I stop pacing, standing in the shadows of the kitchen, letting the vibration rattle on my thigh for a second beat. A third.
I pull the sat-phone. The screen glows with a single, encrypted alphanumeric string.
Hutchinson.
I don’t answer immediately.
My gaze cuts to the living room. Iris sleeps on the rug, curled onto her side facing the dying fire. The heavy wool blanket sits pulled up to her chin, her breathing deep and even. One hand lies tucked under her cheek, the other resting loosely on the weave of the rug.
She looks impossibly small. Defenseless. A civilian wrapped in wool, trusting a lock she didn’t engage and a man she doesn’t know.
And yet, hours ago, she dismantled my entire psychological profile in three sentences.
You’re lonely.
The words still itch under my skin, irritating a wound I thought had scarred over years ago. Shrapnel, working deeper every time I move.
I step further away from the fire, moving deep into the cold shadows of the kitchen. I press accept.
“Vance.”
“Status.”
Hutchinson’s voice comes through digitized, stripped of humanity by the encryption protocols. It bounces off a satellite twenty thousand miles up and returns sounding like a machine speaking from the bottom of a well.
“Asset is secure. Weather has us pinned for forty-eight hours. Visibility is zero. Roads are impassable.”
“Good. Keep her secure. We have a problem.”
I tighten my grip on the phone. Hutchinson doesn’t call to chat. He calls to deliver bad news or coordinates.
“Elaborate.”
“Toxicology came back on the John Doe.”
I lean against the cold marble counter. The stone sucks the heat from my lower back through my shirt. I check the steady, shallow work of her breathing, monitoring for any change in rhythm.
“And.”
“Inconclusive.”
The word hangs in the silence of the kitchen, heavy and flat.
“That isn’t possible.”
My voice drops, turning hard, scraping the bottom of my register.
“She said he was crashing. Pinpoint pupils. Bradycardia. Respiratory depression. That’s an overdose. That’s textbook.”
“Labs are clean. No opiates. No fentanyl. No heavy metals. No amphetamines. They ran the full panel. The medical examiner is ruling it a cardiac event secondary to blunt force trauma.”
“Trauma doesn’t cause pinpoint pupils.”
“The M.E. says it does if there’s a specific type of brain stem compression. The narrative is set. It was a hit-and-run. The kid’s heart gave out. Tragic accident. End of story.”
I stare at the phone. The hum of the Agency servers bleeds through the background of Hutchinson’s line. The lie is being constructed, brick by brick.
“It’s a cover-up.”
