Page 61 of Anchor
Vos smiled, thin and merciless. “Let Ian carry her burden. It will break him faster when she’s gone.”
The line went dead. Heather was left staring at her own reflection in the black screen. The understanding struck. Lucien Vos was responsible for the attempt on her life. Now Heather had to figure out how to spin this.
NSA HEADQUARTERS – DIRECTOR’S OFFICE – 2358 HOURS
The room smelled of stale tension. Director Keating sat quietly, his staff clustered near the wall, wide-eyed and waiting for orders. He didn’t give any.
Instead, Keating leaned back, eyes narrowing as his mind traced the fracture line.Claire Bowman and Operation Emberline.
“What exactly did she see?” he asked finally.
A junior deputy swallowed. “A code anomaly. Embedded echo inside the Emberline intelligence stream. She flagged it and was ordered to stand down.”
“Ordered by whom?” Keating’s voice snapped like a whip.
“Her bureau chief.”
Keating stared, the puzzle piece locking in with a quiet, chilling click. A bureau chief who had long been considered untouchable. He was too smooth and too connected. And suddenly, the silence felt like Vos’s shadow was moving across the room.
Keating’s knuckles tightened against the desk. “If that anomaly was the root, then Emberline wasn’t a mistake. It was engineered. And someone in this agency protected it.”
He rose slowly, his voice cold enough to cut stone. “Find out how deep it goes. Now, before Ian Chase does.”
The aides scattered.
Keating stood alone, staring at the reflection of his own tired face in the window. For the first time in his career, he didn’t know whether the truth was still in his grasp or was already buried under someone else’s war.
The blinds were drawn against probing eyes, but it didn’t matter. The room still felt too exposed. Behind him, aides whispered across tablets, pulling fragments of Emberline reports. Too many holes. Too many redactions. A pattern that looked less like oversight and more like design.
Keating didn’t move. His hands rested on the sill, white-knuckled.
Claire Bowman.Her name was now plastered across every broadcast channel, thanks to Ian Chase. A young analyst who flagged an anomaly and quit after her name was signed on a strike file resulting in civilian deaths. Someone who should’ve been a footnote. Instead, she was shot in daylight on a university campus, and now the world wanted answers.
But Keating knew better than to call it coincidence. He had heard Vos’s name whispered in corners of the agency no one dared shine a light into. Buried ops. Misfiled accounts. The kind of ghost work that left no fingerprints but too many bodies. Now the same shadow had slipped into his office without ever setting foot there.
His jaw flexed. He wanted to call Chase back, to demand every file he had. He wanted to break open the sealed vaults in his own house and drag the truth into daylight. But he didn’t. Not yet. Because if Vos was inside his walls, and if Claire Bowman really had seen it first, then every move he made could already be charted, anticipated, and countered.
Keating exhaled slowly, the sound tight with fury he didn’t show. “Not yet,” he murmured under his breath.
The aides stilled, pretending not to have heard.
Keating stewed in a storm he couldn’t admit aloud, the shadow of Lucien Vos curling tighter around him with every unanswered question.
CHASE HQ – STRATEGIC OPERATIONS ROOM – 0005 HOURS
Ian Chase stood at the wall of screens, their glow brushing hard lines across his face. Loops of the university shooting played, freeze-frames of Claire’s fall against Reid, street-level satellite updates. And overlaid with them was traffic from Chase’s encrypted channels. A trace here, a hesitation there. Tiny gaps. Too neat to be an accident. Too small to be incompetence.
He didn’t move, but his jaw set harder.Vos.
If Vos was reaching into Chase’s secure nets, even a sliver, then the breach wasn’t out there. It was in here, somewhere between his operators and his systems. Somewhere he couldn’t yet name.
Ian slowly drew in a breath. The board stood behind him, waiting for orders. He could feel Killian’s restless stare. But he kept his silence. He couldn’t say it yet, not aloud. Because if Vos was inside these walls, then even speaking the thought risked giving it away.
Ian locked it down inside his chest and turned toward the men and women watching him. He was calm, but the steel underneath him cut clear. “Lock every door. Every terminal. Until I know who’s watching, no one moves alone.”
ICU – 0110 HOURS
Claire clawed her way back through heavy darkness, surfacing slowly, pulled by something warm and steady at her hand. Light stabbed at her eyes. Machines hummed. A dry burn clawed her throat. She tried to breathe, and panic flared when she realized the tube was still there. Her body jolted weakly against the mattress.
