Chapter 10 - Someone Wearing My Name
I read the code three times. It was my old access identifier, retired when I'd taken emergency leave. Someone had reactivated it.
"I didn't send anything," I said.
"We know," Price replied. "Your hardware was physically secured when the request was logged. We're investigating credential misuse."
Still, I felt the familiar shame of being accused by a computer screen. Systems don't sound angry. They simply label you compromised and let everyone else supply the emotion.
Ellis asked about the last person who had access to my home office. I thought of Raymond talking about an important video meeting, asking to borrow my printer. I had refused. My father had let him in anyway.
"Could he have found my old badge?" I asked.
"Possibly. We'll examine the evidence," Ellis said. "Don't leap ahead."
I wanted to leap all the way across the ocean, through every locked door between Marcus and home.
Instead, I worked. With permission from the investigators, I reconstructed Marcus's supply notes from old shopping receipts, scribbles, and the edges of the manuscript he'd used to conceal the drive. He marked suspect deliveries with tiny porch-light symbols. The third symbol appeared beside a facility code that wasn't overseas at all.
It belonged to a warehouse twenty miles from my parents' house.
"Why would he bring the trail home?" Price asked.
"Because he thought domestic inventory was the missing link."
Ellis contacted federal agents already following the procurement fraud. They obtained the necessary legal authority for a coordinated inspection. By midnight, photographs arrived: rows of sealed shipping crates, labels altered, safety certificates copied with mismatched serial numbers.
One office contained a wall calendar. Thanksgiving was circled in red, beneath the handwritten words BENNETT HOUSE.
Price stood very still.
"They're using your home for something," he said.
May you like
A second photo showed a packing slip with a destination and a time: 6:00 A.M. The destination was Marcus's address. The delivery was scheduled for tomorrow.
