Chapter 9 - STATION NINE
I did not go alone.
That decision may have saved my life.
Vega arranged a discreet surveillance team while Lena and I approached a public road overlooking the old maintenance compound.
Walter stayed behind because I could not ask a father to walk blindly toward the promise of his lost child.
The building looked vacant from a distance, its windows boarded and its chain-link fence bent by years of wind.
But fresh tire tracks crossed the dirt at the service entrance.
Through binoculars I saw two vehicles and a generator cable passing under a steel door.
“This isn't abandoned,” Lena whispered.
“No,” I said.
“And someone wants us to think they control who arrives.”
A figure emerged from the doorway.
It was not Peter.
Richard Vale stood there in an expensive coat, hands clasped in front of him as though waiting for a late guest at a reception.
He called my name across the gravel.
“Commander Mercer, you've made this much harder than necessary.”
I stayed behind the protective barrier.
“Where is Peter Hayes?”
Vale laughed without humor.
“You still believe every life can be rescued.”
“Answer me.”
He gestured toward the doorway.
“Come closer and I'll show you what survived.”
At that instant Vega's team moved in with an executed federal search warrant.
Vale retreated into the building and locked the door.
What followed was not a battle but a grim race to secure people and evidence before they disappeared.
Agents breached the outer entry and found rows of empty filing cabinets, a recently dismantled computer room, and a medical bed with warm sheets.
In a rear office they located an older man suffering from dehydration and confusion.
His identification claimed he was Samuel Price.
He gripped Lena's wrist and whispered that someone had made him memorize a different name.
I knelt carefully beside him.
“Do you remember Afghanistan?”
His eyes moved over my face.
“Mercer,” he said.
For a heartbeat I thought we'd found Peter.
Then he spoke a sentence Peter could never have known.
“The silver compass goes clockwise when the files are moved.”
Vega found a trail of shredded paper leading to a furnace.
The man called Samuel pointed at its ash and began to cry.
“They told me to forget the names,” he said.
“They've moved him again.”
Before we could ask whom he meant, the facility's fire alarm shrieked.
May you like
Smoke spread into the hall.
And from inside the locked control room, someone began hammering on the door.
