Page 45 of Travis
I should go back to my room.
Instead, I sat down at my workstation. The routing anomaly from this afternoon was still open. I pulled it up and stared at it, but my mind kept drifting in a different direction.
The external variable. The one I'd set aside ten days ago because Travis had told me the route gaps were more important, and I'd agreed because he was right.
But I'd never stopped thinking about it. It had been sitting in the back of my mind for ten days, unresolved, and I was done leaving it there.
I pulled up the disruption pattern I'd flagged back in Spokane, the one I'd mentioned to Travis on our first day working together. At least seven incidents that I'd been able to identify where Kindt's pipeline had been disrupted by something external. Something that wasn't law enforcement, wasn't a competitor, wasn't anything I could identify. And those were just the ones visible from my data. There could be more.
With Travis’s intercept data layered in, I had better resolution now. I started mapping the disruptions against the communication feeds, looking for corresponding chatter on Kindt's side. Something that would tell me how his organization had reacted to each hit, which might tell me what the disruptions looked like from the inside.
That was when I noticed the gaps in the intercept logs I'd been given access to.
The logs were comprehensive. Months of communication intercepts, courier scheduling, operational chatter inside Kindt’s organization. But when I aligned them against the timeline of the disruptions that wouldn’t leave me alone, there were holes.
Deliberate holes. Gaps designed to keep information from me specifically.
I'd been working in these systems for ten days and I hadn't noticed because the gaps were expertly crafted. Whoever had partitioned my access had done it skillfully, removing specific windows of time without disturbing the data on either side.
Not whoever.Maude. No doubt on Travis's instructions.
My hands went still on the keyboard. I sat there and let that settle. Travis had filtered what I could see. He'd given me access to his systems concerning Kindt but had carved out specific time windows and hidden them from me.
That wasn't paranoia. Paranoia would be restricting access to entire data sets. This was surgical. He'd removed exactly the windows that corresponded with the external disruptions.
Why? Why would Travis not want me to see that?
I was going to damned well find out.
I worked it from the other side. Kindt's communications weren't filtered. Travis had given me full access to the enemy's chatter because he had no reason to hide what Kindt's people were saying. So I pulled every reference to the disruptions from Kindt's internal communications. Every panicked message, every route change ordered in response, every after-action assessment of what had gone wrong.
It took me twenty minutes. And in those twenty minutes, a word appeared in the intercepts that I'd never seen before.
The Ghost.
That was the name Kindt's people had given to whatever was hitting them. Not a name they'd chosen with respect. A name born from frustration and fear, the kind of label an organization gives to a problem it can't solve.
The Ghost had hit a transport outside Polson. The Ghost had compromised a holding location near Kalispell. The Ghost haddisrupted a courier handoff south of Calgary. Each reference matched one of my seven disruptions.
The external variable wasn't a variable. It was aperson.
I mapped the Ghost's operational footprint from Kindt's communications. Dates, locations, the geographic spread of every disruption. Then I laid that map over the timeline I'd been living inside for ten days.
My brain already knew what it was going to find. All I was doing now was confirming it.
The night I’d broken in, Travis had come home with a bruise on his face. I cross referenced that with Kindt’s communication data and froze.
Three children had been found at a fire station that same night. A loss attributed to the Ghost.
I checked the rest of the data to match with his injuries since I’d been here. The split knuckles. The bandaged forearm. The stiff shoulder. Every one of them lined up with Ghost activity on the corresponding night.
Travis was the Ghost.
The man who never left his house actually left it every few days to wage a one-man war against the network that had killed my sister.
"Maude. Where is he?"
Silence. Not the processing pause I'd gotten used to over ten days of conversation. Not the dramatic beat she liked to deploy before delivering a piece of information. Just silence.
