Chapter 6 - Subject, Not Suspect
The folder contained eight years of surveillance summaries.
There were photographs of my apartment building, airport departure records, and annotated transcripts of speeches I had delivered at logistics conferences.
Several entries were fabricated.
One claimed I met an overseas courier in Brussels on a day when I was undergoing surgery in Virginia.
Another listed an account in my name that I had never opened.
Someone had spent years assembling the outline of a criminal case against me.
“Why keep it ready?” Vance asked.
“To use when I became inconvenient,” I answered.
The phrase felt old in my mouth.
In Richard's house, being inconvenient had always meant having an independent thought.
Our forensic team found printer marks suggesting the file had been prepared in offices servicing Halcyon.
They found something else as well.
The earliest surveillance order predated my classified assignment.
Whoever started watching me had done so before my work threatened the contracting scheme.
Vance leaned back in his chair.
“That means there was another reason.”
“My mother.”
He said nothing, which was answer enough.
We located Tyler's vehicle on security footage entering the storage complex.
A second car followed three minutes later.
The driver wore a ball cap and kept his face hidden.
But he made one mistake.
He lowered the sun visor as he passed the camera, revealing an access badge clipped to his jacket.
The badge belonged to a contracting administrator in Richard's command.
We filed the evidence and sought to preserve the administrator's accounts.
Richard attempted to reach the unit before the investigators could.
He arrived claiming family concern.
The local commander refused to hand over the files.
By evening, Richard had begun calling senior officers to describe me as unstable.
One recipient forwarded the message to the oversight counsel.
The transcript was clinical and devastating.
“My stepdaughter has a history of imagining threats,” Richard had said.
“She'll manufacture anything to punish me.”
There it was again.
The family's oldest defense against a daughter who remembered too much.
Then Ana Ruiz's encrypted account sent a scheduled message.
It contained only a location, a time, and a line from a children's rhyme.
THE BLUE ROOM HAS TWO DOORS.
The second door was not on the annex diagram.
May you like
And the time was twenty minutes away.
