David McGovern was—is a spy. Not in the way people imagine dodging bullets in foreign cities or seducing informants in smoke-filled bars. No, he worked behind a desk at Langley, buried beneath layers of bureaucracy, parsing classified data with the trained eye of an analyst. His specialty was information—patterns, anomalies, and the unseen connections most people would never notice. And until recently, that was all he ever needed to do.
Then the file.
It wasn’t meant for him. A folder—thick, dense with classified markings—placed carelessly on his desk by an overworked assistant from another office, shuffled in with routine reports. The kind of clerical error that should have been insignificant, dismissed without a second glance.
Except he did glance.
At first, the document seemed mundane: coordinates, timestamps, operational assessments stamped with the insignia of covert air raids. Routine in his line of work. But then, something shifted—the names. Locations in Columbia that were marked for strategic bombing, encrypted identifiers attached to them. Should he have skimmed past them, filed the report, and let it fade into the depths of intelligence archives? But instinct made him linger.
The same names. Over and over.
Too frequent, too coincidental. At first, it looked like personnel rosters—agents embedded, operatives on the ground. But the deeper he read, the stranger it became. Their social security numbers weren’t just mismatched. They belonged to two different identities. Multiple records under the same alias, scattered through government payroll databases, cross-referenced against entirely different people.
People who shouldn’t exist.
David sat frozen, pulse hammering as he flipped through page after page, fingers tightening over the thick dossier. This wasn’t just an error. This was engineered—fabricated with surgical precision. Someone had erased lives and rewritten them into something unrecognizable.
And he was never supposed to see it.