Page 8 of Buried Past (First in Line #3)

Chapter six

Dorian

I'd been in the apartment for three nights—time to move. I now knew more of why Farid brought me here after my latest encounter with Hoyle's bastards, but I couldn't stay. I had every reason to trust McCabe, but I couldn't be responsible for him turning into collateral damage.

Matthew had left a clean set of clothes on the coffee table. The stolen scrubs had served their purpose, but they marked me as displaced and running. I needed to blend back into Seattle's early morning commuters, appearing like any other face heading somewhere important.

Each movement sent sharp bolts of pain through my ribs. The sutures pulled tight as I stood, reminding me that healing and escape operated on different timelines. I breathed through the discomfort, compartmentalizing the signals the way I'd been taught—pain was information, nothing more.

Unfortunately, information could still slow me down. My left arm moved stiffly, the shoulder joint protesting where I'd injured it in a fall on the way to Matthew's apartment.

A flash drive nestled in my boot's false heel where I'd hidden it days earlier.

Insurance. Evidence. The kind of digital ammunition that could topple governments or get you disappeared, depending on who was pulling the trigger.

I'd left my boots near the door, leaving my most valuable belonging vulnerable.

I didn't belong in places with hand-knit blankets and mugs left on tables for whenever you wanted them. I belonged in motion. Long ago, I'd become a creature of the shadows.

Matthew's apartment had two exits—the front door with multiple deadbolts, and the fire escape accessed through the bedroom window. I'd memorized the layout within my first conscious hour, scouting escape routes the way other people noticed furniture arrangements.

My bag was nothing more than a canvas messenger satchel I'd lifted from the hospital's lost and found. Inside: more stolen scrubs, basic first aid supplies, and forty-three dollars in crumpled bills. Everything I owned, minus the information that could burn down an empire.

I slowly pulled on the borrowed clothes. The hardwood floor creaked under my bare feet as I moved toward where my boots waited by the door. It was too loud. Matthew stirred in his chair.

"Going somewhere?"

His voice was gravelly with sleep but alert. I froze halfway to the door, bag in hand.

Matthew sat up slowly, running fingers through his dark hair. He wore a soft gray t-shirt and looked at me from across the room. The light was dim in the pre-dawn hours, but it was enough to spot his insistent stare.

I didn't answer. Couldn't, really. What was I supposed to say? Thanks for the medical care, but men like me don't lead nice lives.

"Dorian, you didn't answer."

I took another step toward the door. He moved faster than I expected, rising from the couch with the fluid grace of someone trained to respond to emergencies. His bare feet slapped against the hardwood as he positioned himself between me and the exit.

He didn't raise his hands or take an aggressive stance. He merely stood there, solid and immovable as a brick wall, watching me with those steady brown eyes.

"Why the hell did someone shoot you?"

His question was direct and impossible to sidestep.

I shifted my weight, testing whether I could slip past him, then caught myself as a wave of dizziness hit. Three days of irregular meals and blood loss had left me lighter on my feet than I wanted to be. Matthew mirrored my movement.

"I asked you a question—make that two."

His voice was level, not frantic, but had an undercurrent of pure steel. He didn't accept evasion when lives were on the line.

I could lie. I could spin some story about the wrong place, the wrong time, and random street violence. Matthew was civilian enough to believe it and decent enough to let me walk away with a fabricated explanation.

After everything, I couldn't do that to him. Other words slipped out instead.

"Because I didn't stay quiet."

Farid trusted him, and that was good enough for me. I reached down and picked up my left boot, fingers working at the concealed panel in the heel. The flash drive slid out, no bigger than my thumb. I'd carried it for eight months, through three countries and more safehouses than I could count.

Matthew stared at the device in my palm.

"Everything's on here," I said. "Names, bank transfers, operational logs. The people who shot me, the people who paid them, and the network that connects them all."

"What kind of network?"

"The kind that erases people. The kind that turns humanitarian operations into intelligence laundering, and the kind that takes missing soldiers and repurposes their deaths for someone else's agenda."

That got his attention. His jaw tightened, and I watched his hands flex at his sides.

"Show me."

I extended the drive toward him. Our fingers brushed as he took it. The contact lasted half a second longer than necessary.

Matthew walked to a small desk placed against the living room's far wall where an aging laptop sat closed beneath a stack of medical journals. The machine wheezed to life. He wasn't a tech geek. He lived with outdated hardware.

I stood behind him as he sat and inserted the drive, close enough to smell the clean scent of soap on his skin and see the tension gathering across his shoulders.

Files appeared on the screen—folders labeled with code names, encrypted databases, and image files I'd organized into comprehensible evidence.

Matthew opened the first folder. Bank transfers scrolled down the screen, millions of dollars flowing between shell corporations and foreign accounts.

Then came personnel files—dozens of them, each marked with operational status codes that meant nothing to civilians but everything to the people who'd been burned.

He clicked on a photograph.

An image filled the screen, and Matthew froze.

Farid.

Alive.

Timestamp from six weeks after his supposed death in Afghanistan.

Matthew's hands gripped the laptop's edge. A muscle in his jaw worked like he was grinding his teeth to powder.

Another photograph showed Farid in what looked like a medical facility—clean walls, institutional lighting, and he wore civilian clothes instead of the Manchester United jersey Matthew had described. A date stamp in the corner read three months ago.

"How long?" Matthew's voice came out hoarse.

"How long what?"

"How long has he been alive?"

I moved closer to the screen, pointing at other files in the directory. "Based on the records? Since you watched him die."

Matthew clicked through more images. Farid in different locations, different clothes, but unmistakably alive and apparently healthy. The final photo showed him walking through what looked like a European airport, carrying a passport I knew would bear someone else's name.

"The IED was real," I said quietly. "But the medical response wasn't. They didn't kill your interpreter. They extracted him. Shipped him to a facility in Romania where they spent six months reconstructing his identity."

"Why?"

"Because he was useful. Native language skills, intimate knowledge of American military operations, and emotional connections to US personnel. Magnus Hoyle's organization specializes in repurposing assets other people think are dead."

And Farid was the best and most loyal friend I'd ever known.

Matthew closed his eyes. "Hoyle?"

"Billionaire. Reclusive. Publicly, he runs tech companies and funds humanitarian operations.

Privately, he illegally runs a foreign intelligence operation with illegal networks that stretch into the US.

He harvests intelligence from those operations and sells it to whoever pays the most. Governments, corporations, criminal organizations—he doesn't discriminate.

I added more detail. "Hoyle's not some Bond villain in a volcano lair.

He's a former State Department analyst pushed out for 'ethical flexibility' during the Iraq War.

Lost his son in a bombing—a civilian contractor, wrong place, wrong time.

After that, he decided governments were too sentimental to make the hard choices.

He sees himself as evolution in action. Post-national, post-moral. Just pure information capitalism."

I reached around Matthew and opened another folder. Soldiers, interpreters, aid workers—officially dead, but still breathing in Hoyle's system. Extracted, renamed, and repurposed as assets.

Matthew stared at Hoyle's photo on the laptop screen—silver-haired, expensively dressed, the kind of man who appeared on financial news programs to discuss global markets. Nothing in his face suggested the monster he'd become.

"What drives him?" Matthew asked. "Beyond profit."

"Control," I said immediately. "He told me once that chaos was just unorganized information. His network doesn't create instability—it monetizes the existing instability. He thinks he's providing clarity."

I took a step back, leaving control of the laptop to Matthew. "Farid wasn't the only one extracted. It's been happening for years. Stage a death, steal a life, and sell the rest. Who goes looking for someone they already buried?"

Matthew's hands trembled as he scrolled through the files. "The blood. I held pressure on wounds that wouldn't stop bleeding."

"Pig blood mixed with coagulants. Creates a realistic trauma response without actual life-threatening injury. The extraction team was probably within fifty meters of the blast site."

"I grieved for him." His voice broke on the last word. "I carried his death with me for years. Thought I'd failed him."

"You were supposed to. That's how the operation works. Real emotional trauma creates authentic behavioral patterns. Anyone investigating would see exactly what they expected—a medic devastated by losing someone he couldn't save."

"Do you know what I told his mother?"

Matthew didn't wait for an answer.

"That he didn't suffer. That it was fast. That he knew he was loved."