Chapter 6 - The Camera Behind the Anatomy Poster
We searched without speaking.
Mason checked the smoke detector and fluorescent fixtures. Julia examined the reception computer. I moved along the shelves, watching for anything recently disturbed.
Ghost rose unsteadily from the examination table.
“Easy,” I murmured.
He stepped down before I could stop him and walked toward the animal anatomy poster on the green wall.
His nose touched the lower corner.
Mason pulled the poster away.
A pinhole lens stared back at us from inside the wall.
Julia disconnected the clinic’s router, but the camera’s indicator remained active. It had its own transmitter and battery.
Mason removed the unit carefully. A microSD card sat behind the lens.
Ross reached for it, then stopped when she saw his expression.
“No,” he said.
“This may involve classified material.”
“It involves surveillance inside a civilian medical facility.”
He handed the card to Julia.
She inserted it into an offline laptop used for diagnostic imaging.
The newest files showed the clinic from the previous forty-eight hours—me closing alone, Julia opening that morning, Mason arriving with Ghost, Ross stepping inside five minutes later.
Someone had installed the camera before the appointment.
But older folders existed on the card.
Their date stamps were impossible.
Seven years earlier.
Julia opened the first file.
The image was grainy and dark. It showed a concrete room with no windows. Ghost lay behind a chain-link barrier, younger and thinner. His ribs showed beneath his coat.
A man walked past the camera wearing camouflage pants and a torn black shirt.
His face never turned toward the lens.
I stopped breathing.
He had Ethan’s shoulders.
His uneven stride.
The slight outward angle of his left foot from an old high-school football injury.
“Play it again,” I said.
Ross closed her eyes.
The man knelt beside Ghost and held something through the fence. The dog pressed his muzzle into his hand.
There was no audio.
A timestamp placed the recording eleven days after the mission that supposedly killed them both.
“Where was this filmed?” Mason asked.
Ross said nothing.
The next clip was dated four months later. Ghost stood in the same enclosure. The man did not appear.
A third clip showed a medical team sedating Ghost.
On the wall behind them was a painted symbol: a white compass crossed by a red line.
Mason leaned closer.
“I’ve seen that.”
“Where?”
“On equipment recovered during a counterintelligence raid in Virginia Beach.”
Ross’s head turned sharply. “When?”
“Two years ago. The case was sealed.”
Another file appeared at the bottom of the list. Unlike the others, it had been recorded the previous night.
Julia clicked it.
The camera angle showed my clinic before the device had been placed in the wall.
A gloved person stood beneath the anatomy poster, installing the surveillance unit.
Then the person stepped backward.
The decorated sleeve of a dark Navy uniform entered the frame.
Everyone looked at Ross.
“That isn’t me,” she said.
The figure moved closer to the camera.
A woman’s voice, distorted but still audible, spoke to the installer.
“When Cole gives the command, we’ll know the conditioning survived.”
Ross’s face drained of color.
I recognized why.
The voice sounded almost exactly like hers.
Before we could replay it, the offline laptop connected to something on its own.
A deletion bar appeared.
Files began vanishing.
Julia pulled the power cable, but the battery kept the laptop alive.
Mason yanked out the memory card.
The screen went black.
When it returned, every video was gone except one still image.
It showed the younger Ghost beside the unidentified man.
This time, the man’s face was turned toward the camera.
It was Ethan.
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And around his neck hung a handwritten sign bearing that day’s date.
📖 See what Ethan had written beneath the date—and why Admiral Ross insisted the message was meant specifically for me in CHAPTER 7. 👇
