Chapter 6 - The Burn Notice
I stared at the glowing red screen, my mind struggling to process the devastating reality of the situation.
I had just been completely erased from the system, leaving me with absolutely no authority, no backup, and no official identity.
"We are officially on our own, Whitmore," I whispered, showing him the chilling disavowal message.
He cursed quietly under his breath, chambering a fresh round into his assault rifle.
"If the agency burned you, that means the director himself gave the order to have us eliminated," Whitmore deduced.
"Then we need to take the fight directly to him," I stated, my voice completely devoid of fear.
I remembered a heavily fortified off-the-books safe house located just three miles from our current position.
We hoisted my grandfather carefully between us and began the grueling trek through the muddy, freezing wilderness.
Every snapping twig sounded like a gunshot, and the freezing rain bit into our exposed skin like tiny needles.
After an hour of agonizing physical exertion, the dark silhouette of an abandoned hunting cabin finally appeared through the trees.
I punched in a classified numerical sequence on the rusted keypad, and the heavy reinforced door clicked open.
We carried my grandfather inside and gently laid him on a clean cot in the corner of the dusty room.
Whitmore immediately began booting up the analog computer terminal hidden behind a false wall.
"I can try to hack into the central server using my old clearance codes, but it might trigger an alarm," he warned.
"Do it," I ordered firmly. "I need to know exactly what Project Genesis actually is."
The old monitor flickered to life, rapidly scrolling through thousands of heavily redacted intelligence files.
Suddenly, a high-resolution photograph appeared on the center of the screen, causing my heart to skip a beat.
It was a picture of my mother, Diane, but she was wearing the uniform of a high-ranking Russian intelligence officer.
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"Your mother was never a CIA handler, Claire," my grandfather whispered weakly from the cot behind me.
"She is a deep-cover foreign operative, and she stole you from your real family because of what is hidden inside your blood."
