Chapter 4 - Task Force Specter Returns
At sunrise, the dead came back to life.
Major Javier Reyes arrived first.
Sixty-one now. Gray at the temples. Limp in his left leg.
Still carried himself like doors should open before he reached them.
He walked into Lily’s room, looked at her once, and whatever warmth had entered his face disappeared.
“Sir.”
“Not here.”
He nodded.
“Daniel.”
Then came Naomi Chen, our former cyberwarfare specialist, who now supposedly ran an agricultural analytics company in Oregon.
Samuel Kane arrived wearing a mechanic’s jacket.
And Evelyn Brooks—Specter’s intelligence analyst—walked in carrying coffee as though we had all met last Thursday instead of nineteen years ago.
Lily stared at them.
I had no way to explain.
Brooks saved me.
“Old military friends.”
Lily typed:
YOU HAVE FRIENDS?
Reyes laughed.
For three seconds, the hospital room felt human again.
Then Chen placed a tablet on the windowsill.
She had recovered eleven frames from the erased surveillance system.
Grainy.
Incomplete.
But enough.
Lily walked toward the science building at 9:08.
At 9:52, Ethan and Brandon followed her into a lower laboratory corridor.
Tyler remained outside.
That contradicted the story.
At 10:04, Tyler ran inside.
At 10:11, he came out carrying blood on his shirt.
Not laughing.
Panicking.
“Tyler didn’t start the attack,” I said.
Brooks nodded.
“He may have interrupted it.”
Next frame.
A fourth person exiting through a service door.
Hooded.
Face hidden.
Height approximately five foot seven.
Too small to be any of the boys.
I looked at Chen.
“The Specter-07 access?”
“Came from that service door.”
Mara.
Or someone using her ghost.
Reyes placed another file beside the tablet.
“We traced the package sent to Lily.”
“Where from?”
“A mailbox in Maryland.”
“Who rented it?”
“No one. Fake identification.”
“But?”
He knew what I meant.
Every fake identity leaves a seam.
Brooks answered.
“The ID photograph belonged to Anna Walker.”
My dead wife.
I stared at her.
“That’s impossible.”
“We know.”
Anna died giving birth to Lily.
I watched doctors cover her face.
I buried her.
Unlike Mara, there had been a body.
Brooks continued gently.
“The package was mailed with an identity created three weeks before Anna died.”
I stopped breathing.
Someone had prepared a false identity in my wife’s name before childbirth.
Before I left Specter.
Before my life changed.
Then my phone rang.
Tyler Whitmore.
I answered.
He was whispering.
“Mr. Walker, I didn’t hurt Lily.”
“Then tell me who did.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Because my father will kill me.”
A door slammed on his end.
Tyler started breathing faster.
“Listen to me. Lily wasn’t attacked because of us.”
“Then why?”
“Because she found out who her mother really was.”
The line went dead.
Reyes and I looked at each other.
Then Lily’s monitor began screaming.
Not because she was crashing.
Because she had sat upright in bed.
May you like
And she was staring at us with pure terror.
She had heard every word.
