CHAPTER 4 — THE FILE THEY NEVER WANTED ME TO READ
Three weeks after Adrian's arrest, everyone believed the nightmare was over.
Everyone except me.
Every night, I woke at exactly 2:47 a.m.
Not because someone opened my bedroom door.
Because my mind kept returning to the laboratory.
The voices.
The syringes.
The hidden files.
The survivors.
One rainy afternoon, Special Agent Daniel Brooks invited me into a secure evidence room.
"We recovered almost everything," he said.
"Almost?"
He hesitated.
"There was one encrypted file we couldn't open."
He slid a black flash drive across the table.
On its label were only two words.
FINAL SUBJECT
"It requires your biometric authorization."
My fingerprints.
My retina.
My voice.
The system recognized me immediately.
A single video appeared.
Adrian was sitting alone in the laboratory months before my rescue.
He looked directly into the camera.
"If you're watching this, then I've already been caught."
He smiled.
"But that doesn't mean I've lost."
The screen changed.
Blueprints.
Maps.
Financial records.
Photos of hospitals across three different countries.
Then came the sentence that froze every person in the room.
PROJECT LAZARUS WAS NEVER ONE LABORATORY.
There were seven.
Seven secret facilities.
Seven teams.
Hundreds of patients.
Adrian wasn't the mastermind.
He was only Facility Three.
Agent Brooks slowly lowered the tablet.
"My God..."
Then another image appeared.
Seven photographs.
Six faces were crossed out.
Only one remained untouched.
A woman.
Elegant.
Silver hair.
Blue eyes.
Her code name:
DIRECTOR ZERO.
Before anyone could react, every computer inside the evidence room suddenly shut down.
The lights flickered.
Then one sentence appeared on every monitor.
May you like
WELCOME BACK, REBECCA.
Someone had just hacked the FBI.
