“It’s not just papers, Becca. It’s an old digital voice recorder. A hard drive. I plugged it in. I listened to it.” He let out a sound that was half-sob, half-laugh. “It’s about you. Your whole career.”
“Make sense, Jason.”
“You didn’t earn it, Becca! None of it! Fort Bragg, your deployment to Kandahar, your promotion to Major… it was all orchestrated. I’m looking at the ledgers. They moved you around like a chess piece to guard their transport routes. And when your unit got hit in Afghanistan… the ambush that killed your lieutenant…” Jason choked on his tears. “They paid the local militia to hit your convoy so you’d get pulled back to base. They needed you alive to sign off on the quarterly logistics reports.”
My stomach bottomed out. The world tilted on its axis. The ambush. The blood on the sand. The guilt I had carried for six years because I survived and my lieutenant did not.
“Who, Jason?” I whispered, my voice trembling with a rage that felt nuclear. “Who orchestrated it?”
“Play the tape!” a voice screamed in the background. It was my father. He sounded frantic. “Don’t tell her, Jason, just play it!”
A click echoed over the line. Static hissed, followed by the grainy, unmistakable sound of a recording from decades ago.
“…I need her stationed at Bragg by 2012,” a woman’s voice commanded. It was sharp, authoritative, and terrifyingly familiar. “If the selection board pushes back, fabricate a disciplinary mark on the other candidates. Rebecca goes to Bragg. She’s the only one I trust blindly with the blind-spots in the ledger.”
The phone nearly slipped from my sweaty palm.
I knew that voice. It was the voice that had sung me to sleep. The voice that had faded away in a hospital room when I was twelve years old.
“Mom?” I breathed.
“She’s not dead, Becca,” Jason cried over the phone. “She’s the one running the smuggling ring. She’s—”
Suddenly a massive crash echoed through the receiver. The sound of heavy oak splintering. Jason screamed.
“They’re inside!” Jason yelled.
