Page 103 of Travis
Beckett didn’t sit. He leaned against the wall with his arms crossed.
“Okay,” he said. “Talk.”
I didn’t sit, either. I stood at the end of the table opposite Hunter because sitting felt like I’d be hiding behind the furniture, and I hadn’t driven here to hide.
“For the past eighteen months, I’ve been running solo tactical operations against Lucian Kindt’s trafficking pipeline. Yes, the same people that killed Naomi.” I kept my voice level. Operational. The language I knew how to use. “I’ve been intercepting courier transports, recovering victims, and disrupting his network across the northern corridor across the state and up into Canada. Kindt’s organization has a name for whoever’s been doing it. They call the source the Ghost.”
Silence.
“The camera was never broken during our meetings,” I said. “I kept it off sometimes because I couldn’t let you see my injuries. The bruise from the server rack was from a man who outweighed me by sixty pounds in a cinderblock building outside Polson. There were other times, other bruises. I knew if you saw them regularly enough, you’d start asking questions. Easier to blame a broken camera.”
Beckett’s arms tightened across his chest. He didn’t speak.
I told them about the first night. Not the details, not the play-by-play. Just the shape of it. Children on my screens that nobody was coming for. My body fighting me the whole way out the door. Going anyway.
“How many times?” Hunter asked. His voice was the same as it always was. Level, economical. But the question underneath it wasn’t casual.
“I stopped counting individual missions around month six. But… dozens. Across the full northern corridor.”
“Dozens.” Beckett pushed off the wall. “Dozens of times you went out alone, no backup, no comms, no support. While we sat in this room and worried about whether you were eating enough.”
“Yes.”
“While I called you every goddamn week to make sure you were still alive.”
“Yes.”
“And you sat there, and you let me worry. You let me make jokes about the camera and nag you about vegetables, and you never once, notoncein eighteen months?—”
His voice broke. Not loudly. Just a fracture in the middle of a sentence that he couldn’t close. He turned away from me and put his hand on the back of a chair and gripped it.
The room was quiet.
“Who stitched you up?” Coop. Always quiet. Always asking the questions no one else thought of, sitting forward with his elbows on the table. His voice was calm, but his jaw was set. “You got hurt. I know it had to have been more than just some bruises.”
“Yeah, it was more than bruises a lot of times. Cracked ribs. Knife wounds, gunshot. I stitched myself up mostly over the bathroom sink.”
Coop closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them, he looked at Hunter.
Hunter hadn’t moved. His gaze was fixed on me with an intensity that I’d seen him direct at operational targets and threat assessments and never, in all the years I’d known him, at a member of his own team.
“You used our friendship as cover,” Hunter said. “The agoraphobia, the isolation, the reclusiveness. All of it was real,but you weaponized it. You knew that if you stayed the man who never leaves his house, none of us would question what you were doing inside it.”
“Yes.”
“You lied to every person in this room. For three years.”
“The Ghost started eighteen months ago. But I’ve been monitoring Kindt’s operation since I built the compound. So yes. Three years.”
“Why.” Not a question from Hunter. A demand.
This was the part where the operational language ran out.
“Because I couldn’t stop.” My voice sounded different to my own ears. Rougher. Stripped of the control I’d been holding since I walked through the door. “I saw children on my feeds, and I went. And then I went again. And it became the only thing that made the guilt bearable, because every time I walked out that door and my body tried to tear itself apart, it felt like payment. Like I was earning the right to keep breathing.”
“Payment for what?” Beckett had turned back around. His eyes were red, but his voice was steady.
“For Naomi. For things I did and didn’t do before she died. Things I’m not getting into right now, but they’re the reason. The Ghost was penance.”
