009 — Rhys Beckett · 007 First Light

Here is the straight answer to the 007 First Light 009 question most people come for: yes, 009 dies in 007 First Light. Bond finds his body already cold inside a hideout ship moored at Aleph, during the Mauritania chapter, The Past Never Dies. There is no boss fight and no chase to the death — by the time Bond reaches him, the job is done. The kill is the work of the Blonde Assassins, a pair of hitters on the Webb payroll, sent to silence 009 before he could hand his evidence to MI6.

That reversal is the point. For the opening hours of 007 First Light the game frames 009 as the antagonist Bond must track down, the rogue name at the top of the target list. Then it pulls the rug: standing over the corpse, the question flips from 'how do I stop him' to 'who wanted him dead, and why'. The whole 007 First Light 009 arc is a murder to investigate, not a duel to win — and what Bond pulls off the body turns the story on its head.

009's real name is Rhys Beckett, a former MI6 Double-O whose service file is flagged 'rogue'. For most of the first act of 007 First Light he is defined entirely by that flag: a decorated 00 agent who went dark, and the man Bond and his mentor are dispatched to bring in. Players typing '007 first light 009' the moment he is name-dropped are usually chasing exactly this — who he is, and whether he is friend or enemy.

Beckett is a new original character created for 007 First Light, not a face carried over from the James Bond films, so there is no decades-old movie backstory to lean on. What the game establishes instead is a clean tragic shape: a veteran agent who failed a mission, took the blame, and vanished for more than ten years. That missing decade is the gap the rest of his story fills in — and the reason a dedicated dossier is more useful here than for a legacy character everyone already half-knows.

The 007 First Light 009 backstory really begins with Operation Nightfall — the assignment that broke Rhys Beckett. It failed, Beckett was branded a traitor, and he disappeared. The twist 007 First Light builds toward is that he sabotaged nothing — he discovered that the operation had been compromised from the inside, and ran rather than be silenced for it. He is far closer to a whistleblower than a traitor, and the early missions are deliberately built to make you doubt that right up until the body turns up.

What corrupted Nightfall was THEIA, a quantum-computer intelligence system fed manipulated data so that its faulty predictions looked authoritative. Beckett spent his missing years gathering proof of the tampering — which is exactly why someone needed him dead before he could deliver it.

On who, precisely, pulled the strings, the published guides do not agree, so we flag it rather than pick one: some accounts name Damien Webb as the man who hired the assassins, while others point to Sir Nicholas Webb as the figure who legitimised THEIA's bad intelligence. The Webb family is the throughline; the exact name is single-source and conflicting, and we treat it that way.

The 007 First Light 009 confrontation lands in the Mauritania chapter, The Past Never Dies. Bond and his mentor John Greenway head into Aleph — the black-market town run by the Pirate King Bawma — on the trail of the rogue agent, who has been hiding there under Bawma's protection. If you want the full mission breakdown, the chapter has its own walkthrough; here we focus on what it means for 009 himself.

The trail ends at 009's hideout ship. Aboard it there is even a 'Photo of Greenway' intel collectible — a small, pointed sign of how tangled Beckett's history with Bond's mentor really is, and one of the threads that makes Greenway's own arc land harder later. Through 009's telescope, Bond also spots the HYPERION vessel offshore: the first concrete lead pointing past Aleph toward the Webb conspiracy.

Before he died, Beckett swallowed a set of diamonds — and they are not loot. Bond retrieves them from the body, and they turn out to be the key to a sealed cache of evidence keyed specifically to John Greenway: the kind of dead-drop a Double-O leaves when he knows he will not make it out alive. It is the clearest sign in the game that 009 died on the right side of the story.

That evidence is the hinge the wider plot turns on. It points straight at the Webb–THEIA cover-up and the cloned quantum computer at the heart of the endgame, and it lands hardest on Greenway, who knew Beckett. The fallout pushes Greenway to step back from the 00 programme before he is drawn back in — which is why the 007 First Light 009 thread, dead within a single chapter, ends up shaping the back half of the game far more than a one-mission target has any right to.