The call came at 02:11.

Christian Wolff was awake already.
He lay flat on the narrow bed of the Airstream, hands folded on his chest, eyes open, counting the hum of the generator outside.
Sixty cycles per second. 
Stable.
Predictable. 
Good. 
He answered on the second ring.

“Speak.”

A voice tried to sound calm. Failed.
“We audited ourselves. Something’s wrong.”

Christian closed his eyes.
People didn’t audit themselves unless they were already bleeding.
The documents arrived encrypted, layered, sloppy. Fear makes men rush. Christian stripped the protections away like wet paper and saw the mistake immediately, not a missing number, not a rounding issue.

A duplicate life.

One shell company existed twice in the same quarter. Same transactions. Same dates. Different recipients. That wasn’t laundering. That was theft inside theft. Someone had started skimming from men who murdered for less than fractions of a percent.
Christian wrote the names down by hand. Ink. Paper. Permanent.
Then he found the bodies in the numbers.
Payments continued long after death certificates. Salaries paid to men already buried. Insurance payouts rerouted, reassigned, recycled. Someone wasn’t just stealing money.

They were erasing people.
Christian felt the familiar tightening behind his eyes, not anger, not fear. Alignment. Purpose clicking into place.

He packed the rifle last.

The site was an abandoned meatpacking plant turned data center. Cold rooms still intact. Hooks hanging from ceilings like punctuation marks. Men with guns patrolled the perimeter wearing jackets that cost more than the town they stood in.

Christian entered through the drainage culvert, boots sinking into frozen sludge. The smell reminded him of childhood visits to slaughterhouses with his father. Order. 
Process. 
Finality.

Two guards at the first checkpoint. He used the suppressed pistol, one shot each, center mass, fast enough they didn’t have time to understand the sound. He dragged them aside and closed their eyes.

Not respect.
Habit.

Inside, the air was colder. Servers hummed where cattle once screamed. Christian paused, counted his breath, then moved.
The first team found him by accident.

Three men turning a corner too fast. Christian fired through one, pivoted, broke the second’s neck with the butt of the rifle, and took the third down with a shot that shattered the knee before finishing the job. Pain delayed screams. Screams attracted problems.
He advanced anyway.
The control room was glass-walled, elevated, arrogant. Six people inside. None of them armed. They watched screens, not doors. Christian stepped in, locked it behind him, and shot the cameras first.

Panic followed.
One man ran. Christian shot him in the spine. Another begged. Christian ignored him. He pulled the drives, methodical, then turned to the room.
“You stole from violent people,” Christian said. 
“That’s not why you’re going to die.”
Silence.

“You continued transactions after death. You made murder profitable.”
He shot two of them without looking at their faces.
The last three tried to explain. Christian let them. He listened, corrected their math aloud while they talked, pointing out where they’d been greedy. Where they’d been sloppy. Where they’d assumed no one would notice.
“That was your error,” he said.
He left one alive. Barely. A message with a pulse.
The building went dark as Christian exited. He didn’t blow it up. He wiped it. Financially. Digitally. Every server became noise. Every backup contradicted itself. Anyone investigating would drown in data.
Outside, the cleanup crew arrived early.
Gunfire tore through the night. Christian took a round to the shoulder, adjusted, returned fire with surgical cruelty. He moved closer as they retreated, turning fear into mistakes. He killed them in pairs. One to draw attention. One to punish it.
The last man dropped his weapon and ran.
Christian let him go.
Fear compounds faster than death.
Weeks later, the payments stopped. Families received overdue benefits from accounts that suddenly corrected themselves. Names resurfaced in databases where they’d been quietly deleted.
No one connected it.

Christian sat at his table, ledger open, pen hovering. He made the final mark, closed the book, and set the pen down exactly where it belonged.

Outside, the generator hummed.
The world was still broken.

But one column balanced.
That would be enough, for now.