“That’s his business.” Morgan’s voice was flat. “Evidence destruction for hire. Helping someone who’s about to go down for something they can’t beat in court, so instead of fighting the case?—”
“They hire Randall to make the evidence disappear. For the right price, their legal problems vanish.”
Lincoln turned back to his screens, pulling up one of the facility files alongside Specter’s database. Internal coding systems. Alphanumeric identifiers for case files, storage locations, access protocols.
He cross-referenced it against the strings of data Morgan had been reciting for days—the names and dates and numbers that hadn’t matched anything in any database he’d tried.
“This is why we couldn’t make sense of anything before.” He sat back, staring at the results that now made perfect sense. “The data in your head isn’t raw information. It’s coded. Internal facility references—the kind of shorthand that only makes sense if you already have access to the system it references.”
Morgan moved closer, looking at what he’d found. “So when Randall made me memorize a name and a date and coordinates?—”
“He wasn’t giving you the actual real name or a true location. He was giving you the facility’s internal reference codes. Meaningless to anyone who doesn’t have the key.” Lincoln gestured at Specter’s database. “This is the key. Without it, everything in your head is just noise. With it?—”
“Every piece of data suddenly has a target attached.”
He nodded slowly. Randall hadn’t just been using Morgan as storage. He’d been using her as encrypted storage. A human cipher that couldn’t be cracked without access to classified federal systems.
Lincoln could appreciate the elegance of it all, even as he planned to take the entire network down.
“Give me one of the data strings in your mind. Any of them,” he said. “Let me show you how it translates.”
Morgan’s eyes unfocused slightly, reaching into the catalog. “ECHO-SEVEN-DELTA. March 12. Coordinates thirty-two point two two one seven, negative one ten point nine two six five.”
Lincoln fed the codes into his cross-reference. The facility database returned a match almost immediately.
“ECHO-SEVEN-DELTA translates to a witness protection case file. The coordinates map to Tucson, Arizona.” He pulled up the decoded information. “The real name attached to that case file is Samuel Obasi.”
“So he’s a protected witness?”
Lincoln was already running a search on the name. The results populated his screen.
His hands stopped moving.
Four days ago. Hit-and-run. Tucson.
He stared at the headline, willing it to be a different Samuel Obasi. A coincidence. Anything other than what he knew it was.
“Lincoln?” Her voice had shifted, picking up on his stillness. “What is it?”
She leaned closer to the screen. He watched her eyes find the headline.
Man Killed in Hit-and-Run in Tucson.
“No.” The word came out strangled. “No, that’s not— It could be a different?—”
But Lincoln was already pulling up the article, and there was the photo. A man in his fifties. The name beneath it: Samuel Obasi.
Morgan stepped back from the screen as if it had burned her.
“Randall extracted that from me. And now Sam Obasiis dead.” Her voice was barely audible. “I gave Randall what he needed to —”
“No, that’s bullshit. You didn’t give Randall anything. Hetookit.” Obasi’s death wasnotMorgan’s fault.
“The result is the same.”
Lincoln wanted to argue with her. Wanted to tell her that none of this was her fault, that she’d been tortured and broken and had no choice. But he could see on her face that those words wouldn’t land. Not now. Maybe not ever.
So instead, he said, “All we can do is focus on stopping Randall from doing this to anyone else.”
