Page 1 of Travis
Chapter 1
Travis Hale
The third monitor from the left had been running a three-hour loop of a rest stop parking lot off Highway 93. Nothing moved except a plastic bag caught on a fence post and a stray cat that kept circling the same dumpster.
I’d been watching both. The cat had commitment issues. Kept approaching the dumpster, losing its nerve, circling back. I respected the strategy even if the execution was flawed.
“Travis.” Maude’s voice cut through the silence, crisp and faintly disapproving. The voice she used when she’d decided I was being inefficient. “Your heart rate has been elevated for forty-seven minutes. You haven’t consumed anything in six hours. Shall I addbasic self-preservationto your task queue, or would you prefer to continue ignoring it?”
“I’m busy.”
“You’re staring at a cat.”
I reached for the energy drink without looking. Found it by feel. Same spot, always the same spot, two inches right of thesecond keyboard. Half-empty. Warm. I drank it anyway and it tasted like regret and artificial watermelon, which was roughly what I deserved.
“That’s your fourth today,” Maude said.
“Are you counting my drinks now?”
“Someone has to. You certainly aren’t counting your meals.”
The control room was underground, carved into the hillside beneath what looked, from the road, like a forgettable ranch house with peeling paint and a sagging porch. I’d spent three days getting the exterior paint to peel in a convincing pattern.
Deliberately neglected. Aggressively uninteresting. The kind of place people drove past and immediately forgot.
But down here was different. A hidden fortress that I’d spent three years designing the internal structure for. Cameras in every room, motion detectors in all the hallways, biometric locks on doors, electromagnetic field disruptors.
Then there was the control room, where I spent most of my time. Six monitors across the main wall. Two more on the secondary desk. Server racks humming behind a glass partition. Temperature held at sixty-eight degrees. Lighting at forty percent because anything brighter made my skin crawl after a few hours. Everything where it belonged. Everything accounted for.
The only thing in my life that was.
“Incoming call,” Maude announced. “Beckett. Audio.”
I glanced at the clock on the center screen. 9:47 p.m. Beckett Sinclair was on a job tonight—surveillance for a Warrior Security client, a corporate whistleblower who’d been getting death threats. Babysitting work, but the kind that paid well and kept Beckett out of trouble, which was a full-time job in itself.
I tapped the comm. “Yeah.”
“I’m so pissed at Aiden right now. I’m stuck out here on surveillance, and he’s off on international duty in Scotland. That is completely unfair.”
I rolled my eyes. “If I recall, you turned down that assignment because you didn’t want to be away from Audra for weeks at a time.”
“Yeah, but I’m losing my mind out here, Trav. This guy I’m surveilling has been watching Netflix for two hours straight. I can see the glow through his curtains. Pretty sure he’s on season three of something with subtitles because he hasn’t moved. Not even for a bathroom break. The man has a bladder like a camel.”
“Riveting.”
“It is the opposite of riveting. It is the anti-rivet. I need you to pull the camera feed from the north side of his building. Exterior, facing the parking garage. Mine keeps cutting to static every few minutes.”
I pulled it up on monitor four. Took about ten seconds. “You’re up. Northwest corner, second level. Your angle’s better from this one anyway.”
“Beautiful. Thank you. See, this is why you’re my favorite hermit.” He paused. “You doing okay? You sound a little off.”
“I sound the same as always.”
“Exactly. You always sound off. But tonight you sound off-er.”
“Off-er is not a word.”
“More off. Increasingly off. I have a degree in criminal justice, not English. Are you getting sick? Because you have that voice. The voice where you’re trying to sound normal and it’s making you sound less normal.”
