Plot summary
Four months after the events of Burner , former mercenaries Court Gentry and Zoya Zakharova lay low in Panajachel, Guatemala. Zoya is approached by Russian businessman and family friend Borislava Genrich, who asks her for help with extracting a Russian computer software engineer in Mexico City. Genrich is flagged by an ISR drone nearby, tagging Zoya in the process. Contract killer Scott Kincaid (codename Lancer), who had recently taken part in assassinations of several experts in artificial intelligence and robotics around the world under orders from a mysterious client named Cyrus, is sent to Guatemala but fails to kill Zoya and Court, although he later eliminates Genrich and the engineer in Mexico City.
The CIA assigns senior operations officer Jim Pace to investigate the killings. Accompanied by a Special Activities Center paramilitary operations unit led by Chris Travers, he finds a list with names of the targeted scientists that includes billionaire Anton Hinton, who had survived an assassination attempt in Oxford, England. His chief operating officer Gareth Wren hires former CIA paramilitary ops officer Zack Hightower (Pace and Gentry’s former team leader) as Hinton’s new security chief. They go to Hinton’s residence and lab in Cuba, where they later survive another assassination attempt from a group of Jamaican convicts.
Learning about the assassinations and recognizing Lancer as a former colleague, Gentry asks his former handler Sir Donald Fitzroy for information. He learns that Kincaid is employed by former MI5 officer Jack Tudor, who had founded a risk management company after Fitzroy retired and had taken over his contracts. Fitzroy arranges a meeting with Tudor at his residence in Tulum, Mexico, with Court and Zoya posing as his bodyguards. They are attacked by lethal autonomous weapons (LAWs) sent by Cyrus, killing Tudor.
Gentry tracks down his former employer Matthew Hanley, now working as CIA deputy chief of station in Bogota, Colombia. He informs him about the events in Mexico while giving him a piece of the circuit board from one of the killer robots Zoya had disabled. Hanley gives the circuit board to Pace, who finds it to be manufactured by a company based in Hong Kong; they had recently shipped some components to Florida and Singapore (where Cyrus had set up an operations center for the killings and eliminated the personnel with killer robots afterwards), with a third shipment to arrive in Cuba. Pace asks Gentry to provide countersurveillance as he acts as overwatch for Travers’s team, who examine the shipment at the Havana port and find disassembled parts for killer robots.
Cyrus sends Kincaid to Havana to assassinate Pace with ISR support. Gentry follows him as Travers and his men evade Cuban police officers while leaving the port. Kincaid is captured by Cuban police as Gentry and Pace get away. Zoya captures the ISR drone pilot, who tells them about Cyrus, revealed to be a powerful AI developed by Hinton. The billionaire's plan is to upload the AI into Chinese servers from a Cold War-era Soviet SIGINT headquarters building, while building an army of killer robots to be controlled by Cyrus, who had perceived Hinton's colleagues in the AI industry as a threat and ordered them killed.
Accompanied by three CIA paramilitary ops teams, Pace, Travers, Gentry and Zoya stage a raid on Hinton's lab, battling his killer robots and linking up with Hightower, who had discovered Hinton's plan. Cyrus overrides Hinton's safeguards and attacks the advancing Cuban army, allowing Pace, Travers, and Zoya to corner Hinton in the server room. Pace initially orders Hinton to cancel the upload and instead deliver Cyrus to US servers, but later destroys the server room, deleting Cyrus and disabling all killer robots. Hightower kills Wren after a struggle.
Zoya is captured by Hinton's personal assistant, who is revealed to be a Chinese PLA SSF officer, and is later extradited to Russia. Gentry blames Hinton, who is shot dead by Hightower. He later meets with Hanley in Bogota to work on a plan to rescue Zoya.
