The command center glowed in the darkness, monitors cycling through their quiet protocols while the rest of the house slept.
Lincoln didn’t sleep.
He’d made Morgan stop three hours ago, practically carried her up the stairs when she’d started reciting coordinates with her eyes already closing. An hour, he’d told her.She needed to sleep for an hour. She’d protested, but exhaustion had won. She’d been asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow in his bed.
Then he’d come back down here to stare at data that refused to make sense.
They were running out of time. If they didn’t have a breakthrough today, the contingency plan was going to become the only option. If they weren’t careful, that wouldn’t be an option either—the noose could tighten before they could get out.
His tertiary monitor displayed his monitoring dashboard—the network of trip wires he’d set up after Montana to alert him if anyone ran his face through recognition databases. But it had been running constantly since they got back, and nothing. No unusual queries. No flags on his identity. No indication that anyone unusual was looking for Lincoln Bollinger.
He allowed himself to believe they’d dodged that particular bullet.
A chime cut through the silence, and Lincoln spun. That wasn’t the chime he’d been expecting. Not even the one he’d been dreading.
Not the security system. Not the federal contacts who’d been hounding him with increasing desperation. This came from a different channel entirely—one of the darker corners of his network, a communication pathway he hadn’t used in years.
Lincoln’s fingers found the keyboard before his conscious mind fully registered the alert.
The message was short. No greeting, no signature, just text and an attachment.
Heard you’re looking for ghosts in the machine. I might have a mirror. Consider us even.
Specter.
Lincoln had done Specter a favor once. A significant one. The kind that created debts. Generally, Lincoln didn’t collect on those debts. Dancing with the devil had a price.
But it looked as if that debt was being repaid, and if ever Lincoln was willing to dance with the devil, it was now.
He opened the attachment.
The dark web file was massive. Dense. Lincoln’s systems took several seconds to decompress and catalog the contents, and when the structure finally resolved on his screen, his breath caught.
Personnel records. Security clearances. Assignment histories. Federal employees across six different agencies, their entire professional lives laid bare in classified detail. And buried in the data—addresses. Facility locations. The kind of information that didn’t appear in any public database because it wasn’t supposed to exist outside the most secure government servers.
This wasn’t legal to possess. Wasn’t legal to look at. The mere act of breathing in the same room as this information could probably get him sent to prison.
Lincoln hesitated for exactly one second.
“Gary, save this file to local drive seven.”
“I’m required to point out that this file appears to contain classified federal personnel data,” Gary’s measured voice responded. “Downloading it would violate approximately eleven federal statutes, including sections of the Espionage Act.”
“Noted. Save it anyway.”
“Lincoln, the legal exposure here is significant. If this file is traced back to your systems?—”
“It won’t be. Specter doesn’t leave trails, and neither do I.” Lincoln was already pulling up his cross-referencing algorithms. “Save the file, Gary.”
A pause. The kind of pause Gary used when he wanted Lincoln to know he disapproved.
“File saved to local drive seven. For the record, I think this is a terrible idea.”
“Your objection is noted and ignored. Now run cross-references against the coordinates Morgan’s been reciting.”
The algorithm began its work, comparing latitude and longitude against the classified facility addresses.
The first match appeared almost immediately.
