Chapter 10 What my father found

Ethan found the parking structure by instinct.

Six floors. Open top. A building that existed purely to hold cars and had no interest in the people inside them. No cameras above the fourth floor. He had clocked that on his way past it yesterday morning without deciding to clock it. His brain filed useful spaces automatically now. Exits. Blind spots. Places where a person could exist for an hour without being recorded or remembered.

He took the stairs to the top floor.

Three cars are parked near the elevator. None near the far wall. He went to the far wall and sat down with his back against the concrete and looked at the city spread out below him and let himself stop moving for the first time in twenty-four hours.

His ribs were healed. The burns from the rocket were gone. The damage from Kane was resolved. His body had been running its repair processes continuously since yesterday morning, and the cost of that was not pain. It was a heaviness that sat behind his eyes and in his shoulders. Not exhaustion exactly. Something adjacent to it. The specific weight of a system that had been operating at full capacity without pause.

He looked at the hard drive in his hand.

He needed a device.

He made one call. Rosa picked up on the second ring, and he told her where he was and what he needed. She said nothing about the time or the location or the fact that he had not contacted her since leaving her apartment before dawn. She told him twenty minutes and hung up.

He sat with the city and waited.

---

Rosa pulled into the top floor of the car park eighteen minutes later.

She got out with a laptop under her arm and a paper bag in her hand and walked to where he was sitting against the wall and looked at his torn shirt and the dried blood on the collar and the general condition of a man who had been through more in one day than most people went through in a decade.

She said nothing about any of it.

She held out the paper bag.

He took it. A sandwich. Still warm. She had stopped somewhere on the way.

She put the laptop on the ground beside him and straightened up.

"I'll be in the car," she said.

She went back to the car, closed the door, and gave him his back and his privacy without being asked to and without making a moment. That was Rosa. She understood that some things did not need to be witnessed to be supported.

He opened the laptop and plugged in the drive.

---

His father's files opened in a folder structure that was clean and precise and completely consistent with the man who had built it. Labeled. Dated. Cross-referenced. Two years of investigation by a man who was dying and knew it, and chose to spend what he had left on this.

Ethan read.

The shell companies first. Fourteen of them across six jurisdictions. His father had traced each one back through its layers with the patient thoroughness of someone who had spent forty years in business and understood exactly how these structures were built because he had seen legitimate versions of them his whole career. Each company connected to the next. Each connection was documented with a paper trail his father had compiled from public records and private sources, and one contact inside a regulatory body whose name appeared in the files with a note beside it. Willing. Careful. Use once.

The program funding trail next. Diana's research operation had been drawing government money through four different grant streams simultaneously. Each stream legitimate on its own. Together, they represented a funding base that went significantly beyond what any single research initiative should require. His father had found the discrepancy in publicly available budget documents and followed it through three years of government financial records.

The names of four government officials appeared across multiple documents. Not just Harlan. Three others. Different departments. Different roles. All connected to the same funding streams and all connected to Diana's operation through intermediary relationships that were invisible individually and unmistakable together.

His father had built a complete picture.

Then Ethan opened the last file on the drive.

It was not a document.

---

His father was sitting at a desk.

The camera was slightly too low. Set up quickly by someone who was not accustomed to recording themselves. The desk behind him was the one from his office at Cole Industries. Ethan recognised the edge of it. The particular grain of the wood his father had chosen deliberately because it had belonged to his own father before him.

He was thinner than Ethan remembered. The illness is visible in his face in the way illness becomes visible when it has been present long enough to stop hiding. But his eyes were the same. Clear, direct, and completely present.

He looked at the camera for a moment before he spoke. The look of a man deciding where to start.

Then he started.

"The program had a second purpose," he said. "Diana was not only building enhanced subjects. She was collecting data from the process. Biological data. Neurological data. The kind of data that does not exist anywhere else because the process that generates it has never been done before." He paused. "She is building something with that data. Something larger than one man, one company, or one city. I could not find the full shape of it before I ran out of time. But it is in the files. Enough of it. You will find it faster than I could."

Ethan watched his father's face on the screen.

"The woman behind the mask," his father said. "I got close. Not close enough. She is careful in a way that Diana is not, and powerful in a way that Diana does not understand she is not. She removed my source before I could get a name. But what I found before she did that is in the files under the marked folder. You will know it when you see it. Finish what I started."

He stopped. Looked at the desk for a moment.

Then he looked back at the camera.

"I should have said this more," he said. "I was not a man who said things easily. You know that. You grew up knowing that, and I think it cost you something I did not fully understand until it was too late to fix." He looked directly at the lens. "I am proud of you. I have always been proud of you. Not of what was done to you or what you can do because of it. Of who you were before any of that. Who you still are." He reached forward. "Come home."

He turned the camera off.

---

The car park was very quiet.

The city hummed somewhere below him. A siren three streets away is moving east. The particular sound of a city at night that never goes fully silent.

Ethan sat with the closed laptop for a long time.

His father had sat at that desk eight months before he died and looked at a camera and said the things that had not been said across thirty-two years of a relationship between two people who were too similar to communicate the way they should have, and had both paid the price of that similarity their entire lives.

I am proud of you.

He put the laptop on the ground beside him.

Picked up the clean phone.

He looked at it for a moment.

Then he dialed the number from the bank. The number he had taken from the man outside. The number that had connected him to a voice he still could not put a face to.

It rang three times.

She picked herself up.

He could tell immediately. No intermediary. No assistant. The same voice from the screen. Controlled, calm, and alert in the specific way of someone who does not miss things.

He spoke before she could.

"I want a meeting," he said. "A real one."

Silence.

Not long. Three seconds. The silence of someone who was genuinely surprised and was deciding whether to show it.

Then she laughed.

Small. Quiet. Nothing like the theatrical laugh from the screen in the private club. This was real. The unguarded laugh of someone whose day had just become something they had not predicted.

"Now we are getting somewhere," she said.