensed from this window.

  Hans stepped to the door, paused, listened. He opened the door and slipped into the hallway, moving toward the back stairs. His boots made no sound on the worn wooden boards. Behind him, the room held no secrets except the small circular cut in the window glass. The cut would be dismissed as damage from the mob’s thrown stones, one more casualty of colonial violence that no investigator would think to question.

  He checked his watch. 10:01 PM.

  Stepping through a weathered door onto King Street, Hans allowed the chaotic tide of humanity to engulf him. The mob swirled around the Custom House steps now with over a hundred men led by Mackintosh, their faces illuminated by scattered torchlight.

  The snow continued to fall as Hans disappeared into Boston’s labyrinthine streets, leaving behind a trail of bodies and a crowd swelling with anger. In his pocket, his watch ticked steadily onward.

  Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

  The sound of time itself, counting down to whatever came next. After a few steps, he was gone from the growing chaos.