Page 10 of Shadow Burn

“She wants final say on what we do with what we find. Including in situations that might affect me.”

Vivi tilted her head. “She’s a senior CIA archivist who’s in over her head. She doesn’t know how to share information or decisions. You have to decide how much you’re willing to deal with that.”

“I told her I’m not giving up my judgment.”

“Hold that line. Just don’t hold it so hard that you walk away from this.”

He nodded once and headed out.

His office hummed, soothing him with three monitors that waited for his command, and the low whisper of the server fans in the far corner. His headphones were on the desk where he’d left them yesterday. He sat down, pulled the chair forward, and let his shoulders drop an inch.

He started with Walter Vance. He told himself he was doing it because he wanted to confirm what he already suspected, which was true, and not because he was trying to delay the moment when he’d also be looking up Katherine Townsend.

He dug into his databases, some official, some public, and others that required the kind of access he preferred not to explain to Vivi or anyone else. He confirmed that Walter Vance was retired CIA, had a decorated career, and two foreign postings on the public record. He had several others that weren’t. He’d settled in Blackridge after his last assignment. His wife Margaret had moved back to Virginia after his death. They had no children.

He found the obituary in the Blackridge Beacon and read it twice. Walter Vance died peacefully at his home on the morning of August fifteenth. No autopsy listed. Digging into another database, he found the death certificate, which attributed the cause of death to acute myocardial infarction—a heart attack.

A man in his late seventies, alone in his house, dies of a heart attack on the same morning he’s drafting a letter about an active spy who was supposed to be dead twenty-nine years ago. No autopsy. No witness to the death. Death certificate signed by the local family physician who’d been treating Vance for high blood pressure for the better part of a decade.

It was the cleanest cover Jasper could imagine. The story didn’t need to lie. It just needed to leave one thing out—someone may have helped him have that heart attack in order to shut him up.

He set his elbows on the desk and rubbed his jaw. He’d expected to find this and he’d still hoped he wouldn’t.

He pulled up Katherine next. Public information first, the kind anyone with a search bar could find. There wasn’t much. A faculty page from her doctoral years at Georgetown. A digitized version of her dissertation in the university’s online repository. Two co-authored papers published in academic journals during her early Agency years—both unclassified studies of historical research methodology, dry as paper.

He pulled the dissertation abstract. Institutional Memory Practices in Cold War-Era Intelligence Agencies, A Case Study Approach. He read the first three pages of the introduction and slowed down.

She’d written about exactly this kind of cover-up. Not Cinder specifically—the dissertation was historical, focused on case studies from the sixties and seventies—but the structural argument she’d made was that intelligence agencies under institutional pressure to protect operational continuity tended to bury inconsistencies in their own records by reclassifying them at the bureaucratic level, where formal review was unlikely.

She’d called it administrative encryption. She’d documented seventeen cases of it from the early Cold War.

In other words, the move that had been used against her flag was the same move she had spent her doctoral career identifying.

He sat back.

Whoever had buried Katherine’s flag had picked the worst possible archivist to bury it under. They’d picked the one person on staff whose entire intellectual life had been spent learning to recognize that exact maneuver. He didn’t know whether to admire her for it or feel sorry for the people who’d underestimated her.

He spent another half hour on the open internet. She had no social media, but her younger sister, Emma, did. He caught himself smiling at photos of Katherine with her twin nieces, Maribelle and Cordelia. Katherine had been at their birth with the happy face of a new aunt who he suspected spoiled the girls to death.

Unfortunately, that was exactly the kind of leverage point a senior Agency official would look for if Katherine was labeled a threat.

Garrett peeked his head in, wanting some surveillance footage from a recent bodyguard gig the new guy, Reid, had been on.

Jasper knew what the head of operations wanted before Garrett opened his mouth. “Already sent the copy to your inbox.”

“You’re always one step ahead of me.” Garrett glanced at Jasper’s screens. “You taking that archivist assignment?”

“Not if I can help it,” Jasper murmured.

“That boring?”

“Not exactly boring.” Jasper began looking for any public mention of the Cinder cover name, even in low-grade conspiracy spaces or obscure declassified-document forums where amateur researchers trafficked in this kind of breadcrumb. “But potentially problematic for us.”

Garrett slapped him on the back. “What cases aren’t these days?” He walked out.

Over the next hour, Jasper dug. And dug some more. Nothing popped on Cinder. Whatever the spy had been doing for thirty years, he’d done it quietly enough to leave no public footprint.

Maybe he really was dead.