Chapter 10 - The Midnight Ledger
The note came with numbers that resembled a shipping schedule.
Ellison's analyst matched them to Meridian invoices billed through three shell companies.
Millions of dollars had been paid for equipment that never passed the tests listed on its certifications.
Some of that equipment had reached training facilities.
Some was sitting in warehouses awaiting release.
None of it should have existed.
Ben had found the discrepancy while helping Celia Ward reconcile an equipment casualty report.
He had planned to turn over an internal ledger to investigators outside Mercer's command.
But he died before the meeting.
The encrypted archive referenced by my bracelet could be that ledger.
The second key, Ellison discovered, was linked to an old authenticated voice sample.
Ben had recorded it in a secure audit session.
Only one former investigator had been assigned to preserve the sample: Celia Ward.
That afternoon Ellison received a tip claiming Ward was alive in Nevada under an assumed name.
Dom suspected a trap.
"Every answer keeps arriving exactly when they want it to," he said.
Ellison agreed not to send a large tactical team without verification.
Instead she made contact through an independent federal liaison.
The woman on the other end knew a phrase Ben used during the audit.
She also knew the first verse of Lily's lullaby.
"I can help you open the archive," she said.
"But don't tell Mercer you're speaking to me."
I asked the question I'd been holding for sixteen months.
"Did my husband die because of this?"
A long silence.
"Ben wasn't driving home from a meeting when his car crashed. He was bringing me evidence."
My throat closed.
"Who stopped him?"
"I never saw the driver," Ward said.
"But I heard the call that ordered it."
Then she spoke the name of the person who had given the order.
It was not Captain Mercer.
May you like
It was the woman who had just signed my hospital security clearance.
