Chapter 6
It was two weeks later. I was on the night shift, which meant the side gate was mine to check every few hours, and I was standing out there in the dark with a flashlight and my pocket notebook, comparing the loose pages Nakamura had pulled from the entry book against my own log.
The command had given me copies. Not officially — Nakamura had Xeroxed them, stapled them, and handed them to me with exactly two words: "Match these."
So I matched them. Every vehicle, every time.
Mullins had signed every side-gate entry. Every one. That was the pattern I'd been staring at for a year without seeing the shape of it: a signature per vehicle, in his block letters, in the entry book, at times that matched nothing on any inbound camera I could check.
But the signatures weren't all in his hand.
About half of them were.
The other half were written in a smaller, tighter, slightly slanted script that I'd never seen before — until I saw it on a training roster three days later.
Nakamura noticed it the same morning. He walked into the shack at 05:55 with a coffee and a folder and asked me to sit down, and he laid the Xeroxed pages across the desk in two piles without saying anything.
I looked at the piles. The right-handed Mullins signatures. The other handwriting.
"Who's the second hand?" I asked.
Nakamura drank his coffee. Then he said one name. A junior NCO in the section, three years in, who'd been transferred off Gate 3 four months ago to a desk at battalion headquarters. A kid I'd trained with. Somebody who used to sign for my shift change on the roster every morning and who I'd never once thought to be careful around.
"Mullins isn't the only one," Nakamura said.
I sat back in the folding chair.
"How many pages?"
He tapped the second pile. "Seventy-one entries. Twenty-three months of side-gate traffic that doesn't exist on any camera on this installation."
Twenty-three months. Not fourteen. Fourteen was just the part I could see from my lane.
"The audit started fourteen days ago," I said, slowly. "But the traffic goes back twenty-three months."
"The traffic goes back twenty-three months," Nakamura said. "The audit started fourteen days ago because that's when the cargo inspection at Gate Seven found something on post that wasn't on the books."
I looked at the two piles. My notebook was on the desk next to them, closed.
"Then what exactly are you asking me to do?"
"Keep matching," Nakamura said. "You have the pocket log. He doesn't know that hand exists. She doesn't either. But if you keep matching, this corridor closes, all of it. Twenty-three months of it."
I opened the notebook.
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