THE GHOST INVENTOR SON-IN-LAW

Chapter 6: The Ghost Coder

I didn't run down the stairs. Running gets noticed. I walked, at the speed of a bored man with an armful of cables, all the way back to the IT desk on the third floor.

Then I sat down and opened the security system.

The cameras at Tan Dynamics ran on a cheap AURA security package, the same kind half the offices in Crestport used. I could have opened it with the Ghost Key in a second. But I didn't need to. I was the night-shift IT worker, and the camera system was part of my job.

I pulled up the eighth-floor hallway and scrolled back to four in the morning.

The screen was grey.

I frowned and scrolled further. Four ten, grey. Four twenty, grey. A small line of text sat in the corner of the window: Recording error. File corrupted. 4:02 a.m. to 4:40 a.m.

Exactly the minutes I'd been in Sophia's office. Not a minute more, not a minute less.

I hadn't touched it. Not once.

I sat there with my hand on the mouse for a long time. Old cameras broke all the time; the system was cheap. That was what I told myself. But a cheap camera doesn't break for exactly the thirty-eight minutes you need it to.

Read, the empty number had said.

I closed the window and decided, very firmly, not to think about it. I had enough ghosts already.

At three in the afternoon, the whole office found out.

It started with a scream of joy from the eighth floor, and then the news ran down the stairs faster than any lift. Sophia had installed the new Pulse at St. Agnes that morning. It had run every patient record in the hospital without a single error. Dr. Reyes himself had tested it, then called in his chief of surgery to test it again.

"He was stunned," Sophia's assistant told everyone at the coffee machine, her eyes shining. "That's what he said. 'I'm stunned. Where did this come from?'"

"Where did it come from?" one of the engineers asked.

The assistant shrugged. "Nobody knows. Sophia found it on her computer. Just a note. 'A friend of the company.'"

The whole floor burst into excited whispers.

I sat at my desk, fixing a broken keyboard, and listened.

"It had to be Ryan's team," somebody said.

"Ryan's team said it would take three months."

"Then who?"

That evening at home, the family dinner was louder and happier than it had been in a year.

"I told you!" Helena said, raising her glass. "I told you our luck was changing. First Sentinel, and now this! Ryan must be so proud of his people."

"Ryan didn't build it," Mei said quietly. She was twenty-one, Sophia's younger sister, a university student with a ponytail and paint on her fingers from her art class. "Sophia said nobody knows who did."

"Well, it was obviously someone who works for Ryan," Jason said, waving his fork. "Someone smart, not like..." He looked at me, standing behind Helena's chair with the water jug, and grinned. "Not like the guy who cleaned the server room floor yesterday. You missed a spot, by the way, Printer."

Bernard laughed his loud laugh. I refilled his glass.

Sophia sat at the end of the table, saying nothing. She wasn't on her phone tonight. She was turning the yellow sticky note over and over in her fingers, reading the capital letters again and again, as if they might change.

Once, she looked up, and her eyes moved slowly around the table. They stopped on Jason. On Mei. On Bernard. On her father.

They passed over me without stopping, the way they always did.

I let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding.

Later, when I was washing the plates in the kitchen, Mei slipped in and set a covered bowl beside the sink.

"Dumplings," she whispered. "I saved you some before Jason ate them all." She hesitated at the door. "Owen? You were at the office every night this week, right? Did you see the Ghost Coder?"

"I only saw Gus," I said.

She looked at me for a moment longer than usual, then smiled and left.

By the next Tuesday, the mystery had a name, too.

I heard it first in the lift on Tuesday morning. Two young engineers were arguing about whether the new code was written by one person or a whole team.

"One person," the first one said. "You can see it. Every piece fits together like a single brain wrote it. And it's clean, man. No name in the comments, no signature, no trace at all. Whoever did this is a ghost."

"The Ghost Coder," the second one laughed. "That's what Sophia's assistant is calling him. The Ghost Coder."

The lift doors opened. I stepped out, and my legs felt like water.

Ghost.

They were joking. They were two kids in hoodies making up a funny name over coffee. They had no idea that ten years ago, in a training hall under a mountain, soldiers had called me that same word before they hit the floor.

It was just a coincidence. It had to be.

But by lunch, the whole building was saying it. The Ghost Coder. By the afternoon, the name had spread to the cafeteria, the lobby and the parking garage. Someone had stuck a cartoon of a little white ghost holding a laptop on the eighth-floor fridge.

I walked past it on my way to fix a projector, and I couldn't make myself look at it. Someone had written underneath it in red marker: Whoever you are, thank you.

That was when I noticed Ryan.

He'd been strange all week. Not happy, the way a CTO should be happy when his company is suddenly saved. Nervous. Tight around the eyes. Twice, I saw him close his office blinds in the middle of the day. Once, I heard him on the phone in the stairwell, his voice low and angry.

"I don't know who wrote it," he hissed into the phone. "I'm looking. Nobody here could have done this."

Now he was walking from desk to desk on the third floor, chatting with the engineers with his easy, charming smile. But every conversation ended with the same question, asked too casually.

"Hey, so this Ghost Coder thing. Any ideas? Anyone stay late this week? Anyone you've seen on Sophia's floor?"

The engineers just shrugged. Nobody had seen anything.

Then Ryan reached the IT desk.

He leaned on the edge of it and smiled down at me. Up close, his smile didn't reach his eyes at all.

"Owen, right? You work the night shift."

"Yes."

"So you're here when nobody else is." He tilted his head. "Did you see anyone go up to the eighth floor this week? Late at night? Anyone at all?"

I pushed my cheap glasses up my nose and made my face as empty and slow as I could.

"Just Gus," I said. "The security guard. He walks around with his flashlight sometimes."

Ryan looked at me for a long, quiet moment. Then he laughed and patted my shoulder.

"Yeah," he said. "Of course. Gus."

He walked away, whistling.

But as he reached the lift, he stopped, took out his phone and typed something fast. And when the lift doors opened, he didn't step in. He turned around and looked back at my desk, one more time, with his thumb hovering over the send button.