Chapter 11 #2
Not whoever. Maude. No doubt on Travis's instructions.
My hands went still on the keyboard. I sat there and let that settle. Travis had filtered what I could see. He'd given me access to his systems concerning Kindt but had carved out specific time windows and hidden them from me.
That wasn't paranoia. Paranoia would be restricting access to entire data sets. This was surgical. He'd removed exactly the windows that corresponded with the external disruptions.
Why? Why would Travis not want me to see that?
I was going to damned well find out.
I worked it from the other side. Kindt's communications weren't filtered.
Travis had given me full access to the enemy's chatter because he had no reason to hide what Kindt's people were saying.
So I pulled every reference to the disruptions from Kindt's internal communications.
Every panicked message, every route change ordered in response, every after-action assessment of what had gone wrong.
It took me twenty minutes. And in those twenty minutes, a word appeared in the intercepts that I'd never seen before.
The Ghost.
That was the name Kindt's people had given to whatever was hitting them. Not a name they'd chosen with respect. A name born from frustration and fear, the kind of label an organization gives to a problem it can't solve.
The Ghost had hit a transport outside Polson. The Ghost had compromised a holding location near Kalispell. The Ghost had disrupted a courier handoff south of Calgary. Each reference matched one of my seven disruptions.
The external variable wasn't a variable. It was a person.
I mapped the Ghost's operational footprint from Kindt's communications. Dates, locations, the geographic spread of every disruption. Then I laid that map over the timeline I'd been living inside for ten days.
My brain already knew what it was going to find. All I was doing now was confirming it.
The night I’d broken in, Travis had come home with a bruise on his face. I cross referenced that with Kindt’s communication data and froze.
Three children had been found at a fire station that same night. A loss attributed to the Ghost.
I checked the rest of the data to match with his injuries since I’d been here. The split knuckles. The bandaged forearm. The stiff shoulder. Every one of them lined up with Ghost activity on the corresponding night.
Travis was the Ghost.
The man who never left his house actually left it every few days to wage a one-man war against the network that had killed my sister.
"Maude. Where is he?"
Silence. Not the processing pause I'd gotten used to over ten days of conversation. Not the dramatic beat she liked to deploy before delivering a piece of information. Just silence.
"Maude. He’s not in the compound, is he? Where did he go?"
"I can't discuss that with you."
Five words. No humor, no warmth, none of the dry wit she'd been directing at me for ten days over sandwiches and blood sugar readings. The voice of a system following an order.
"Is he in danger?"
Nothing.
"Maude. Please. Is he safe?"
"I can't discuss that with you, Sera."
She'd used my name. In ten days, she'd called me by name maybe a handful of times. Now it landed like an apology she wasn't authorized to give.
It also gave me confirmation that I was right on target.
I moved to his chair because mine didn't face the right screens. The data scrolled and updated, and I tried to read it the way he must have read it a thousand times, parsing every piece of communication for the thing you didn't want to find.
Most of it I couldn't fully interpret. His systems were more complex than what I'd been working with on my partitioned access, and the operational feeds moved fast.
It didn't matter. I wasn't reading the data. I was watching the screens because watching was all I had.
My hands were shaking. I pressed them flat against the desk, and I waited.
Every minute was a minute he might not come back. He'd been doing this for eighteen months with no backup, no partner, no one sitting at these screens willing him to walk back through the door.
Except maybe Maude. Who had been here every time, following orders, keeping his secrets, watching a man destroy himself and unable to do anything about it because he'd programmed her to comply.
I didn’t know how long I sat there. An hour, maybe more. Long enough that my back ached from the chair and my eyes burned from the monitors and I'd bitten the inside of my cheek raw.
Then the screens shifted. A feed I'd been watching changed status. The garage sensor on the compound's perimeter log went from idle to active.
I didn't move. I didn't go upstairs and pretend I'd been asleep. I didn't close the screens or return to my workstation or give him the option of walking in and pretending normalcy for me one more time.
I sat in his chair, and I waited.
The control room door opened. Travis came through it and stopped. He was wearing dark clothes, nondescript. His breathing was controlled but too fast.
A scrape ran along his hairline above his left eye, and he was holding his left shoulder wrong, his arm pressed close to his body in a way I recognized by now.
His eyes found me in his chair, in front of his screens, and I watched him read the situation with the immediate understanding that the thing he'd been hiding was no longer hidden.
"I know what you've been doing," I said. "You're the Ghost."