Chapter 2 - The Doppelgänger
We drove in silence for thirty minutes, sticking to the back roads of the Massachusetts coastline. My mind was reeling, spinning through three decades of memories.
"My mother died of ovarian cancer when I was four," I said softly, my knuckles white on the steering wheel. "My father remarried a year later. Helen. She raised me. You’re telling me she’s an operative?"
"Not just an operative," Vance said, checking the magazine of his sidearm. "She’s a handler for the syndicate your father was tracking. They placed her in your home twenty-four years ago to monitor him. She played the part of the loving stepmother perfectly. But Marcus figured it out ten years ago."
"Ten years?" I snapped, slamming the brakes as we skidded around a slick corner. "He lived with a hostile agent for a decade and said nothing to me?"
"Because you joined Naval Intelligence!" Vance shot back. "If he pulled the plug, if he exposed her, they would have targeted you. He played the oblivious, loving husband so you could have a career. He built the decoy protocol to finally sever the tie."
My chest tightened. The woman who had sent me care packages at Annapolis, who had cried at my graduations, who just stood at my father's grave... was a predator waiting to strike.
"Where are we going?" I asked, my voice turning to ice.
"The shipyard. Your father secured a mobile safe house. We need to decrypt those drives."
We arrived at a derelict shipping dock in Boston Harbor. Vance led me past rusted freighters to a small, unassuming fishing trawler. But once we stepped inside the cabin, I saw the truth. The interior was gutted and retrofitted with top-tier military decryption hardware.
I plugged the first drive into the console. The screen flared to life, requiring a biometric scan and a password. I placed my thumb on the scanner.
Password Required.
I thought about the key. The number 42. "What's the password?" I asked Vance.
"He didn't tell me. He said you would know."
I stared at the blinking cursor. Fifteen years ago, the groundskeeper had said. What happened fifteen years ago? It was the day I left for the Naval Academy. My father had handed me a compass and whispered a phrase in my ear.
I typed it in: True North 1989.
The screen flashed green. Access Granted.
A video file popped up. I hit play.
May you like
The screen filled with the face of my father. Not the frail man who had supposedly died of a stroke, but a sharp, hardened operative sitting in a bunker.
"Sarah," my father’s recorded voice said. "If you’re watching this, the casket is in the ground, and Helen has shown her true colors. I am so sorry for lying to you. But I’m not dead. And I need you to find me."
