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Noah swept the corners anyway. “Medical’s on lockdown. How the hell did he get in?”
Tuck didn’t answer. He looked back at Claire, heart slamming under his ribs. “You okay, darlin’?”
She nodded slowly, eyes on the body. “Is he dead?”
Tuck tucked away his weapon, breath catching for the first time. “He is. Now, let me check on you.”
UNKNOWN LOCATION – REMOTE MONITORING HUB – SAME TIME
A dozen screens lit the dark. Angles from hallway feeds. Heart monitors. Thermal overlays from Chase Medical’s private servers. All siphoned, bounced, and filtered through a ghost rig.
In the center, one screen showed Room 2. The gun. The shots. The fall. And Tuck Hanlon, standing guard.
A voice crackled from the shadows. Smooth. Modulated. Neither man nor woman. “He was disposable,” it said flatly.
On the far side of the room, Lucien Vos leaned back in his chair, mouth curled in something too cold to be a smile. He watched as Claire’s vitals spiked, then settled. Watched Reid Hanlon appear minutes later in the camera feed, pushing into the room beside his uncle.
Vos tilted his head. “Now we wait.”
The screen flickered, then went still.
CHASE MEDICAL – SECURE CONFERENCE BAY – 1317 HOURS
Reid stood at the head of the table in a fresh Chase uniform. It should have felt grounding, familiar. Instead, it felt like armor.
Across the room, Killian paced slow, controlled lines. Ian sat near the monitors, posture iron-straight, one hand resting against his jaw, watching the security footage loop.
A slow-motion replay showed the infiltrator collapsing inside Claire’s hospital suite. Tuck’s work. “One to the sternum. One to the throat,” Tuck’s voice echoed from an earlier recording. “He was ready to kill her.”
Reid’s jaw tensed. “That wasn’t the sniper.” His voice was quiet.
Killian stopped pacing.
“Different signature,” Reid added. “Different angle. Different method. The shooter on the campus was fast and distant. This guy came to finish what the sniper couldn’t.” He took a breath. “We’ve got at least two.
Ian’s gaze didn’t shift from the screen as he rewound. He watched the shooter’s body jerk backward as the bullets hit. “Three.”
Reid glanced at him. “The bomb.”
Ian nodded once. “Three operators. One for distance. One for insertion. One for chaos. Maybe more. But this was timed, measured, and coordinated.” He leaned forward. “We were lucky. But if I can’t control my house…” He looked at Killian.“Call Martin. I want security upgraded at all Chase facilities and for my family and Kieran’s.”
The door opened behind them. Fuse and Relay entered without ceremony, both carrying tension in their spines.
“We’ve confirmed,” Fuse dropped a drive on the table, “the man Tuck shot entered through the tunnel dressed as a trauma orderly. Badge was cloned off a janitor who hadn’t been in the building since Tuesday. Facial match came up blank. A level-three team was sent to the janitor’s home. They found him dead.” She looked up. “Whoever he is, he’s not in our system.”
Relay stepped beside her. “He didn’t do it alone. Someone inside rerouted the badge verification at 0512 hours. Bounced the signal through a shell server in MedOps.”
“Show me,” Reid said.
Relay spun the screen. A flow map of Chase’s internal security protocols bloomed in pulsing blue. A red pulse blinked at the point of reroute. “That’s the hook,” Relay said. “Executive stack access. That’s not maintenance level. That’s clearance tier two or above.”
Killian frowned, asking Martin to hold. “Which means?”
Fuse looked him in the eye. “Someone high up gave this guy access to the patient roster, the hallway shifts, and Claire’s room code.” Her tone sharpened. “No way in hell he makes it past Sublevel 3 without a handoff.”
The thought that someone within Chase had sold Claire out again churned hot and poisonous in Reid’s chest.
Ian finally turned from the screen. “Start pulling keycards. Every access log from the past seventy-two hours. Double-check anyone who’s already been cleared. If you find overlap with Claire’s route from OR to recovery, you flag it.” He stood. His expression held no softness. “Whoever helped put a man with a gun at her bedside didn’t make a mistake. They made a choice.”
