Blood and Vows.

Chapter 13 — The Vanishing Past

The lobby of the Bureau’s field office looked the way it always did at eight in the morning—fluorescents a shade too bright, the smell of sanitizer and cheap coffee, the steady click of shoes through a metal detector’s arch. But when Colonel Richard Stevens stepped through the double doors, conversations thinned by half a decibel, like the building itself had inhaled.

He flashed his badge, didn’t break stride. The guard, who’d known him a decade, gave a muted nod that said I heard. Stevens pretended he hadn’t.

Elevator to three. Paper under his arm. A cup of coffee cooling in his hand he didn’t remember buying. He walked past the framed commendations, the memorial wall, the glassed-in conference room where half the faces looked away as he passed. He told himself it was coincidence. He didn’t believe it.

Personnel Records was a chilled rectangle of desks and filing cabinets that should have been extinct. A woman with headset hair and a stone-still expression looked up when Stevens stopped at her counter.

“I need the full file on Officer Jacob Reed,” he said. He kept his voice even, administrative, the kind that slid past defenses.

Her eyes flicked to his rank, back to his face. “Reed is flagged.” No explanation, just the word like a stop sign. “You’ll need authorization from Internal.”

Stevens set a folded sheet on the counter. “Already have it.” He didn’t add that he’d burned two favors at dawn to get the signature. The woman checked the letter, hesitated, then typed. The printer hummed. Two minutes later a cart squeaked up with cardboard boxes and a thin gray binder.

“That’s all?” Stevens frowned at the binder.

“That’s all the physical we have,” she said. “The rest is digital.”

“Open the digital,” he said. “Here.”

She swung her monitor slightly so he could see without crossing the line. The Bureau’s HR portal glowed in cold blues. The tool tips and tabs hadn’t changed in years.

“Reed, Jacob,” she narrated as she navigated. “Hired as civilian analyst contractor five years ago, transferred to task-force liaison eighteen months later, sponsored to academy after preliminary assignment. Graduated with marks,” a pause, “average-plus. Assignment: Special Projects… sealed.” She shot him a look that said you know how this goes.

“Unseal what you can,” he said. “I’m not here for assignments. I’m here for before.”

She clicked Background. A progress wheel spun. A PDF loaded: scans of documents layered like a scrapbook. Birth certificate. Social security issuance. High school transcript. Two employer verifications. Bank letter. Leasing agreement. The backbone of a life.

Stevens leaned in. Trained eyes skated through the pages faster than most people could blink. Something itched.

“Zoom that,” he said, tapping the birth certificate. She did. The county seal blurred into pixels. He traced the raised impression with his eyes out of habit, then saw it—tiny white flecks in a repeating pattern along the border. Scanner dust. Identical flecks reappeared on the social security card scan. And the transcript. And the bank letter. Dust patterns didn’t repeat across different sheets unless the source was the same original… or the same Photoshop layer.

He kept his tone bland. “These are all scanned from physical documents you have on file?”

“They’re scanned from documents,” she said, hedged. “Physicals are stored offsite, but we can request—”

“Don’t,” he said. “Try the metadata.”

She right-clicked. Properties surfaced in small boxes. On four separate files the Created timestamp was identical down to the second—3:16 a.m., two years and nine months ago. Same machine ID. Same user: sys_batch_07.

“They were bulk-loaded,” the clerk said quietly.

“By whom?” Stevens asked.

“System account.” She licked her lips. “Colonel, this is above my—”

“I know,” he said, softening his voice. “You’ve been very helpful.” And then, because kindness greased wheels more than rank, “Thank you.”

He took the binder, left the boxes. He didn’t need the paper. He needed the hollows.

On his way out, the woman called softly, “Sir?”

He paused.

“We don’t always get a choice,” she said. “About what shows up in the system.”

He gave her the smallest nod in the world and walked.

Internal Affairs lived one floor down and three degrees colder. The carpet softened footsteps so men could lie without hearing themselves do it. Detective Mason—nose still faintly crooked from the punch Stevens had delivered days ago—was waiting outside a glass office like a cat pretending to be a rug.

“Colonel,” Mason said, voice smooth with spite. “Looking lively for a man who assaulted a fellow officer.”

“You should hold still when a man warns you to move,” Stevens replied, not missing a beat. He pushed the door and stepped into Director Monroe’s office without being invited.

Monroe looked as if he’d been poured into his suit and left to harden. He held a pen the way other men held a cigarette. “Rick,” he said, too friendly. “To what do I owe this surprise?”

“Jacob Reed,” Stevens said, dropping the binder onto Monroe’s desk so it landed with a thud more dramatic than its weight deserved. “Your golden boy.”

“Golden boy?” Monroe’s brows twitched. “He died last week, if you hadn’t heard. Brave kid.”

“The kind of brave only a ghost can be,” Stevens said. “Your file on him is a cake frosted at three in the morning by a system account. No original documents surfaced. Birth certificate smells like a web layer pulled across four other forms. His social was issued late—two years before the academy. No tax trail before that. No hospital, no dentist, no speeding ticket. He appears the day you needed him and disappears the day he’s useful to blame.”

Monroe’s pen ticked twice like a metronome. “You’re emotional.”

“I’m observant.” Stevens leaned forward. “And I’m telling you Reed isn’t just dirty. He’s fabricated.”

Mason stepped inside, all eyebrows and affront. “With respect, Colonel, we have evidence your agent Walker—”

“You have a video,” Stevens snapped, turning on him. “Which you’ve been waving like a flag because it tells a story you wanted to tell anyway.”

Monroe steepled his fingers. “And you have another story, I take it.”

“I have a question,” Stevens said. “Who sponsored Reed through the polygraph?”

Monroe’s gaze cooled. “That’s sealed.”

“Unseal it.”

“Rick.”

“Unseal it,” Stevens repeated, less officer than brother at a grave. “Or I’ll ask in a room you don’t control.”

Silence stretched. Monroe sighed through his nose. “Sit down.”

He typed, frowned, typed again. On the screen reflected in his glasses, a list of permissions flashed and vanished.

Finally he spoke. “Sponsor listed as ‘Senior Oversight.’ No name.”

“Meaning?” Stevens asked, though he knew.

“Meaning,” Monroe said, “someone upstairs liked him. And we don’t ask names when upstairs likes someone.”

“And the video?” Stevens asked. “Your case against Walker. Do me the professional courtesy of saying it out loud.”

Mason was only too happy. “Security footage shows Alex Walker at Reed’s workstation the night of the breach. Timecode aligns with outgoing messages from her phone to a cartel drop. Telemetry puts her device in the building. She had motive—grief, rage, fixation on Sebastian Cortez. She accessed Reed’s terminal. She had opportunity. She had—”

“—a fiancé who wasn’t real,” Stevens finished for him. “And a boss who failed her.” He let that last word hang in the air long enough to sting. “I’m not asking you to love Walker. I’m asking you to consider you might be hunting the wrong animal.”

Monroe capped his pen. “Consider it considered, Colonel. In the meantime, stay out of my bullpen.”

“I’ll stay out of your bullpen,” Stevens said. “Try staying out of my graveyard.”

He left before either of them could answer.

Natalie’s world was a basement cut into pixels and coffee. The lab’s lights hummed like insects around a porch. On three monitors, the same clip played in staggered frames: a woman—Alex—entering a room, sitting at a terminal, typing. On the fourth monitor, graphs jittered like EKGs.

“Convince me,” Stevens said as soon as he was through the door.

Natalie didn’t turn. “That this is doctored?”

“That it isn’t,” he said.

She sighed. “Then I have bad news.”

Emil was already there, perched on a stool with his long legs folded, jaw dark with a day too long. He lifted a hand in a hello that wasn’t one.

Natalie rewound and hit play. “Four camera angles. Lobby, corridor, lab door, terminal. All internally synced. Sensor noise pattern consistent across thirty days—no mismatched fixed-pattern noise, no resampling artifacts. Reflections in the terminal glass match the room’s lighting in real time. The phone she’s holding announces itself on the access point’s log when she steps in, pings the mesh, then disengages when she leaves. The cursor latency matches a physical keystroke cadence, not a post-process insert. The timecode… is clean.”

“So it’s real,” Stevens said flatly.

“The footage is real,” Natalie corrected. “Which is not the same as ‘the story is simple.’”

“English,” Emil said.

She exhaled. “The video shows Alex at Jacob’s computer. It shows someone’s phone with her IMEI in the room. It shows messages leaving the building from a device that identifies as hers. It does not show intent. It doesn’t show who cloned her SIM three weeks earlier,” she clicked, a screen of logs blooming, “or who registered a secondary IMEI with her device’s make and model for three hours that night then vanished. It doesn’t show who left a phantom process in Reed’s login that opened a port at the exact second her phone broadcast nearby.”

Stevens pointed at the list. “You can prove a clone?”

“I can prove a ghost,” Natalie said. “A perfect twin that existed just long enough to do what it needed, then burned.”

Emil rubbed a hand over his mouth. “So the tape is real, and the frame is real, and the phone is maybe real and maybe a twin.” He looked at Stevens. “This still leaves us defending Alex with a story that sounds like magic.”

Stevens didn’t answer. He watched Alex in the frame sit, type, stand, leave. Even low-res, he knew the set of her shoulders, the sliver of defiance built into her spine. She had cried at the funeral without making a sound. She had walked like a soldier into rooms that were trying to kill her. She had trusted him.

“Natalie,” he said. “The messages that left the building from ‘her’ phone. Content?”

“Encrypted payloads to a known drop.” Natalie shook her head. “We can’t read; we can only prove the exits. But I can prove timing. They align with keystrokes at Jacob’s terminal.” She pointed at a graph. Spikes like teeth. “Cursor moves. Packet out. Cursor moves. Packet.”

“So she was the puppet,” Emil said softly. “And he pulled the strings.”

“Or,” Natalie said, “someone else pulled both. I don’t like the edges on this.”

Stevens turned to Emil. “Your part.”

Emil slid off the stool, grabbed a folder, and spread photocopies on the table as if he were trying to exorcise them. “I went hunting for Jacob Reed before the academy.”

“Find him?”

“That’s the problem. Nobody did.” Emil tapped the first page. “Transcript? The high school exists. The registrar doesn’t remember him. Yearbook pages are curiously thin that year, digital only, prints ‘lost in a flood.’ The social? Issued two years before the academy, like a man who showed up at thirty with the paperwork of twenty.” He flipped a page. “Primary care? None. Dentist? One visit, cash. The office burned down the month after. Rental history? Landlord’s LLC is a shelf company that dissolved inside ninety days. All references pick up right before he enters our world. Before that, Jacob Reed is a rumor with a mailing address.”

Natalie added a page. “And the tech trail is almost clean. First email account created eighteen months before the academy. The IP that created it geolocated to a co-working space used by, drumroll, a private security vendor with a government contract.”

Stevens traced a line with his finger the way he did on maps. “Sponsor?”

“Sealed,” Emil said. “But a friend at the academy owed me. Reed’s polygraph threw a soft flag on ‘undisclosed associations.’ A ‘Senior Oversight Liaison’ overrode it with a note: mission-sensitive. He breezed.”

“Mission-sensitive,” Stevens repeated. Government for don’t ask. He felt the awful, ordinary shape of it settle in his chest. “So he walked in wearing a face we gave him, and we thanked him for the mask.”

Natalie met his eyes. “Rick… the video is real. And Jacob Reed might not be.”

Stevens closed the folder as if the act could change what it contained. “Keep digging. I want the batch loader who pushed those documents at 3:16 a.m. I want the sysadmin who approved sys_batch_07. I want the landlord behind the landlord and the printer who sold the registrar those yearbooks that flood decided to eat.”

Natalie nodded, already typing. Emil scooped the copies, jaw clenched. The lab hummed.

As Stevens reached the door, Natalie said quietly, “There’s something else.”

He stopped.

“I matched the elevator camera’s reflection to the corridor cam’s angle,” she said. “A trick I use to catch deepfakes. The reflection shows Jacob stepping into frame a full three seconds before the corridor camera does.”

“Lag?” Emil asked.

“Not on synchronized internal cams,” she said. “Which means one of two things: the corridor cam buffer stuttered—rare—or… someone fed the elevator a live pass and the corridor a controlled delay. It’s subtle. But it says someone with access was orchestrating more than luck.”

Stevens thought of Monroe’s pen ticking, of Mason’s eager list, of the clerk’s whisper: We don’t always get a choice about what shows up in the system.

“Thank you,” he said. He left before the weight in his chest turned into something he couldn’t carry upright.

Outside, afternoon had bled into gray. He stood on the steps and let the city’s cold air bite his face. His phone buzzed. Unknown number. He answered without thinking.

A man’s voice, strained. “Colonel Stevens?”

“Who is this?”

“You don’t know me,” the voice said. “But I sat three desks from Jacob Reed at the academy. He helped me with a firearms qual because my grip was wrong. I… I thought he was a decent guy.”

“And now?”

“Now his locker is empty and his file has… places where there should be memories.” The voice swallowed. “Do you think he was one of them?”

“Son,” Stevens said, making his voice the floor the man could stand on, “I think he was whatever someone needed him to be.”

He hung up before the man could ask for absolution.

He found a bench half a block away and sat. The cold seeped through the coat. He didn’t notice. He watched a bus pull up, cough, pull away. In the fog on the bus’s rear window, someone had traced a heart and then dragged a finger through it until it looked like a wound.

His phone vibrated again. A text from Emil: Checked Reed’s emergency contact. Number belongs to a prepaid that never received a call. The name on the form? ‘S. Cortez.’ Not Sebastian. ‘S.’

Another from Natalie right after: Pulled the batch-loader logs. The account that pushed Reed’s documents is also associated with two other hires that year. Both transferred out. One never showed up for day one. The other? No longer in the database.

The world tilted a degree and a half, the way it did when men realized the house they lived in was built on sand. Stevens closed his eyes, opened them again, made the horizon behave.

He dialed. Emil picked up on the first ring.

“Tell me you have one real thing,” Stevens said.

“Yeah,” Emil said, voice hoarse. “The apartment manager remembered Reed’s ‘girlfriend.’ Dark hair. Glasses. Lawyer vibe. Name in her email signature when she printed a receipt for him once—Sam…something. I’m trying to—”

“Barnes,” Stevens said.

A pause. “You knew?”

“I know enough.” He scrubbed a hand across his face. “Emil, listen carefully. We’re out of clean angles. Which means we move like we’re already bleeding. Stay off your usual routes. If you have to talk to me, use Natalie’s dead drops. No more calls.”

“Rick,” Emil said, quiet, “You think Mason’s wrong about Alex?”

“I think Mason is wrong about everything that matters,” Stevens said. He ended the call before he promised anything he couldn’t deliver.

He sat there until the cold climbed his spine, then went back inside to write a report no one would read the way it needed to be read.

The last paragraph was one sentence long.

Jacob Reed never truly existed.