Miles, who had remained silent until now, dropped into a chair. "What the fuck?"
Evelyn continued her explanation. "If he said the deal was off, it meant he changed his mind. He'd stopped covering for the project. He was going to blow it wide open."
The weight of her words settled over us. Lars Reeves hadn't been a random assailant. He'd been a man on a mission—one that had cost him his life.
"He wasn't in Tahiti by coincidence." Evelyn smoothed her slacks with one hand. "He was following a trail—an off-the-books meeting between Reeves-Halvorsen representatives and foreign military buyers."
Alex connected the dots. "A weapons sale."
Evelyn nodded. "I believe Lars went rogue. He took sensitive intel to either stop the deal or leak it in real time. I hadn't heard from him in months—until a week before the explosion."
She pulled out her phone, scrolling to show us an encrypted message:
Lars:The end game begins.
"I never expected him to die." Her voice caught, and she reached for a thin chain around her neck—a habit rather than a conscious gesture. From it hung a small, worn key. "We had a protocol, you know, since the beginning. If either of us went dark, there was a storage locker in Vancouver. Backup plans, new identities."
A weak smile appeared on her face. "Lars called it our apocalypse kit. I thought he'd use it—vanish into a black site or go full whistleblower, but he chose something else."
She tucked the key back beneath her collar, composing herself with visible effort. "He never knew who you were, Officer McCabe, but somehow, he trusted that you were the right man to hear his message."
I whispered, "He gave me the message and didn't even know my name."
"Lars fell trying to stop what he helped build." Evelyn's gaze drifted to the window. The rigid control she'd maintained cracked just enough to reveal the woman beneath the fugitive—someone who had once loved not wisely but deeply. "We met as grad students, you know. He talked about changing the world through predictive algorithms. He believed we were saving lives."
Her laugh was soft and hollow. "Not a martyr. Not a villain. We were both something in between."
Alex's hand found mine beneath the table.
Marcus acted as the practical adult in the room. "So where does that leave us?"
Evelyn straightened in her chair. "It leaves you with a choice—walk away now and hope they believe you know nothing of value, or help me finish what Lars started."
None of us spoke. It wasn't really a choice at all. We were already too deep to turn back.
Evelyn reached for her backpack. She withdrew a laptop and placed it carefully on the scarred tabletop.
"This is what Lars died trying to protect." She tapped in a rapid sequence of passwords. "The complete architecture of Project Asphodel, including what they've been hiding from the Pentagon oversight committee."
The screen illuminated her face from below, casting sharp shadows that exaggerated her hollow cheeks. The rest of us gathered around as she turned the laptop toward us.
The interface was surprisingly ordinary—a standard file directory with neatly labeled folders. Nothing in its appearance suggested the horror it contained.
Marcus moved closer, arms folded across his chest. "What exactly are we looking at here?"
"The criteria for who lives and who dies," Evelyn replied, opening a document with a dense flowchart.
I studied the diagram, my stomach tightening at its clinical precision. "This is a kill algorithm."
"Precisely." She highlighted sections as she explained. "It collects data points—social media activity, financial transactions, private emails—"
"Wait," Miles interrupted. "Are you saying this thing is already monitoring people's private communications? That's illegal without a warrant."
"Legality stopped mattering years ago," Evelyn said. "The program accesses everything: browsing history, location data, even genetic markers when available."
Alex whispered to all of us. "Minority Reportwithout the psychics."
"And with real consequences." Evelyn opened another file.
