Chapter 23 #2
“This is why we couldn’t make sense of anything before.
” He sat back, staring at the results that now made perfect sense.
“The data in your head isn’t raw information.
It’s coded. Internal facility references—the kind of shorthand that only makes sense if you already have access to the system it references. ”
Morgan moved closer, looking at what he’d found. “So when Randall made me memorize a name and a date and coordinates—”
“He wasn’t giving you the actual real name or a true location. He was giving you the facility’s internal reference codes. Meaningless to anyone who doesn’t have the key.” Lincoln gestured at Specter’s database. “This is the key. Without it, everything in your head is just noise. With it—”
“Every piece of data suddenly has a target attached.”
He nodded slowly. Randall hadn’t just been using Morgan as storage. He’d been using her as encrypted storage. A human cipher that couldn’t be cracked without access to classified federal systems.
Lincoln could appreciate the elegance of it all, even as he planned to take the entire network down.
“Give me one of the data strings in your mind. Any of them,” he said. “Let me show you how it translates.”
Morgan’s eyes unfocused slightly, reaching into the catalog. “ECHO-SEVEN-DELTA. March 12. Coordinates thirty-two point two two one seven, negative one ten point nine two six five.”
Lincoln fed the codes into his cross-reference. The facility database returned a match almost immediately.
“ECHO-SEVEN-DELTA translates to a witness protection case file. The coordinates map to Tucson, Arizona.” He pulled up the decoded information. “The real name attached to that case file is Samuel Obasi.”
“So he’s a protected witness?”
Lincoln was already running a search on the name. The results populated his screen.
His hands stopped moving.
Four days ago. Hit-and-run. Tucson.
He stared at the headline, willing it to be a different Samuel Obasi. A coincidence. Anything other than what he knew it was.
“Lincoln?” Her voice had shifted, picking up on his stillness. “What is it?”
She leaned closer to the screen. He watched her eyes find the headline.
Man Killed in Hit-and-Run in Tucson.
“No.” The word came out strangled. “No, that’s not— It could be a different—”
But Lincoln was already pulling up the article, and there was the photo. A man in his fifties. The name beneath it: Samuel Obasi.
Morgan stepped back from the screen as if it had burned her.
“Randall extracted that from me. And now Sam Obasi is dead.” Her voice was barely audible. “I gave Randall what he needed to —”
“No, that’s bullshit. You didn’t give Randall anything. He took it.” Obasi’s death was not Morgan’s fault.
“The result is the same.”
Lincoln wanted to argue with her. Wanted to tell her that none of this was her fault, that she’d been tortured and broken and had no choice. But he could see on her face that those words wouldn’t land. Not now. Maybe not ever.
So instead, he said, “All we can do is focus on stopping Randall from doing this to anyone else.”
Morgan looked at him. The guilt was still there, raw and visible. But underneath it, something harder was forming.
“Pull up the Denver information,” Morgan said. “The dates for that location are coming up the soonest.”
Lincoln isolated the Denver coordinate. The facility information populated his screen—location, classification level, the sparse details from the leaked database.
“Thirty-two hours from now. Give or take.”
Thirty-two hours.
“We have to make a move against Randall now,” Lincoln said. “While we still have the advantage.”
“Do we have an advantage?” Morgan’s voice was careful. “What about Montana and facial recognition software? If Randall’s people identified you—”
“They didn’t.” Lincoln gestured at his tertiary monitor. “I’ve had trip wires running since we got back. If anyone had run my face through recognition databases, I’d know. There’s been nothing. No alerts. No flags.”
Morgan studied the silent monitor. “So he doesn’t know who you are.”
“He doesn’t know you’re with me, he doesn’t know we’ve cracked his coding system, and he doesn’t know we’ll be coming for him in Denver for that next job you just mentioned.
” Lincoln turned back to the main screen.
“That’s three distinct advantages we didn’t have an hour ago.
But the Denver job happens in thirty-two hours, whether we’re ready or not. ”
“So, what’s the plan?”
“First, I dig up anything I can about Randall himself, given the breakthrough we had today. There are a lot of new directions I can look now.”
“But we have to catch him in person.” She started pacing back and forth.
“Yes, that’s why Denver comes back into play.
We have to do this all as soon as possible.
And we can’t tip off law enforcement. Even if they believed us about Randall and they ignored how we got this info, even if you weren’t on their wanted list—we don’t know if Randall has people inside federal agencies. ”
She paused. “If we tell them what we’re doing, we might be handing him a warning.”
“And I can’t stop the operation remotely.
These facilities are air-gapped. No external network access.
Whatever Randall’s people do when they go in, it’s physical.
Hands on evidence.” Lincoln pulled up a map, zooming in on the Denver coordinates.
“Which means we have to be there. Set up surveillance on the facility. Document who goes in, what they do, how the operation works. Get footage that proves what’s happening. ”
“And then?”
“Then we have evidence that exposes the whole thing. Something concrete enough that it doesn’t matter who Randall has inside the agencies. Something that forces action.” He turned to face her. “We catch them in the act, and we make sure the right people see it.”
Morgan was quiet. Lincoln watched her gaze drop to the scars on her forearms—the ones Randall had put there. Denver. She was going to have to go back to the city where she’d gotten them.
“Surveillance on a facility we’ve never seen,” she said slowly. “In the city where Randall runs his operation. In thirty-two hours.” She met his eyes. “That’s a thesis statement, not a full essay.”
“No,” he admitted. “It’s not. Not yet.” He turned back to his screens, pulling up the Denver facility data again. “But we have thirty-two hours to write one.”
Thirty-two hours to build a plan, get to Denver, and take down an operation that had been running for years.
Lincoln had built empires in less time. He could do this too.