Chapter 11 - The Phantom Archive
The black envelope in my hand felt heavier than a loaded weapon.
I stared at the blood-red ink on the back of the photograph, my pulse pounding violently in my ears.
Garrick was just a pawn, a low-level operator in a much larger, darker game.
My father’s fiery car crash twelve years ago was not a tragic accident caused by black ice on a mountain road.
It was a highly calculated, targeted assassination.
I quickly shoved the photograph deep into the pocket of my tactical jacket just as my mother walked out onto the porch.
She was carrying two mugs of hot tea, her face finally glowing with a genuine, hard-earned peace.
I forced a warm smile, completely refusing to shatter her fragile new reality with this terrifying revelation.
I told her I needed to run a quick errand at the local hardware store and promised to be back before dinner.
I climbed into my heavily armored SUV and drove directly to a secure, underground storage facility on the edge of town.
This was where I kept my father's old FBI case files, the ones the bureau had supposedly lost during a server migration.
I unlocked the steel unit and pulled down a heavy plastic bin covered in a thick layer of dust.
I spent three grueling hours cross-referencing my father's final field notes with the syndicate files I had stolen from Garrick.
The connection was buried deep beneath layers of encrypted shell companies, but my father had found it.
Before his death, he had been investigating a phantom black ops program codenamed Erebus.
Erebus was not an international weapons syndicate; it was a shadow network operating directly from inside the United States government.
They were funding unauthorized foreign wars by laundering billions through domestic real estate, using abusive monsters like Garrick as their local ghosts.
My father had gathered enough evidence to expose the entire network to the congressional oversight committee.
He was killed exactly forty-eight hours before his scheduled testimony.
I stared at the final page of his notebook, where he had scribbled a single, heavily underlined name.
The name was Arthur Vance.
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Arthur Vance was not a Russian mobster or a cartel boss.
He was my father's former FBI mentor, the man who had personally trained me, and the current Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
