Chapter 14 - WHAT PETER REMEMBERED
Peter spent his first free days sleeping beneath a window that was never locked.
He wanted the curtain open even at night, as if darkness could swallow the room unless he kept watch.
Walter read to him from old letters and asked no questions about the years they had lost.
He understood that love was not an interrogation.
When Peter volunteered to speak, a trauma-informed investigator arranged short interviews with breaks.
I attended only after he requested me.
His face had changed so much that I first recognized his voice instead of his features.
“You wouldn't leave the valley,” he told me.
“Neither would you,” I said.
He remembered the unmarked helicopter and the black case.
He remembered a civilian with a compass emblem telling Vale that the entire operation could be rewritten as a failed rescue.
Then Peter said something new.
“The case wasn't only evidence of stolen equipment.”
The room grew still.
“It contained the names of people they had marked for removal from witness lists.”
He described files detailing intercepted payments, unauthorized shipment routes, and efforts to blame field commanders when the transactions surfaced.
Among the names was Miriam Shaw.
Another was mine.
A third was Daniel Cole.
Peter's finger moved over the table.
“They argued about you, Commander. One of them wanted you dead because you saw the helicopter.”
I asked who stopped it.
Peter shook his head slowly.
“Wren.”
Wren was the nickname for a woman on the extraction crew who kept disobeying Vale.
“She switched a flight plan. She hid a copy of the manifests. She said a living witness was worth more than a clean story.”
Peter thought her real name was Clara Wynn.
Miriam confirmed that Clara had vanished after helping her escape.
The investigators traced Clara to a distant coastal town where she'd been working as a hospice nurse under her own name.
Her decision to live openly was either extraordinary courage or a sign that someone had finally stopped hunting her.
But before they could reach her, Clara sent Lena a package containing a photograph of the black case.
The note accompanying it held seven words.
There are two copies.
Daniel has one.
I stared at the image.
Daniel's case had been stolen from his study.
If Clara had the other, the people behind Meridian were running out of ways to erase their past.
Then Lena unfolded the note completely.
On the reverse was an address for a storage unit, together with a date.
May you like
Tomorrow.
And beneath the date, one final instruction: Bring Travis Cole.
