Chapter 9 - The Woman I Watched Die
I watched Anna die.
That fact became the wall I kept hitting.
I stood in the delivery room.
Heard the monitors change.
Watched doctors perform CPR.
Held Lily while another physician told me my wife was gone.
There was a body.
So how could Anna be speaking nineteen years later?
Chen found the answer buried inside military medical records.
The woman who delivered Lily was legally registered as Anna Walker.
But her fingerprints were never taken.
Her DNA was never archived.
Her original medical file disappeared three days after death.
“Are you suggesting my wife wasn’t Anna?”
“I’m saying we can’t prove she was.”
I hated Chen for seven seconds.
Then I hated myself for needing certainty more than truth.
I returned to my old photographs.
Anna avoided cameras.
Always had.
I used to tease her.
No childhood pictures.
No college friends.
No parents at our wedding.
She claimed they were dead.
I accepted every absence because I had absences of my own.
Two people with classified pasts can mistake secrecy for compatibility.
Then Kane found something.
Our marriage license listed Anna’s birthplace as Madison, Wisconsin.
No matching birth record existed.
The woman I married had never legally existed before age twenty-three.
“What was her real name?”
No one knew.
Reyes sat beside me.
“Daniel, we ran identities like that all the time.”
“I know.”
That was exactly what frightened me.
Lily refused to answer the anonymous messages.
Then another arrived.
YOUR FATHER DIDN’T LEAVE SPECTER FOR YOU.
HE WAS REMOVED.
I read it over her shoulder.
“That’s a lie.”
Reyes looked away.
I noticed.
“What?”
“Daniel…”
“What?”
He confessed.
After Anna died, I did submit my resignation.
But before it was processed, the Pentagon had already prepared termination paperwork.
Why?
Because someone inside Specter believed I was compromised.
“By whom?”
“Anna.”
I stared at him.
“She filed a report three weeks before Lily was born.”
“What did it say?”
Reyes swallowed.
“That Daniel Voss had become psychologically unstable and posed a threat to ORACLE GLASS containment.”
My chest tightened.
My wife had secretly reported me.
Or someone using her identity had.
Brooks entered carrying a forensic result.
The anonymous messages sent to Lily had bounced through seven countries.
But the original device connected once to a network in Virginia.
A private residence.
Owned by Senator Rebecca Hale.
We drove there.
The house was empty.
Inside the basement stood an ORACLE GLASS terminal.
Still active.
On its central screen were two live behavioral profiles.
One labeled:
DANIEL VOSS — RESPONSE PROJECTION 91%.
The other:
LILY WALKER — EMERGING SUBJECT.
My daughter had not been attacked merely to activate me.
Someone was studying how she would respond too.
Then the screen refreshed.
A third profile appeared.
MARA VOSS — DEVIATION EVENT.
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Status:
TERMINATE.
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