Caelan
The door clicks shut, leaving me in the sterile silence of my conference room. The tablet she left on the table feels heavier than it should, like a black box recovered from a crash site. I stare at the door for a long moment, the ghost of her presence still hanging in the air. Dr. Aris Thorne. A name that means nothing. A woman who looked at me with the eyes of someone who has already seen the end of the world.
I pick up my desk phone and press a single button.
“Yes, sir?” Marcus’s voice comes through, rough and immediate. No preamble. That’s why he’s my head of security.
“In my office. Now.”
I don’t hang up. I just set the receiver back in its cradle and walk to the window, looking down at the city twenty stories below. A river of cars flows through the concrete canyons. A million tiny lives, all moving according to a predictable pattern. A system. My entire life, my entire business, is built on understanding and controlling systems. On eliminating variables.
And she just walked in here and upended the entire equation.
The door opens. Marcus is a bull of a man, built from a decade in special forces and another decade keeping my secrets. His face is a roadmap of old scars, but his suit is as sharp as mine.
“The ghost is gone,” he says. It’s not a question.
“She’s gone.” I turn from the window. “What was your read?”
Marcus walks to the table and glances at the tablet without touching it. “She’s clean. Too clean. We ran her profile the second Evelyn booked the meeting. Dr. Aris Thorne. Thirty-two years old. Brilliant academic record. Top researcher at Aethel Corp, working under Patrick Croft. No criminal record, not even a parking ticket. No major debts. No known political affiliations. Lives alone. Her digital footprint is practically non-existent for someone in her field.”
“A good employee,” I say.
“A perfect cover,” he counters without missing a beat. “Nobody is that boring. It’s either a fabrication or she’s the most disciplined person on the planet.”
I tap the tablet. “Her proposal is the opposite of boring.”
“I saw the summary,” Marcus says, his expression unchanging. “A nine-figure doomsday bunker for clients who don’t exist, fronted by a lab tech. On a scale of one to ten on the ‘this is a trap’ meter, it’s a twelve.”
“It’s also the most brilliant logistical and security plan I’ve ever seen,” I reply, walking back to the table. I slide the tablet toward him. “Look at page forty-two. The section on infrastructure failure.”
He picks it up, his thick fingers swiping across the screen. I watch his eyes scan the text, the data tables, the predictive models. I see the flicker of disbelief, the same one I felt thirty minutes ago. It’s the look of a professional seeing something that should not be possible.
“Her projections on the power grid cascade failure,” he says, his voice a low rumble. “The sequence, the timing… this is almost identical to the Pentagon’s ‘Grid-Ex VI’ simulation.”
“It’s not almost identical, Marcus. It’s a perfect match. Down to the predicted failure of the substations in the Pacific Northwest.”
He looks up from the screen, his eyes hard. “That simulation is one of the most classified documents in the country. Only a handful of people have seen the full results. I was in the room for the briefing. How in God’s name does a civilian biologist have it?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” I lean my hands on the table, the cool black surface doing nothing to calm the hum of energy under my skin. “She claims it’s from her consortium’s analytical minds.”
“Her consortium is bullshit,” he says, tossing the tablet back on the table. It lands with a soft thud. “There is no consortium. This data, this plan… it came from somewhere else. Somewhere that has access to information they shouldn’t.”
“I agree.”
“So we walk away,” Marcus says, his tone firm. It’s the logical, correct, and only sane decision. “We blacklist her name, wipe the meeting from the records, and pretend this never happened. We don’t get involved with stolen government intelligence, and we don’t build bunkers for ghosts. It’s too much risk.”
He’s right. Every instinct for self-preservation, every principle I’ve built my company on, screams that he is absolutely right. But then I see her eyes again. Not the calm, calculated demeanor she presented. The fire underneath it. The raw, undiluted desperation of a cornered animal.
“Did you watch the security feed of the meeting?” I ask.
“Every second of it.”
“What did you see?”
“I saw a woman in over her head, trying to sell a story she can’t back up.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “That’s not what I saw. I saw a soldier. Someone who looked at me like she was trying to gauge if I was a threat or a tool. Her entire proposal… it wasn’t a pitch. It was a mission brief.”
I pause, the memory of her gaze making the hair on my arms stand up. “When she spoke about the catalyst, the biological agent… that wasn’t theory. She was talking about something she’d seen. Something that terrifies her.”
Marcus crosses his arms, a wall of skepticism and muscle. “Fear makes people do crazy things, Caelan. Maybe her research at Aethel went south. Maybe she saw something she shouldn’t have, and now she’s paranoid.”
“Paranoia doesn’t produce a two-hundred-page technical document that solves deep-earth geothermal energy stabilization,” I shoot back. “Or a supply chain manifest that accounts for the spoilage rates of seventy-four different essential medications. This is meticulous. This is years of planning. Years of learning from mistakes.”
I run a hand through my hair, a rare break in my own control. “She knew things, Marcus. Not just the data. She knew what to say to Evelyn to get the meeting. She knew what to put in the proposal to get my attention. She’s not just a researcher. She’s dangerous.”
“All the more reason to cut her loose,” he insists.
“No,” I say, the word coming out with more force than I intended. “It’s the reason I can’t.”
He just stares at me, his silence a question.
“Whoever she is, whatever this is, she’s the most fascinating person to walk into this office since we founded the company,” I admit. “My logic is telling me to run. My gut… my gut is telling me she’s the storm on the horizon, and we’re either going to be crushed by it or we’re going to find a way to ride it.”
Marcus uncrosses his arms. He’s known me long enough to know when my mind is made up. He shifts from advisor to operator.
“What’s the play?” he asks.
“I’m not taking the contract. The anonymous client angle is a non-starter. I won’t bet this company on a shadow.”
A flicker of relief crosses his face.
“But,” I continue, “I’m not letting her or this blueprint walk out of my life. If her predictions are even ten percent accurate, this facility isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity.”
I walk over to my desk and sit down, feeling a strange sense of clarity settle over me. The risk isn’t the project. The risk is her.
And I’ve never been one to shy away from a calculated risk.
“I want a full, deep-dive investigation on Dr. Aris Thorne. And I mean deep. Off the books. No digital trails. Use our best assets, the ones who don’t officially exist.”
Marcus nods slowly. “What are we looking for?”
“Everything,” I say, my voice dropping. “I want to know where she buys her groceries. I want to know who her first-grade teacher was. I want to see her university thesis. I want to know about her relationship with Patrick Croft. I want to know every single person she has spoken to in the last seventy-two hours. I want to know how she got access to classified Pentagon data. I want to know why she looks at me like I’m the last lifeboat off a sinking ship.”
I lean forward, my hands flat on the desk. “She called herself a variable. I don’t like variables. So we are going to solve for her. I want a complete ghost file on the ghost. Bring me something real. Something that explains how a simple researcher wrote the bible for the end of the world.”
Marcus gives a single, sharp nod. “Consider it done.”
He turns and walks out, the door closing with a quiet finality. I’m left alone again, the tablet still on the conference table. It’s a Pandora’s box, and I’m about to force it open.
My logical mind screams that I’m making a mistake. That I should have listened to Marcus and walked away.
But my instincts, the ones that kept me alive in war zones and guided me through corporate takeovers, are telling me that Dr. Aris Thorne is not a risk to be avoided.
She’s an asset to be acquired.
