Chapter 6 - THE REFLECTION IN THE GLASS
"You look like you’ve seen a ghost."
The voice spoke from directly behind her.
It was smooth, quiet, and dropped into a low, conversational tenor that didn't carry past the glass partition of her cubicle.
Evelyn froze.
Her body went completely, perfectly still. Every muscle in her back locked into rigid, instantaneous tension. Her right hand, still resting near the trackpad of her air-gapped laptop, didn't jump. She didn't gasp. She didn't turn her head.
With a single, smooth, practiced motion of her left index finger, she caught the top edge of her ThinkPad’s display and lowered the screen halfway down—stopping it at a forty-five-degree angle, cutting off the direct line of sight from anyone standing behind her chair while keeping the machine powered on.
The bright white LED light from the spreadsheet vanished from her face.
In its place, the dark, glossy black surface of the powered-down secondary corporate monitor sitting on her desk became a mirror.
Evelyn shifted her eyes two inches to the left, focusing her gaze entirely on the dark, reflective glass of the idle screen.
In the dark reflection, she could see the ambient layout of the newsroom behind her: the bright overhead fluorescent panels, the rows of gray cubicles, the distant television screens on the wall.
And standing less than eighteen inches behind her left shoulder was a blurred, dark human silhouette.
The figure was wearing a tailored dark coat or jacket, standing relaxed, arms resting loosely at their sides. Because of the angle and the anti-glare coating on the corporate monitor, the face was a smudge of featureless shadow—shadowed by the harsh overhead lighting directly above her cubicle header.
Evelyn’s heart pounded in her ears like a heavy drum, but her expression in the reflection remained completely, terrifyingly flat.
She didn't know how long the person had been standing there.
She didn't know if they had been watching over her shoulder while she opened the metallurgical reports.
She didn't know if they were the person who had dropped the envelope into her box at eight in the morning—or the person who had spent four years ensuring her father’s name remained buried beneath five feet of frozen earth at Fort Drum.
"Evelyn?" the voice asked again softly from the shadows behind her. "Are you alright?"
Evelyn slowly slid her personal laptop into her leather briefcase with her right hand, her thumb disengaging the IronKey drive in a single, blind motion, while her eyes remained locked on the blurred figure standing in the black glass.
May you like
She didn't answer. She didn't turn around.
And as the rain continued to lash against the high windows of the Washington Tribune newsroom, the reflection in the dark monitor stayed perfectly still, waiting for her to move.
