Chapter 4
Cross’s call ended without a goodbye.
For a few seconds, nobody spoke. The attacker lay against the far wall, breathing hard, while the phone screen went dark in Elise’s gloved hand. My leg throbbed beneath my jeans, each pulse carrying the hot, wet certainty that I’d opened the wound again.
“Sit down before you fall down,” Elise said.
“I’m already sitting.”
“Then stay committed to it.”
Jake dragged a chair closer with his boot. I lowered myself into it, jaw clenched while Ryan found a first-aid kit in one of the metal cabinets. The room still smelled of burned dust and old coffee, but now I could taste blood where I’d bitten the inside of my cheek.
Elise spread a folder on the bolted table. “I pulled the mission manifest before we left the corridor. It’s a working copy, not an authenticated record.”
“Meaning we can look at it,” I said, “but we can’t trust it.”
“Meaning we can look at it and ask who benefits if we do.”
The first page listed our extraction, the wounded, the equipment recovered, and the civilian entered under the name Elias Venn. I knew the sequence well enough to feel the old night gathering at the edges of my thoughts: dust in my teeth, rotor wash beating the ground flat, someone yelling for a medic.
Then I saw the time.
“That’s wrong.”
Elise leaned over the page. “Which part?”
“Venn’s transfer. They have him aboard before we reached the pickup point.”
Jake’s hand paused over a roll of gauze. “You sure?”
“I was carrying one end of him.”
The answer came out sharper than I intended. I took a breath and pointed to the line. “We had two wounded before the aircraft came in. Then we loaded the civilians. Venn was the last one across the ramp.”
Elise studied the timestamp. “The manifest says he was processed eleven minutes earlier.”
“Not possible.”
“Could the clock have been off?”
“Not by eleven minutes.” My memory was a set of broken images, but that part had edges. The rear ramp shuddering under my knee. A man gripping my sleeve. The noise swallowing every word except one: wait.
I pressed my thumb against the paper. “Somebody moved the entry.”
Ryan finished wrapping my leg. The gauze pulled tight enough to hurt, which was useful. “After the extraction?”
“If the time is false, yes.”
Elise’s eyes stayed on the manifest. “The copy’s revision field is blank.”
“Convenient,” Jake said.
He set the first-aid kit aside and looked at the page, though I could see he wasn’t reading it. His expression had gone distant, the way it did when he was walking through a memory he’d rather leave shut.
“What?” I asked.
“Venn had a photograph.”
I looked up.
Jake rubbed at his jaw. “Small one. Folded in his shirt pocket. A little girl, maybe six or seven. I saw it when we checked him for anything that could cut or blow up. He wouldn’t let the medic take it.”
“You told me he had family.”
“I remember him saying he wasn’t leaving without the second family.”
Elise glanced between us. “Second family?”
“He was talking about people still inside the compound,” Jake said. “I thought it was a translation issue. We had enough going on that night to make every sentence sound like three different sentences.”
“But you went back,” I said.
“We went back for two people he said were with him.” Jake’s voice tightened. “One was a woman. The other was a boy. I don’t remember seeing a girl.”
The photograph sat in my mind like an object I could almost reach. A child’s face, folded away beside a name that might not have belonged to the man carrying it.
“Could the girl have been the boy’s sister?” Ryan asked.
“Could’ve been.” Jake looked at me. “Could’ve been his daughter.”
No one filled the silence after that. The room’s ventilation clicked on, then settled into a low mechanical hum.
Elise turned to a map pinned inside the folder. “Where was the relay?”
“North service corridor,” I said. “Beyond the holding rooms.”
“Venn knew the compound?”
“He knew where he needed to go.” I traced the route with one finger, careful not to smudge the ink. “He kept pushing toward the relay. I thought he wanted the comms panel so we could call the aircraft.”
“Did he know how to use it?”
“I don’t know.”
That was the problem with memory. It could show me his hand on the door, his face turned toward the noise, the child’s photograph hidden somewhere beneath his shirt. It could not tell me what he’d known, or what he’d been trying to reach.
Elise laid a second page beside the map. “The extraction report says nobody entered that corridor after our team moved through.”
I checked the sequence. Our movement was there. The wounded were there. The civilians were counted, then counted again. But the space between one entry and the next was too clean.
“There should be another line,” I said.
“Who?”
“Doesn’t matter. Someone went back toward the relay while we were loading.”
Jake’s gaze met mine. “You remember that?”
“I remember hearing someone behind us. I turned, but the ramp was coming up and I had a man’s weight across my shoulders.” I shut my eyes for a moment, then opened them. “I told myself it was one of the locals.”
“And now?” Elise asked.
“Now I don’t know who it was.”
Ryan came to the table with a small reader and the Meridian badge in a clear evidence sleeve. “The badge has local access history. Not much, but enough to see where it was used before the attacker came through the airport.”
Elise inserted it. A progress bar crawled across the screen, slow as a clock in a hospital waiting room. The office’s blank-blue monitor changed to a list of dates, doors, and facility codes.
One location appeared twice.
“Meridian’s records annex,” Elise said. “Outside the district.”
“Why would an airport subcontractor have access there?” Ryan asked.
“Maybe he didn’t,” she said. “Maybe the badge was borrowed.”
The last entry showed the annex scheduled for demolition at 0600 the next morning.
I looked at the clock on the wall. We had less than a day before the ceremony, and the building would be gone before it.
“Does the badge tell us what’s inside?” I asked.
“No,” Elise said. “It tells us somebody connected to Meridian went there. It tells us when. That’s a lead, not proof.”
Jake leaned over the screen. “Then we find out what they’re so eager to flatten.”
The phrase landed harder than it should have. The dead had become lines in a manifest, the living reduced to doubtful names. Now someone was getting ready to tear down a building before we could ask what it held.
Elise opened a separate audit file on the isolated terminal. “This is from the mission archive copy. The access record may be incomplete.”
“You said the official files could be altered,” I said.
“I said we shouldn’t trust them. We can still see what they claim.”
The screen filled with rows of dates and user credentials. Elise moved through them, comparing the timestamps against the evacuation manifest. I watched the lines slide past, searching for a name, a gap, anything that made the night fit together.
Then she stopped.
Her hand went still on the mouse.
“What?” Jake asked.
Elise looked at me. “This log says your credentials opened the altered manifest.”
I stared at the screen. My name sat beside an access time dated after the medical evacuation.
I had been nowhere near a terminal. I’d been strapped to a stretcher, my leg torn open, watching the ceiling lights pass overhead.
“I didn’t open that file,” I said.
May you like
Nobody answered.
My own name remained on the screen, attached to something I could not remember doing.
