Chapter Eight
Carissa didn’t waste time easing into it.
What had happened at the children’s hospital felt familiar in a way neither of them liked admitting. More brazen than the earlier incidents—but not messier. Not chaotic. The violence was controlled. Unemotional. Executed with clarity and intent.
It wasn’t symbolic.
It wasn’t meant to send a message.
It was meant to work.
Whoever had done it hadn’t been experimenting. They’d been refining.
Carissa had started with the cameras.
Not the day of the bombing—that footage had already been scrubbed, sealed, and buried under multiple layers of jurisdiction. But the days before were still accessible. Security footage no one had flagged because the attack hadn’t happened yet. She filtered by time of day, by location, by pattern.
Routine movements. Staff rotation. Cleaning crews.
Visual noise. The kind of low-priority data people learned to ignore.
One figure caught her attention.
A janitor. Fast-moving. Strong posture. Younger than the others, though not obviously so. He appeared only in the final four days before the bombing. Before that, the same areas had been serviced by someone else—an older man, slower, more familiar to the environment.
Side by side, the shift became clear. Posture. Gait. Speed of movement. A pattern that didn’t belong in a job designed to go unnoticed.
She froze frames. Zoomed in.
The badge was legible. Same name. Same ID number. Registered to the older man.
She ran the record. Local hire. Retired quietly two weeks prior. No red flags. No disciplinary history. No known associations.
She enhanced both sets of images and placed the faces beside one another. Close enough to pass at a glance. Different enough that once you really looked, the substitution couldn’t be ignored.
This wasn’t borrowed access. It wasn’t a favor.
It was impersonation.
Deliberate. Patient. Clean.
Janitors moved everywhere. Through wings, back corridors, loading docks. They weren’t questioned. They weren’t watched. They were meant to blend into the infrastructure of the day. Not like nurses. Not like administrators. No one remembered what they looked like.
That was the point.
She built the profile.
Height between six feet and six-two. Athletic build, narrow frame. Right-handed. Walked with a slight asymmetry in the left foot—compensation, possibly an old injury. Kept his hat low. Angled his body away from cameras just enough to avoid recognition, but not enough to raise suspicion. The footage wasn’t theatrical. It was technical. Trained.
She ran facial recognition on the best captures.
Nothing.
No flags. No matches. No priors. Whoever this was had never been pulled into the net before—not by the U.S., not by Interpol, not by anyone who shared data with Carissa’s channels.
“He’s cleaner than the others,” she said. “More precise. There’s intent behind how he hides.”
Matt listened without speaking. He didn’t need to.
The thought hung between them—
Had his actions changed the equation? Had removing WTO One and WTO Two accelerated whatever this was?
He didn’t say it aloud. Neither did she. But it was there.
Carissa sent everything she had. Still frames. Movement composites. Gait profiles. Angle-recovered partials. It wasn’t enough for an ID.
But it would be enough if Matt saw him in person.
That mattered.
When the call ended, Matt didn’t hesitate.
He needed to be there.
The hospital sat just outside Washington, D.C.—too close to federal layers to move through recklessly. The area would still be under review. Surveillance feeds heightened. Faces flagged. Too many lenses pointed in too many directions.
Driving would attract attention.
He chose the train.
No second-guessing.
The motion would help. Steady, uninterrupted. Like laps in the pool. Like bullets through paper. Breath, cadence, control. It was how he worked. Always had been.
He drove the BMW back to Richmond, packed what he needed—no excess, no drag—and moved cleanly through the city toward the station. The train would give him hours to build internal shape. Organize what Carissa had sent. Prepare for whatever came next.
Because whatever this was, it wasn’t finished.
Not even close