Chapter 8 D' Captor

The summons to the director's office had been sudden.

Evelyn Daly stood in front of the mahogany desk, her national intelligence agency badge clipped to the lapel of her blazer.

Director Michael didn't offer a seat. Instead, he slid a thin blue folder across the surface of his desk.

“Van Zero, Person of Interest in a gas explosion that took his wife and child,” Michael stated, his voice a flat monotone. “We need him picked up before it hits the news cycle.”

Evelyn didn't reach for the file.

“Sir, why is National Intelligence issuing an apprehension warrant? That falls strictly under the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police.”

“The target has exhibited highly erratic, potentially hostile behavior following the incident. He has gone completely off the grid,” Michael replied, though his eyes remained focused on his monitor.

“We have reason to believe he may pose an immediate threat to the public. So your objective is simple, Agent Daly. Locate him and bring him into our custody. You are to do this quietly, using minimal attention. The media cannot, under any circumstances, discover this investigation or they will turn him into a victim. We don't need that.”

Minutes later, Evelyn sat in her cubicle, the screen of the monitor illuminating her face as she opened the digital case file of the official incident report.

She began cross-referencing the municipal dispatch logs with the forensic summary.

The incident report cited the explosion at exactly 18:42. The first municipal fire engine was logged at the perimeter at 18:51. But the traffic camera feeds from the intersection showed two SUVs with government plates arriving at the scene at 18:47.

She ran the plates in their database and it was identified as a military vehicle.

Military personnel had been on-site before the fire department even arrived. They had beaten the first responders to an unannounced, accidental gas leak.

Evelyn frowned, scrolling down to the medical examiner’s addendum.

The bodies of Laura and Noah Zero had been recovered from the debris at 20:15. The death certificates and autopsy reports were fully signed, processed, and legally finalized by 23:10.

Less than six hours. No backlog, no delay. Nothing like the usual pace of any government institution.

It was logistically impossible. A standard single autopsy required extensive tissue swabbing, dental verification, and toxicological screening. The paperwork alone took a minimum of twenty-four hours to clear the municipal hurdle. Let alone two bodies.

Evelyn bit her finger as she dug deeper into the database.

She pulled up the forensic photographs taken by the fire marshal before the military perimeter had been established. Evelyn was not an explosives expert, but her training at the academy had thoroughly covered the basic physics of urban detonations.

She zoomed in on a high-resolution image of the building's foundational load-bearing beams.

The concrete was pulverized. The rebar was melted and bent at an upward angle, the burn marks forming distinct, localized clusters of blackened carbon. This wasn't the work of domestic gas. This was a highly concentrated thermal footprint of an accelerant used by the military alone.

Evelyn leaned back in her chair.

Her mind went back to the funeral she had observed earlier in the week from behind the tree in the cemetery. She remembered the suspect, Van Zero.

He hadn't looked like a grieving man. He had a different expression. Like someone irritated, someone looking for something, anything to take out his anger on. And when he saw her, she couldn't help but disappear. She couldn't hold his gaze.

Evelyn gathered her tablet, marched back down the fluorescent-lit corridor, and stepped into Director Michael's office without waiting for his assistant to announce her.

Michael looked up, slightly annoyed at the intrusion. “Agent Daly. I trust you have a location on the target.”

“I have a discrepancy, Sir,” Evelyn said, keeping her tone neutral, and placed the tablet on his desk. "I'm reviewing the foundational parameters of the apprehension mandate. The timeline of the gas explosion doesn't align with the forensic reality on the ground. We have classified military vehicles on-site before the blast was even called in to dispatch, and the structural damage is entirely inconsistent with a gas leak. Furthermore, the autopsies were pushed through in under six hours.”

Michael ignored the tablet and looked directly at her.

The silence in the room stretched, oppressive.

“Your directive is apprehension, Agent Daly,” Michael said, his voice dropping an octave, losing its smooth undertone. "It is not a forensic review. You are not assigned to the Metropolitan Police arson desk.”

“Sir, if we are mobilizing resources to bring in a civilian victim,”

“He is a flight risk and a severe threat to national stability,” Michael interrupted, his tone sharp and scolding. "You will cease this line of inquiry immediately. Find him. Bring him in. Do not make me question your loyalty to this agency, Evelyn.”

Evelyn returned to her desk. She stared blindly at the blank screen of her monitor.

She had joined the National Intelligence Agency because she believed in the absolute sanctity of the law. She believed in procedure and in the idea that the system, while imperfect, fundamentally protected the citizens of Valoris. But the system was actively mobilizing to hunt down a grieving man, suppressing the evidence of his family's murder.

If she followed her orders and brought Van Zero in, she knew exactly what would happen.

He would be quietly detained in a black-site before the media could ever learn his name, and the false narrative of the tragic gas explosion would become permanent history. Loyalty to her country dictated she follow the directive. She didn't want to be an accessory to wrongful execution.

She thought of Michael's voice, the way it had dropped when he threatened her loyalty instead of answering her question. A man with nothing to hide answers questions. He hadn't answered hers.

She thought of Van Zero at the grave not grieving, not broken, just watching. Like a man who already knew something was wrong and was waiting for the world to catch up.

Two men. Two silences. Only one of them looked like guilt.

The overhead lights in her sector automatically dimmed, signaling the end of work hours.

Evelyn sat still in the half-darkness.

She made her choice and it wasn't born of emotional outrage or visceral anger.

She reached out, her manicured fingers resting on the keyboard. She closed the apprehension mandate issued by Director Michael. Then, bypassing the agency's primary logging servers to ensure she wouldn't trigger an internal audit, she opened a secure, encrypted terminal.

With a few keystrokes, Evelyn Daly pulled the original, unredacted metropolitan police file on the explosion back onto her screen.

She opened the case file again.