Page 13 of Wild Card
And sure enough, there he is.
Ronan Griggs.
Plain blue uniform. Rolling mop bucket. Slow steps. He pushes past a junction point and disappears behind a wall of crates.
“Okay,” I mutter. “So that puts him in the general vicinity.”
“But not in range,” Aria says, fingers already typing. “Watch this.”
She pulls up a second camera—the one angled directly on the transfer door, twenty feet away from where Ronan vanished behind the crates. The one that should show ifanyonewent in or out.
We both lean in again.
3:42 a.m.
The hallway is still.
3:43.
Still empty.
3:44.
I blink.
“Wait,” I say. “Go back. The last frame before 3:42.”
She rewinds and pauses.
3:41:26.
“Now jump forward.”
She skips ahead.
3:45:02.
“Right there.” I sit up straighter. “There’s a gap. Four minutes unaccounted for.”
She narrows her eyes. “The camera feed jumps. We’re missing everything between 3:41 and 3:45.”
I glance at her. “That’s the window. That’s exactly when Ronan disappears behind the crates.”
Aria sits back in her chair, arms crossed, frowning hard. “It could be coincidence. Or it could mean someone tampered with the footage.”
I nod slowly. “Okay. Let’s say hedidmess with the camera. Maybe he looped the footage. Maybe he disabled it temporarily. Either way… that’s not easy to do, especially not on our system. This isn’t some grainy old VHS tape. It’s digital, secure, encrypted, backed up off-site.”
“And he’s a janitor,” she says. “Not some ex-MI6 hacker moonlighting with a mop.”
I rub the back of my neck. “EvenIcouldn’t scrub four minutes from a Citadel feed without someone upstairs getting a notification. That kind of access takes more than an override key.”
“Exactly,” Aria says, her eyes locked on the screen. “Which means he didn’t do this alone.”
We’re both quiet for a moment, watching the screen as the hallway resumes its slow, uneventful loop.
She finally turns to me. “We keep watching. If someone helped him—if this was staged—we’ll see something.”
I nod. “And if we don’t?”
