Page 95 of Anchor
A portable comm unit pulsed once. Not wireless, just hardline encrypted, routed through miles of buried fiber. The screen showed no name, no ID. Just a single feed. Live telemetry.
Vitals: Reid Hanlon, OR 3, Chase Medical. Still alive.
Vos leaned back in the worn leather chair, sleeves rolled, gloves off. A cup of untouched tea sat cooling beside his elbow, steam long faded.
He watched the data with no reaction. No twitch of surprise and no frustration. Only stillness. This was expected. Reid surviving was part of it.
The poison—not just to kill. Not to haunt. To stay in the blood and to be found. To tell a story in the veins that Ian Chasewould never stop trying to unravel.
Vos reached for the small tablet beside the comm unit and flicked a file open.
SUBJECT: Hanlon, Reid
Stage One: Complete
Stage Two: Latent Activation TBD
Psychological Trigger Matrix: Embedded
He smiled faintly. Not warmth, nothing that human. Just completion.
Behind him, Scour waited quietly. “Sir?”
Vos didn’t turn. “They’ll think this is over soon. They’ll rally. They’ll talk about recovery.” He stood, slow and methodical. “But healing isn’t the same as undoing.”
He walked to the far wall, where an old map of the eastern corridor of the Ann Arbor facility was pinned, marked in red. Several nodes were circled, with one name underlined: CLAIRE BOWMAN.
Vos reached for a pen and drew a line from her name… straight to Ian’s. Then another, downward. REID.
The pen tapped once. Vos smiled again.
COMMAND FLOOR – SYSTEM PORT C – 0426 HOURS
Claire’s eyes burned as she overrode another firewall. The lines of biochemical data on the screen were relentless, but she saw a pattern now. It wasn’t clotting suppression; it was neural latency degradation, disguised as something simpler. Something that looked like a bleeding disorder on the surface… but under it? Cognitive decay. This was a bioweapon.
“This wasn’t just to kill him,” she whispered. “It’s meant to erode him, over time, bit by bit.”
Beside her, Terry Fields hunched over the second terminal, fingers hammering keys too fast to be focused. Claire didn’t watch him directly, but she was aware of every motion, every click, every breath he wasn’t quite taking. He wasn’t looking at her either. That was new.
She’d seen the way he looked at her before, too open, too sure he could charm his way out of anything. But now he didn’t dare. Now, he knew.
She was measuring him. She didn’t accuse him. Didn’t confront him. But she let the silence stretch just long enough to press. Terry could feel it. She could see it in the way his shoulder blades pinched together like a dog bracing for a blow.
And still, he typed. He was pretending. The search he was faking had a rhythm to it, too practiced, too smooth. He was calling up old CIA biochemical trials, junk filters, archival dead ends she recognized from her own years in the system. He wasn’t looking. He was performing.
She didn’t speak. Just watched and let him stew in it.
