Chương 3
“About Orion?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
His eyebrows tightened.
“No?”
“I was not allowed to.”
“You could have found a way.”
“That is what people say when they do not understand the consequences.”
He leaned back.
“You think I would have exposed you?”
“I think you would have tried to protect me.”
The answer surprised him.
“And that was the problem.”
He stared at the table.
For a moment, he looked older than I remembered.
Not weaker.
Just tired.
“My entire career was built around protecting people.”
“Your entire career was built around controlling situations.”
“That is unfair.”
“Yes.”
I let the silence sit.
“Because it is also true.”
He rubbed his forehead.
It was a small movement.
One I had rarely seen from him.
My father did not show exhaustion.
He converted it into anger.
But there was nowhere for anger to go now.
“I lost your mother because I trusted the wrong people.”
I looked up.
He had never said that before.
Not once.
“She died because of a mistake in an intelligence report,” he continued.
“I was told the area was secure.”
His fingers tightened around the edge of the table.
“I believed it.”
The memory came back to me.
Not the funeral.
Not the officers standing in rows.
The smell of her perfume on a scarf I found weeks later in the back of a closet.
I had kept that scarf for years before finally admitting I could not remember her voice anymore.
“I spent years thinking you blamed me,” I said.
My father looked confused.
“Why would I blame you?”
“Because you looked at me like I was another mistake waiting to happen.”
His face changed.
Pain crossed it quickly.
Then he hid it.
“I looked at you like I was afraid of losing the only family I had left.”
The honesty of it made me uncomfortable.
Anger was easier.
Anger had rules.
Pain did not.
Before I could answer, the conference room door opened.
Admiral Reid stepped inside with a folder under his arm.
“I have something.”
My father immediately stood.
“What?”
Reid placed the folder on the table.
“Three months ago, Orion intelligence detected unauthorized attempts to access archived mission records.”
I looked at the folder.
“Why was I not informed?”
“Because the attempts stopped.”
“That does not mean the threat ended.”
“No.”
Reid opened the folder.
“That was our mistake.”
My father looked at him sharply.
“You knew about this?”
“I knew about suspicious activity.”
“And you said nothing?”
“I did not know the target was Orion.”
The admiral’s voice remained calm, but his eyes changed.
“I know now.”
Inside the folder were printed reports.
Not digital copies.
Printed.
That detail bothered me.
People printed things when they wanted them to exist outside a system.
Or when they did not trust the system.
I picked up the first page.
The access attempts were random at first.
Old files.
Inactive accounts.
Archived operations.
Then one file stood out.
My file.
My name appeared beside a date.
The date was two weeks before my last mission.
Someone had searched for me.
Not my credentials.
Me.
“Why would they look for my record?” I asked.
Nobody answered immediately.
My father did.
“Because they needed a person to blame.”
I looked at him.
He did not look away.
That was new.
“What else?”
Admiral Reid opened another document.
“This is where things become complicated.”
He slid it toward me.
A photograph was attached.
It showed a man entering a secure facility.
I recognized him immediately.
Not because I knew him well.
Because I had spent years watching people like him.
Lieutenants.
Analysts.
People who carried information instead of weapons.
The man in the picture was Daniel Voss.
My father’s executive officer.
My father saw my expression.
“You know him?”
“No.”
The answer came too quickly.
Everyone noticed.
I corrected myself.
“I know of him.”
My father sat down slowly.
“Lena.”
I stared at the photograph.
Daniel Voss had been in the background of my life for years.
At ceremonies.
At briefings.
At family events where he stood near my father and remembered details my father forgot.
He had once brought me coffee during a sixteen-hour planning session because he noticed I had not eaten.
A small kindness.
A normal human thing.
Those were the details that made betrayal difficult.
Not the enemy.
Not the stranger.
The person who knew where you kept your coffee mug.
The person who knew when you were lying about being tired.
The person who knew which door you entered through.
“Where was this taken?” I asked.
Admiral Reid looked at the report.
“Restricted facility.”
“When?”
“Forty-eight hours before the operation failed.”
My father closed his eyes briefly.
Then his phone rang.
Nobody moved.
The sound felt wrong in that room.
Too ordinary.
He looked at the screen.
His face changed.
“Who is it?” I asked.
He did not answer.
He stood.
“General?”
My father stared at the number.
“It is Voss.”
The room went silent.
He answered.
“Daniel.”
For several seconds, nobody heard anything except my father’s breathing.
Then his expression shifted.
Not anger.
Not confusion.
Fear.
“Where are you?” he asked.
A pause.
“Do not move.”
Another pause.
My father looked at me.
Then at Admiral Reid.
“He says he has proof.”
Admiral Reid stepped closer.
“Put it on speaker.”
My father did not.
That bothered me more than it should have.
“Daniel,” my father said slowly.
“What proof?”
His face became completely still.
Then he whispered.
“That is impossible.”
I stood.
“What?”
My father looked at me.
The color had drained from his face.
“He says the person who ordered the leak was not trying to frame you.”
Nobody spoke.
My father gripped the phone tighter.
“He says they were trying to hide what you discovered before the mission.”
The words settled over us.
A new possibility.
May you like
A worse one.
Because if I had not been the target, then I had been standing too close to something someone desperately wanted buried.
