If Wyatt destroyed the files first, he’d be obstructing a federal investigation.
Either way, people were going to get hurt.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He didn’t look at it. He already knew what it would say.
That night,Wyatt sat in the dark of his apartment, laptop open on the kitchen table.
He’d written the monitoring program years ago—back when paranoia was just good sense, back when he’d first started working for a police department and wanted to know if anyone ever came looking for his real identity. The program was elegant in its simplicity: it flagged any searches through law enforcement databases that touched certain keywords. His name. His mother’s name. The town they’d fled from. And now, the case numbers his father had sent him.
He hadn’t expected it to ping tonight.
But it had. Twice.
Wyatt pulled up the alert log, his stomach already sinking. Someone had been searching the archived case files. Running queries on names and dates that overlapped with his father’s list.
He drilled down into the metadata, tracing the searches back to their source.
The first one was routed through a VPN—three layers of it, actually. Whoever this was knew how to stay hidden. But what most people didn’t know was that Wyatt had built a geolocating tag into the database. The VPN masked the IP address, but the tag pinged back a physical location anyway.
Somewhere in the suburbs. A residential area. He couldn’t get more specific than that without further investigation, but someone was digging through old case files from their home, late at night, trying not to be seen.
Wyatt’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. He could see the search history laid out in front of him—court transcripts, DEA reports, witness testimonies. All of it pointing toward the same organization his father worked for.
He started deleting.
It felt like cutting pieces of himself away. Each file he erased was another betrayal of someone who might be trying to help.But if they found what they were looking for—if they connected the dots back to Wyatt’s father, back to Wyatt himself?—
He couldn’t let that happen.
The second alert made him pause.
Different source. Different location. This one wasn’t even trying to hide behind a VPN.
The geolocation came back clear: Motel 8. Room 116.
Wyatt stared at the screen. Motel 8 wasn’t a place cops stayed. It was cheap, run-down, the kind of place people used when they didn’t want to be noticed.
His father’s people?
He pulled up the access log for that location, examining the queries. Whoever was searching wasn’t just looking at the case files—they were mapping the entire database structure. Probing the system’s architecture. Testing permissions.
But they weren’t changing anything.
Wyatt checked the access level. Read-only. Whoever this was could see everything in the system, but they couldn’t modify a single record.
The realization hit him like cold water.
If they can hack in, why do they need me?
Because they can look but can’t change. That’s why they need me.
His father’s people could read the files. They could see what was there, identify the threats, find the witnesses who might talk. But they couldn’t alter the records. Couldn’t erase the evidence. Couldn’t scrub the connections that might lead back to the syndicate.
That’s what Wyatt was for.
He was the one with write access. The one who could make changes that would look legitimate, that wouldn’t trigger audit flags or raise suspicions. His father hadn’t just put a body inhis trunk to scare him—he’d chosen Wyatt specifically because Wyatt could do what his hackers couldn’t.
The thought made him sick.