THE GHOST INVENTOR SON-IN-LAW

Chapter 3: Three Minutes Inside the Hunter

The cursor blinked, waiting for me like an old dog that still remembered its master's footsteps.

"Show me Sentinel Systems," I typed.

Lines of code poured down the screen, white on black, fast as rain. Anyone else would have seen nonsense. I saw rooms and hallways and locked doors, all built from the same bones I had designed ten years ago. Sentinel's servers ran on AURA, just as I'd guessed, and AURA ran on Genesis.

Which meant every door inside Sentinel opened for me.

I set a timer on my phone for three minutes. Three minutes was the longest I could stay inside any system without leaving footprints big enough for someone to follow.

"Okay," I muttered. "Let's see who you really are."

The first door was Sentinel's public face: a shiny website, a list of happy clients, a photo of a smiling director in a blue suit. Their address was an office tower in Halbrook, the capital. They claimed to have three hundred employees.

I went deeper, past the pretty pictures and into the bones.

Their payroll had eleven names. Not three hundred. Eleven. Their bank account held a little under two million dollars, which was strange for a company offering Tan Dynamics eighty million. And their clients list was full of companies that didn't exist.

2:31 left on the timer.

"A front company," I whispered. "You're just a costume."

I pushed through a locked folder labeled Collection Protocol. The folder opened without a sound, because the lock on it was a lock I had once taught Genesis how to make.

Inside was a map.

It wasn't a map of streets. It was a map of data, a chart of where every scan from every Sentinel contract was supposed to go. All the lines pointed in one direction, away from Sentinel's own servers, through three hidden relays and into a single database with no name at all, only a code.

ANX-7.

My stomach turned to ice.

The Annex. The Directorate's secret office, an ordinary grey building in Halbrook where the men in grey suits worked. I'd been there once, the week I was recruited, to sign papers I wasn't allowed to keep.

1:48 left.

I opened the last file in the folder. It was a short memo with no signature, only a date from four months ago.

Objective: locate surviving Genesis personnel. Method: offer AI integration contracts to small tech firms in key cities. Require full memory-pattern scans of all staff and family. Flag any pattern showing Site Nine exposure. Report flagged subjects to the cleanup team.

The cleanup team. Nobody called it by any other name in the memo. But I didn't need a name. Anything that receives a list of "flagged subjects" from the people who wiped my mind isn't a gift shop.

Under the memo was a list of cities. Crestport was third.

Under Crestport was a list of companies that Sentinel had already approached. Most of them had turned the offer down. One of them hadn't.

Tan Dynamics. Status: First agreement signed. Final signature expected at Crestport Grand Hotel gala.

0:59 left.

The whole thing was a trap. A beautiful, simple trap. Offer a dying company a pile of money, make them scan everyone, and wait for one brain to light up like a lantern in the dark. And my father-in-law had just signed the first page with a gold pen while my mother-in-law kissed his cheek.

0:20.

I backed out of the folder, closed every door behind me and wiped my footprints from the logs, the way Ruth had taught me when I was twenty-three and terrified of breaking things.

0:03.

I pulled out, and I was gone.

The laptop screen went back to my plain, boring desktop: a picture of a mountain lake that came with the computer, and a folder named Recipes that held nothing but recipes.

I sat back in my chair, breathing hard, as if I'd just run up Cypress Hill.

Three minutes. Three minutes inside the people who were hunting me, and they had never even known I was there.

At Site Nine, Ruth had a rule for every system we ever entered: get in, learn one true thing, get out. Tonight, I'd learned three. Sentinel was fake. The Directorate was behind it. And the Tans were already halfway inside the trap.

I looked down at my right hand. Without thinking, while I'd been reading, my fingers had moved to the edge of the desk and closed around the handle of a metal stapler, gripping it the way you'd grip a knife. My thumb sat in exactly the right place to drive it into an attacker's throat.

I let go of it slowly.

My body remembered. That was the third thing they had failed to erase. The combat program at Site Nine had trained me every morning for ten years, before I ever sat down to write a single line of code. I could take a rifle apart blindfolded. I could disarm three men before the first one finished shouting. I had beaten whole teams of trained soldiers in the base's training hall while the instructors stood back and wrote notes.

They called me Ghost because nobody ever saw me coming.

For three years, I'd kept all of it locked away. My mind, which could write or break almost any software in the world. The Ghost Key, which could open any door built on Genesis. And my training, which could put a man on the floor before he knew he was in danger.

I'd been carrying a war inside me and pretending to be a man who couldn't fix a printer.

Outside, somewhere on the lower floor of the mansion, I heard Helena laughing at something. A car door slammed in the drive as the last guests left. Ryan's voice called out good night, warm and friendly.

I thought about Ryan. Ryan, who had brought Sentinel to the Tans. Ryan, who had laid the folder on the table so close to my hand. Did he know what it was? Or was he just a lucky man who'd stumbled onto a big deal?

I didn't know yet.

I did know one thing. In ten days, at the Crestport Grand Hotel, Philip would sign the final page. Then men with scanning machines would walk into Tan Dynamics. They would scan Philip and Helena, Bernard and Jason, Mei, and Grandma Grace.

And Sophia.

And me.

And when my brain lit up on their screen, the cleanup team would come to this house. They wouldn't care who else was standing in the room.

I could run. Tonight. I had a little money hidden in my shoe and a bus ticket's worth of courage. I could vanish, the way I'd vanished once before.

But if I ran, the scans would still happen. The Tans would still be in that database. And whoever killed Mark would want to know why the Tan family's strange son-in-law had disappeared the same week their trap arrived.

I picked up my phone and read the five words again.

Mark is dead. You're next.

Somebody out there knew who I was. Somebody had warned me, from a number that didn't exist.

I typed a message to nobody, to the empty number, knowing it would fail.

Who are you?

I pressed send anyway.

This time, it didn't fail.

The message went through. A small grey word appeared under it, a word that made every hair on my arms stand up.

Read.