‘Really?’She nodded politely as her fingers brushed past her notebook until they closed around her encrypted laptop.The one her father had purpose-built for her, days after Meghan’s funeral.
She killed the office wi-fi, then booted into her father’s ghost-net protocol.And typed only a few words into the secure console:
Andrew Bannon + Meghan Forrester
The search was short and showed nothing, no red flags, because she’d already combed every file, every shared email trail, every whisper for a connection, for Meghan’s name.
So why not try something new?
While her boss droned on about crocodiles the size of bathtubs, she keyed in:
Andrew Bannon + Renzo
Just the first name, since she had no last name for the man who’d murdered her cousin, all without any hope that it’d work.She even leaned back in her chair and listened to her boss.‘Did you eat that fish?’
‘Eventually.The guys I went fishing with helped me cut it up, snap-freeze it, and I carried it home in my hand luggage.’
Taryn let out a soft laugh.‘You big game hunter, you.’
Russ chuckled.‘The customs copycats—those quarantine fellas at the airport—didn’t love it.They thought I was smuggling in frozen dinosaurs when I landed back in Canberra.’
The spinner ticked.
Still digging.
Oh, she hated that thing now.
Her boss kept nattering from the couch about crocs sunbaking like retirees, and how small boats barely outrun them.She could recite this story by heart:Crocodile story number seven.
But this time, she couldn’t laugh.Not with her own monster somewhere in the system.And the longer that spinning cursor of doom rolled like a beach ball that went nowhere, the deeper it was trolling for information, the more her patience frayed.
She should’ve called it, shut the lid and let the thread go cold.
But now the spinning thing had her hooked.
It was still searching.
By now, like all the other searches, it should have stopped cold.
Yet, it was still searching.
Then—
Three results pinged.
She clicked the first one.
The screen blinked and showed a plain document.No letterhead.No classification.Just some old metadata with the title:
SEALED FILE – CLASSIFICATION: INTERNAL ONLY
Authorised Access: Restricted
Access Key: [DECRYPTED]
Name:Lorenzo Matteo Caruso
Alias:Renzo
