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 He lived with outdated hardware.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 stretchinto 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."
