The Jotun Protocol Thanos Kal amidas The JoTun ProTocol a novel “An unforeseen spy novel” - pp press Thanos Kalamidas An Ovi eBooks Publication 2025 Ovi eBookPublications - All material is copyright of the Ovi eBooks Publications & the writer C Ovi ebooks are available in Ovi/Ovi eBookshelves pages and they are for free. If somebody tries to sell you an Ovi book please contact us immediately. For details, contact: ovimagazine@yahoo.com No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the writer or the above publisher of this book The Jotun Protocol The Jotun Protocol Thanos Kalamidas Thanos Kalamidas An Ovi eBooks Publication 2025 Ovi eBookPublications - All material is copyright of the Ovi eBooks Publications & the writer C The Jotun Protocol Arvid Strand – Former Särskilda Operationsgrup- pen (SOG), Disavowed Stockholm, Sweden — 02:17 AM T he bullet missed Arvid’s head by inches. Glass from the café’s bullet-pocked win- dows exploded inward as he dove behind the marble-topped counter, dragging a screaming baris- ta with him. She was still holding her phone, mid- swipe on a delivery app. “Stay down,” Arvid growled, yanking the weapon from his coat. A SIG Sauer P226, clean, oiled, ready. Thanos Kalamidas Another round cracked through the night. Silenc- er. Professional. The café’s hanging lights swung like pendulums as boots stormed the sidewalk outside. Arvid’s breathing slowed. His pulse didn’t. Whoev- er these bastards were, they’d planned this. Tracked him for days. Knew his route. But they’d made a mis- take. They didn’t finish the job fast enough. He surged upward, fired twice, center mass and watched one black-clad figure crumple onto the cobblestones, blood blooming against the snow like crushed cranberries. The other fled. Arvid didn’t chase. He knew how these games worked. One attacker was a distraction. The other, long gone, was already en route to his apartment. His past. His files. His truth. He moved fast, boots slapping pavement, gun still warm in his hand. Every corner whispered betrayal now. Every camera might already be watching him. The Syndicate was real. And now they knew he knew. The Jotun Protocol He’d tried to bury it. The black files. The false identities. The whisper campaigns. Governments compromised like rotten floorboards under polished marble. He thought he’d left all that behind when he burned his last clearance badge in a storm drain outside Riga. He was wrong. There was no “out.” Only deeper in. And Arvid Strand—reluctant, hunted, furious— was about to kick in the door of the world’s most powerful criminal network. And remind them who built it. Thanos Kalamidas chapter 1 Ghost in the Fjords stockholm, sweden. Present day. The compass wasn’t supposed to move. Erik Nordin stood alone at the summit ridge of Kungsleden, the King’s Trail. Wind howled off the al- pine valley like a warning howl from ancient gods. In one hand, he held the weathered compass, the same one he had buried in Norway with Kasper twelve years ago. And yet, here it was. In the post. No return address. Just a blank envelope, a smudge of something oily on one corner, and when he cracked open the brass casing, beneath the needle was a micro-inscription, etched by a diamond drill. The Jotun Protocol They found it. You’re not done. His pulse didn’t spike. Erik didn’t breathe fast- er. But his body remembered. Every bone in him remembered Kasper’s last words in the snow, the breath leaving him as he bled into the frost: If they come back for the Protocol, you run. He didn’t run. He booked a train to Oslo. * * * * * * * oslo central station. Two days later. She was waiting at Track 19. Maja Lind wore a wool coat too long for her frame, black gloves, and her blonde hair pulled back in a no-nonsense bun. Civilian clothes, but her eyes were military. They scanned, clocked everything. She rec- ognized him instantly. “You’re older,” she said without preamble. “You look like shit,” Erik replied. She smirked. “Still charming.” Thanos Kalamidas They walked without touching, without looking at each other. Standard field protocol. The wind cut down Karl Johans gate, snow turning greasy in the gutters. The city felt like it was bracing for something. Erik could smell tension like other men smelled rain. Inside a nondescript café, Maja slid a burner phone across the table. Onscreen: hex code, scrambled frag- ments of what looked like Cold War kill-switch sche- matics. “Jotun Protocol,” she said. “It’s real. And it’s alive. Someone rebuilt it off the original framework. The problem is, it’s self-learning now. AI-enhanced. And it’s pointing inward.” “Inward?” “At Western infrastructure. Our own systems. Power grids, central banks, weapons authorization chains. It’s building a backdoor collapse. Slowly. Qui- etly.” “KORA?” Maja nodded grimly. “They’ve infected key nodes: Deutsche Bundesbank, MI6, BND, even Swedish Riksdag has fingerprints on it. But they don’t just want chaos. They want a reset.” The Jotun Protocol “Who’s they?” “You already know.” She slid over a grainy photo: six people at a diplomatic summit. Faces familiar from headlines, war tribunals, Davos panels. “These aren’t politicians anymore. They’re shareholders.” Erik tapped the screen. “And why send me a ghost signal?” Maja hesitated. Her fingers tightened around the coffee cup. “Because you’re embedded in the Jotun source code. Part of the failsafe.” “No,” he said coldly. “That project was buried. Burned. We all agreed.” “And yet here we are.” She leaned in. “There’s a leak in the Five Eyes network. KORA knows you’re alive. The moment I decrypted that file, they knew.” “Then we’re already dead.” Before she could reply, the front window of the café exploded inward with surgical precision. A sniper round, a .338 Lapua, suppressed, punched through Maja’s head, spraying Erik’s jacket with blood and shattered bone. She collapsed against the table, her coffee cup rolling in a lazy circle, spilling black liquid like an omen. Thanos Kalamidas Erik moved before thinking. He grabbed the data stick from under her palm, vaulted over the table, and shoved a stunned barista behind the counter. Another round tore through the espresso machine. Superheated steam hissed, mask- ing his exit through the kitchen. Back alley. Cold air like knives in his lungs. He ducked just as a burst of fire hit the wall over his head, short-barrelled MP7, fired on semi. These weren’t amateurs. Clean-shaven, unremarkable, cor- porate kill units, private sector muscle trained in Is- raeli kill-houses and Russian ghost cities. Erik slid into a pile of trash bins, yanked a broken pipe loose, and threw it hard across the alley. One of the shooters turned toward the noise, just enough and Erik was on him. He closed distance fast, hands low. Disarmed him in two brutal moves, elbow to trachea, knee to tem- ple and turned the submachine gun against the sec- ond. Two rounds to the chest, one to the neck. Blood hissed on snow. He rifled the first man’s pockets: encrypted badge, The Jotun Protocol RFID tag for an elevator system, and a card with a stylized J burned into the plastic. “Jotun,” Erik whispered. Sirens in the distance. No time to clean up. He vanished into the night, pockets bleeding se- crets. * * * * * * * hours later. swedish Border. Erik changed trains twice, switched jackets, shaved his beard with a pocket knife in a train bathroom. The data stick was now sewn into the lining of his boot. By dawn, he was in Malmö. By midday, on a ferry to Travemünde, Germany. His mind replayed Maja’s last words. You’re embed- ded in the code. Somewhere in the shattered remains of the Cold War was the truth of what they did, what they creat- ed. They had made Jotun to destroy syndicates like KORA. But now it had become their weapon. Thanos Kalamidas The wolves had taken the leash. * * * * * * * Berlin next. One man remained who could decrypt the old fail- safes. Nigel Barrow. Ex-MI6. Paranoid. Dangerous. The kind of man who might shoot you for knock- ing twice. Or worse, he might open the door. The Jotun Protocol chapter 2: The Berlin Burn Kreuzberg, Berlin. Three days later. The city still wore the scars of another century’s se- crets. Rain slicked the cobblestones as Erik Nordin stood beneath the overhang of a graffiti-tagged tenement in Kreuzberg, his breath visible in the chill. Streetlights flickered like bad memories. He scanned the third- floor balcony across the street, saw the faint flicker of a signal, a single light blinked twice, paused, and blinked once more. Nigel Barrow. Or a trap wearing his face. Thanos Kalamidas Erik crossed the street, passed a homeless man humming an out-of-tune hymn, and entered the crumbling stairwell. Every creak in the rusted railing felt deliberate. Psychological pressure. A message. You’re being watched. He knocked once, then twice. No answer. He waited, then placed his palm on the door. Pres- sure-sensitive panel. Still operational. That told him enough. Click. The door opened. Darkness. A shotgun muzzle greeted him, point-blank. “Step in or step out, Nordin. Your indecision’s em- barrassing.” Barrow Voice like gravel soaked in gin. Erik stepped inside. The shotgun lowered, revealing a scarecrow of a man in a faded tweed jacket and one glass eye that glinted unnaturally. Papers littered the flat. Piles of old radios, red-thread maps, and hard drives sealed The Jotun Protocol in vacuum bags. The whole apartment smelled of dust, cordite, and distrust. “I saw your name embedded in something I thought died in ’03,” Erik said. “Jotun. It’s back.” Barrow exhaled sharply, like a man finally seeing his cancer show up on a scan. “They’ve activated the failsafe routines,” he said. “Which means the world’s on the edge and your name’s been given to the wolves.” “I didn’t authorize that code.” “You did, lad. When you signed the clearance forms. Buried in the language. A legacy fingerprint. Yours was chosen because you’re clean. Off-grid. Scandinavian neutrality worked in your favour.” Barrow turned a laptop toward Erik. Onscreen: A black-and-white cascade of compromised networks. European Commission. World Bank. US Federal Re- serve. Digital worm signatures replicating hourly. The Jotun Protocol wasn’t just running, it was learn- ing. And it had targets. Thanos Kalamidas “It’s not just a kill-switch now,” Barrow continued. “It’s a viral governance override. It embeds itself in trade algorithms, defence AI, energy controls. When KORA flips it, governments won’t collapse. They’ll be bought in real-time by anonymous shell corps regis- tered to the Caymans.” “Who controls it?” Barrow grimaced. “Used to be state-owned. Now it’s private. Some of the same bastards who funded it the first time. Only now they wear tailored suits and sponsor economic forums.” Erik sat forward. “I need access. Core access.” “You can’t access it remotely. They house it on a tiered cold-server system in the Arctic. Off-grid. Physical redundancy. Probably NATO infrastructure rebranded as research stations. You’ll need to breach the firewall node.” “Where’s the node?” Barrow hesitated. “Under Berlin.” Erik blinked. “You’re joking.” “I never joke about war. The node is buried be- The Jotun Protocol neath a decommissioned U-Bahn line. They used it as a Cold War relay hub. Now it’s repurposed by a shell company called Kalmar Assets. Sounds Swed- ish. Isn’t. You’ll have five minutes max before it alerts their intrusion system.” Erik stood. “Draw me a map.” * * * * * * * Twelve hours later. midnight. The abandoned U-Bahn tunnel smelled of wet stone and rusted metal. Erik moved like a shadow between dead trains, carrying nothing but a compact satchel, a Glock 19 with a compensator, and the kind of anger that quiet men cultivate for years. He reached the blast door. Old NATO issue. Two biometric locks. Barrow’s custom spoof module worked for exactly four seconds before the internal system realized it was being tricked. Too late. Erik was already inside. The server room was lit like a morgue. Rows of humming towers, cool blue lights blinking in a slow, Thanos Kalamidas reptilian rhythm. At the center: the node, a server stack built around a hardened data core the size of a coffin. He inserted Maja’s data stick into the interface. Decrypting. Root access requested. Error: External user flagged. Then a second message appeared. Flashing. Hello, Erik. We’ve been watching. His blood went cold. Lights snapped on across the room. A voice, deep, synthetic, filled the chamber. “You should have stayed in the woods.” Gunfire erupted from the ventilation shafts above. Erik dove behind the server stack as rounds shred- ded the air. Three shooters dropped from the ceil- ing—exosuit-enhanced, carbon masks, high-end PMC tech. KORA had sent the elite.