Chapter 3 - Ghosts Of Oregon
I felt the breach at 14:27 that afternoon.
Not on my servers. On something much older. Much more fragile. A dead-man switch I'd buried in twelve layers of encryption, tucked away in a server farm under the Cascade Mountains, that hadn't been pinged in eleven years. Not since the day I'd walked away from that life and became Morgan Hale. Not since the day I'd buried the girl I used to be.
The ping was tiny. Almost invisible. A single query, routed through seven layers of proxies, bouncing off cell towers in three countries, asking a question no one should have even known to ask:
WHO IS LILA MERCER?
My coffee went cold in my hand. The holographic displays in my command center flared red, emergency alerts stacking up like bodies on a battlefield. I didn't move. I just stared at those three words on the screen, and for the first time since I'd revoked Evelyn's clearance, since Grant had blown up my door, since this whole war had started—I was afraid.
Because Evelyn Strickland had just found the one door I'd welded shut and buried under concrete. She'd found Lila.
"Director," my lead analyst said over the comms, her voice tight. "We traced the query. Originated from a Georgetown IP. Registered to Evelyn Strickland. She's been digging for forty minutes. She's got the 2014 police report from Astoria. The coroner's inquest. The obituary. She hasn't connected the final dots yet—but she's close. Maybe hours. Maybe minutes."
I closed my eyes. I could smell the rain. The Pacific Northwest cold that seeped into your bones and never really left. I could hear the sirens. The screaming. The sound of my father's voice telling me to run, run and don't look back, Lila run—
"Stop her," I said. My voice was steady. Too steady. The voice I used when I was ordering drone strikes or approving wetwork. The voice that didn't belong to Lila Mercer. "Every server she's touched. Every backup. Every cloud storage account. Burn it. All of it. Leave nothing but ash. And get me Agent Marlow. Now."
Ten seconds later, the hologram of a woman in her late thirties with short-cropped auburn hair and a scar slicing through her left eyebrow flickered to life in front of me. Sarah Marlow. My oldest friend. The only person alive who knew both names. The only person who'd been there that night in Astoria.
"You felt it too," she said without preamble. Her face was grim. "Evelyn Strickland just bought a one-way ticket to the one place you told everyone never to go. What do you need?"
"She's got the police report," I said. "She's got the coroner's file. She doesn't have the truth yet. But if she keeps digging, she will. And if she finds out what really happened that night? She doesn't just take me down, Sarah. She takes down everything. Black Iris. The program. Fifteen years of operations that kept this country safe. All of it goes up in smoke because a bitter old woman wants her clearance back."
Marlow nodded. She was already pulling on her jacket in the hologram feed, strapping a sidearm to her hip. "I'm on the first jet to Portland. I'll secure the physical records. The courthouse. The cemetery. The witnesses—whoever's left. If Evelyn sends anyone, they hit a wall."
"Do not engage the Stricklands directly," I warned. "Not yet. Evelyn is desperate. Desperate people do stupid things. And stupid things get people killed. Just secure the past. I'll handle the present."
The hologram flickered. Marlow paused, her expression softening for just a fraction of a second—only for me. "You okay, Morgan? Really?"
May you like
I looked at the screen again. LILA MERCER. A name I hadn't spoken out loud in over a decade. A girl who'd died in a car crash on a rainy Oregon highway, according to every official record on Earth. A girl whose identity I'd taken, layer by layer, until there was nothing left of her but a grave and a ghost story I told myself when I couldn't sleep.
"I will be," I said. "As soon as I remind Evelyn Strickland exactly what happens when you dig up a ghost."
