“That’s also unusual for you.”
Smartass. “Just pull the records.”
The data populated his third screen. Library science degree from University of Montana. Seven years at WhitefishPublic Library. Digital catalog management. Basic database administration. A workshop certificate in cybersecurity fundamentals from two years ago.
Lincoln read through it twice. His leg had started bouncing under the desk—a habit he usually suppressed, but the command center was empty and Gary didn’t judge.
“She built a local library database,” Lincoln said slowly. “Managed digital archives. Took a weekend course on firewalls.”
“Her technical profile suggests competence in database management and basic security protocols. Solid work. Nothing extraordinary.”
“She found me on the dark web.” Granted, not very deep in it. He hadn’t been hiding. “Could she have coordinated a simultaneous breach of six federal agencies?”
Gary’s pause was longer than the programmed quarter-second. “No.”
“Explain.”
“The fire sale required penetration of six distinct security architectures, each designed by different contractors with different protocols. The attack showed evidence of at least four separate intrusion methodologies working in parallel. Conservative estimate: a team of five to seven elite-level hackers with months of preparation.” Another pause. “Morgan Reece’s skill set does not align with any of those requirements. She’s a librarian who knows her way around a database. She’s not a federal-level threat.”
Lincoln stood up. The chair rolled back and hit the wall with a soft thump. He needed to move, needed his body to do something while his brain worked through the implications.
The command center was twenty feet long. He paced it.
“Timeline,” he said. “Cross-reference Morgan’s disappearance with the attack window.”
“Morgan Reece was last active online four days ago. The fire sale began two days after that—a concentrated twelve-hour push. The attack terminated the same morning you conducted the extraction from the Denver warehouse.”
Lincoln stopped pacing. “What’s the statistical probability of that correlation being coincidental?”
“Less than 0.3 percent.”
He stood in the middle of his command center, surrounded by the blue glow of six monitors and the steady hum of servers he’d built himself, and felt the shape of it click into place.
She hadn’t run the attack. She’d beeninthe attack. Present for every moment of it. Held in that warehouse while hackers tore through federal systems—and forced to watch. To absorb. To remember.
“They used her as a hard drive.” He returned to his workstation but didn’t sit. His hands gripped the edge of the desk, knuckles whitening.
Morgan had perfect recall. Her brain was a server that never crashed, never corrupted, never lost a file. Whoever had taken her hadn’t needed to download anything. They’d just needed her to look at it.
He pulled up the federal reports he’d dismissed days ago. Called them reconnaissance without extraction. Access without action. No data stolen. The agencies had celebrated their victory, congratulated themselves on systems that had held against a sophisticated attack.
They had no idea they’d lost anything at all. Lincoln hadn’t either until now.
Every piece of information those hackers had accessed was now stored in Morgan’s memory. No digital trail. No server logs. No evidence that anything had been taken. The perfect crime, executed with a tool no security system had ever been designed to detect.
“Gary, what would be the value of information extracted from those six agencies?”
“Impossible to calculate without knowing specific data accessed. However, potential categories include: witness protection locations, ongoing investigation details, classified financial records, personnel files, and interagency communication logs.” Gary paused. “Depending on scope, such information could be worth tens of millions to interested parties. Potentially hundreds of millions if it includes witness locations or undercover agent identities.”
Tens of millions. Hundreds of millions. Locked inside the head of a woman who couldn’t forget any of it even if she wanted to.
Lincoln sat down slowly.
He pulled up the wanted bulletin again. Morgan’s face. The charges.
“They framed her,” he said.
The frame job was almost as elegant as the theft itself. Her digital fingerprints planted on every breach attempt. Her face on wanted posters. Even if she escaped—which she had—she couldn’t go to the authorities without being arrested. The evidence would show her accessing those systems, even though she’d only been forced to watch. The agencies would never know the difference.
