Her Father
Some investigations begin before we know we’ve started.
Personal || Past || Revelation
His name had been Daniel Vasquez. He had been a signal engineer, freelance, contracted to a variety of government-adjacent projects in the eighties and early nineties. He had disappeared when Elena was fourteen, on a Tuesday in October 1998. The official file — which she had read obsessively at twenty-three, when she first became a journalist and first had the contacts to access it — listed him as a missing person, case open, no evidence of foul play. The unofficial explanation, which her mother had given her with the flat practicality of a woman who has decided that useful partial truths are preferable to emotionally devastating complete ones, was that Daniel had been working on something classified, had become compromised, and had likely been relocated under a witness protection-adjacent arrangement that precluded contact. “He didn’t choose to leave us,” her mother had said. “He was asked to go somewhere.” Elena had spent twenty-two years finding that distinction sufficient.
Frank Yuen told her a different story. Not a dramatically different story — her father had not been secretly evil, had not done anything beyond what the professional obligations of a classified engineering contractor required. But he had been involved. In the original program, in the early phase, before the privatization. He had been a builder of the network she had spent the last several months dismantling. And in 1998 — four years after the Millhaven land transfer, three years after Patricia Soo’s disappearance, at the precise moment when the FBI investigation that Diaz had mentioned was quietly being redirected — he had found something in the network’s data that he could not in good conscience leave undiscovered. He had reported it. To Frank, among others. Frank had advised him to be very careful. Daniel had not been careful enough. Or possibly he had been perfectly careful, Elena thought, and that simply hadn’t been enough. The absence of him had been the shape her entire adult life was built around. She understood now that the shape was not random. It was precisely designed.