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“Okay.” She typed a little more then stopped. “So your cover background has to explain where you’ve been for five years and why you’re coming back. What would make them suspicious?”
He had to admit, that was the exact right way to come at it.
“Being too clean. If my trail looks like a résumé, Arlo will smell it. Real people in this world have gaps. Jobs they don’t list. Stretches where they went dark because they were doing work that doesn’t go on paper.”
“So you want holes in the history.”
“Yeah, but the right kinds of holes. The kinds that say this guy was working but not advertising it.”
She started typing. Fast. “Corporate security contracts for the visible stuff. Real companies, names that hold up if someone picks up the phone and calls. Then gaps between them.”
“That sounds right. And I was thinking military background. Marine, maybe. It’d explain the skill set.”
“That’s a bad way to go.”
He waited.
“Military records are either there or they’re not. If the Diehls run your name through any kind of database, a fake service record will fall apart in minutes.” She shook her head. “You want a background that’s hard to verify, not one that’s easy to disprove.”
Shit. She was right. He’d been thinking about what sounded good rather than what held up under pressure. It was a rookie mistake, and she’d caught it in about three seconds flat.
“Fine. Scratch the military. What about basing me out of Houston?”
“Dallas is better. Bigger transient population, more corporate security firms, easier to disappear into. A guy nobody recognizes in Dallas doesn’t raise questions.”
“Dallas works.”
“Let’s circle back to social media,” she said. “I’m thinking an account that barely gets used. A few posts spread over two years. Nothing personal. A truck. A score from a game. Maybe a repost of a news article about private security trends. Nothing with anything personal about you.”
“That’s good.”
He watched her work. She wasn’t just filling in fields on a form. She was thinking about who this person was. What email provider would a private security contractor use? Not Gmail, too casual. Not a corporate domain, too traceable.
Would he have a LinkedIn? If so, how many connections? What would happen if the Diehl brothers Googled the phone number she set up? Each question landed before he’d even considered it, and she already had the answer worked out.
The woman who couldn’t manage a hello in a conference room was sitting here constructing a human being out of data points, and every choice she made was sharper than the one before it.
He didn’t know what to do with that. The Cassandra from yesterday and the Cassandra in front of him didn’t fit inside the same person.
She also still wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes moved between the three screens and the keyboard, and the few times she did glance in his direction, it lasted about a second before she pulled away. He’d stopped trying to figure out what that was about.
Some things just… were what they were. He didn’t have to understand her to be able to appreciate her skills.
They finished the persona framework in about an hour. She saved the file and reached for one of the coffee cups on the desk, looked into it, and set it back down. Empty.
“That’s a solid foundation,” she said, still looking at the screen rather than him. “I’ll have the full digital trail built out within a day or two. Employment records, references. I’ll make sure you have access to everything before you go in so you know your own backstory cold.”
He nodded. The persona work had gone better than he’d expected. She knew what she was doing, and even if she still couldn’t seem to look at him for more than a second, the work itself was sharp.
She pulled up a different screen.
“Now the hard part.”
Great. “You mean that was the easy part?”
“Much.”
That wasn’t fucking good.
