Chapter 8 - The Tampa Road
The drive down to the private hospice facility outside Tampa took forty-five minutes of unbroken silence. Julian drove his own unmarked sedan, while Captain Sterling and the NCIS team stayed behind to secure the Gainesville warehouse and intercept any Vanguard assets trying to retrace our digital footprint. I sat in the passenger seat, staring out at the darkening Florida highway as the humid evening air blurred the streetlights into streaks of gold and gray.
"If Marcus is alive and responsive," I said, breaking the silence as we took the county road exit, "why hasn't he reached out to me? We served together through three deployments. He knew where to find me."
"Because he couldn't trust who was watching you, Aiden," Julian replied, keeping his eyes on the road. "After the incident in the Gulf, Vanguard placed every member of Marcus’s operational unit under active counterintelligence surveillance. They knew you were the closest thing he had to a brother. If Marcus had contacted you directly, Vanguard would have used you as leverage to force him to hand over the cryptographic keys to the offshore accounts where he stashed the duplicate compliance logs."
"The keys that were on my satcom unit," I realized.
"Exactly. That’s why someone tipped off Officer Jenkins in Ocala today. They didn't want to arrest you for impersonating a sailor; they needed an excuse to confiscate your secure gear, isolate you in a holding cell, and run a biometric brute-force download without triggering a national security lockdown at the Pentagon."
Julian pulled the sedan off the paved road onto a narrow, gravel drive flanked by dense rows of live oak trees draped in Spanish moss. At the end of the lane sat a low, unassuming single-story brick building that looked more like an administrative annex than a medical facility. No guards stood at the gate, but the exterior security cameras tracked our approach with slow, mechanical precision.
"Is he lucid?" I asked, my hand resting on the door handle.
"Some days," Julian said as he shifted into park and cut the engine. "Other days the neurological damage from the chemical exposure takes over, and he doesn't recognize his own name. But he knows your voice, Aiden. You were the last person he spoke to before he went into the water."
We stepped out into the humid night air. The heavy wooden front door of the facility wasn't locked; Julian pushed it open with his shoulder, leading me down a quiet, dimly lit hallway smelling of antiseptic and old paper. Room 104 was at the very end of the hall.
May you like
Julian pushed the door open just enough for us to see inside. Sitting up in a hospital bed, staring blankly out the window at the dark oak trees, was a man with hollow cheeks, silver-streaked hair, and a familiar scar across his left jawline.
It was Marcus. But he looked like a ghost of the man I had pulled out of the surf three years ago.
