Page 84 of Anchor
“Sir… there’s no such user in the database,” the tech said quietly.
Reid pulled his secure tablet and cross-checked the signature. It wasn’t random noise. It was written to blend in, to look like a machine ping. Someone had built this to slip under the radar. And they were still inside.
“Pull the full trail,” Reid ordered, his voice steel. “Don’t upload a thing. Local drives only. No cloud. No cables. No outside eyes.”
“Yes, sir. That means the only way in was…”
“…to be inside this building,” Reid finished.
The room felt colder. He straightened, already moving for the door. “You find anything, you send someone for me in person. I’ll post two of my team outside your door.”
Reid walked out with his gut locked hard. Whoever S. Key was, they weren’t a ghost in the system. They were flesh and blood. Inside Chase. Watching.
SECURE STRATEGIC BAY 7 – 1904 HOURS
Reid shut the door by hand. No voice command. No badge swipe. No wireless seal. Just a heavy lock sliding into place, old-school and deliberate.
Six heads turned toward him. Killian at the far end of the war table, arms folded, eyes like steel. Ian stood at the head, sleeves rolled, collar open, looking like the night had dragged too far.
Apex lingered by the reinforced glass, motionless as a coiled spring. Fuse and Relay sat at the terminals, systems quiet but primed, like leashed hounds waiting for release. Nobody spoke. Everyone knew what this was: the moment when shadows start to take shape.
Reid walked forward and set a matte-black drive on the table. No markings. No label. Isolated.
“This doesn’t leave this room,” he said, voice taut. “Not a whisper.”
Fuse raised a brow. “Tell me that’s what I think it is.”
Reid nodded once. “Access trails. Executive suite. Claire’s floor. I went through the maintenance logs again—the buried ones, not the surface-level feeds. They looked clean. But deep under the backup layers, I found a pattern. Masked under housekeeping entries. Manual.”
Relay frowned. “Manual how?”
“It’s posing as redundancy code,” Reid said. “But it isn’t system-generated. Someone wrote the tag by hand.” He tapped the drive. “Handle: S.Key011.”
Apex shifted, jaw tightening. “That’s not a department string.”
“No,” Reid said. “And it doesn’t match any active employee signature. It’s not random. It’s a signature—like a fingerprint. Somebody left it, thinking no one would look this deep.”
Fuse’s fingers hovered over her keyboard. “They built a fake machine identity. That takes someone inside.”
Killian’s gaze narrowed. “Was it used for the elevator event?”
“Yes.” Reid’s voice was flat. “And two days ago, it hit the medical wing. Pulled a diagnostic ping while Claire was down for a scan. Could’ve been watching her. Could’ve been staging something else.”
Relay slid the drive into an air-gapped terminal. “I’ll trace every access, map the insertions, and cross-check against node activity. No uplinks. No mirrors.”
Ian finally spoke. “Has it touched surveillance feeds?”
“Multiple times,” Reid said. “Elevator loop. The night she was moved. It’s stepping around our security stacks like it knows exactly where we’re blind.”
Killian’s voice dropped. “This isn’t a bug. Bugs don’t know where we’re blind. Bugs don’t leave fingerprints.”
Reid nodded. “Exactly. This is a person. Embedded. And by what they’ve touched—the executive suite, medical wing, feed nodes—we’re closing the gap. Executive movement’s been locked down since Claire was shot. That means the pool of people who could leave this just got very, very small.”
Apex folded his arms. “Then we’re not chasing shadows anymore.”
Fuse muttered, “We’re hunting someone in our house.”
Ian’s gaze swept the room, deliberate and cold. “Relay, pull every proximity log from breach days and cross it with S.Key011 activity. Fuse, build me a hit map of every manual insertion. Killian—keep the lockdown tight. If they’re inside, they’re boxed in now.”
