Total pages in book: 45
Estimated words: 41664 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 208(@200wpm)___ 167(@250wpm)___ 139(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 41664 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 208(@200wpm)___ 167(@250wpm)___ 139(@300wpm)
In my office, I slid into the chair and woke the main rig. The world narrowed in the way it always did when I was where I belonged—my fingers on keys, eyes on moving numbers, and heartbeat finding the tempo that let me move faster than whatever tried to catch me.
Basic checks first, because even though I knew they wouldn’t show anything, I followed my procedures. Public records. County clerks. DMV stubs. Lease agreements. The same boring sprawl I’d skimmed before, but this time I traced every line to its edge.
It held. Too well.
Again, I went a little deeper, looking over the information that had sparked my suspicions in the first place. Clean—but not sterile. Someone had sprinkled just enough dust for her background to look lived-in.
Utility start dates lined up with the lease. Water, power, and internet. The internet package was basic, just enough bandwidth to stream in HD and handle video calls without buffering. No gaming spikes. No late-night spikes. Everything was average. Perfectly average.
And the absence of social profiles still rang like a fire bell.
I let the dead air hang a beat, then went where I already knew I was going.
Federal records.
Not the front doors. Not even the side doors. Those were alarmed for people who wanted to get caught. I worked my way in backward, through contractor portals no one cleaned up when a project ended, past an authentication layer that trusted the wrong kind of certificate, and across a dead-end subdomain that only looked dead. A few more scrapes, and I was under the paint.
I kept my touch light. The DOJ didn’t scream when someone touched their glass; it whispered. If you tripped the wrong flag, the only sign was a silent call to a human who was suddenly having a better fucking day than you.
Two more turns, and I found the archive. The label wasn’t “WITSEC” because they weren’t that stupid. It was something that sounded like a budget line item for courthouse maintenance. But the structure under it was the same book I’d read from the inside when they paid me to make strangers vanish and turn up as someone else.
I keyed in the alias—Lark Whittaker.
The first search returned a polite nothing. I pivoted through the parallel index—the one they thought no one remembered existed—and there it was.
Subject: Carly Nolan.
Current identity: Lark Whittaker.
Program: Federal Witness Security.
Status: Active.
Relocation: Florida—restricted.
The breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding let out slow. It wasn’t relief. More like recognition. The kind that landed heavily and sat there.
I clicked through authorization layers others couldn’t access without clearance, rode the rails of a credential I’d buried years ago and kept alive for just-in-case. The file opened.
The skeleton of the legend lay in neat lines. Birthdate matched her alias. Educational entries aligned to the certificate she’d earned during her eight-week course. Prior employment built out as an event assistant—real enough to answer a phone, but thin enough to avoid deep records. The relocation date matched her last lease start to the day. It ended abruptly right before a new one started here in Crossbend.
And it was all wrong in the ways that mattered.
When I worked as a civilian contractor for the DOJ, legends like this would have gotten me fired. Or worse, gotten someone killed. I’d built airtight covers, wiped real lives clean down to the last fucking library card, and rebuilt new ones from the ground up. My work held. Nobody cracked it.
I zoomed in on the financial scaffolding. Whoever had crafted the history had done just enough to survive a civilian look. But the metadata under the PDF revealed the real story—batch creation windows, template IDs, and a document author field I recognized from a regional office that had once sent me files I had to fix before a witness boarded a plane. I’d taught a class to a handful of their analysts back in the day and left thinking they’d learned. Apparently, someone hadn’t.
I dug into the employment reference Kane’s team called. It only existed on paper. Just enough to pass a phone check. However, the VOIP carrier tied to the line was a private contractor who prioritized government dollars and lowered its standards when a purchase order hit its inbox. The voicemail system header listed a firmware version I knew because I fucking wrote it once for a different agency and never turned the key for the spin-off product they used here.
I closed my eyes for one long second and pictured Lark again. The way she had steadied herself before looking me in the face. How her hands had moved quick and competently as she sorted the mess she’d dropped.
The deeper I dug, the uglier it got. The summary report in her file wasn’t long—WITSEC never wrote novels, just bullets sharp enough to cut. She’d been under since twenty-three months back, relocated after handing the DOJ enough classified material to shut down a private military contractor that had been neck-deep in trafficking and weapons deals.