The rhythmic, high-pitched beep… beep… beep pulsed from behind the corrugated steel roll-up door of Unit 17. It sounded like an old server rack, or a heart monitor—a persistent, cold hum in the freezing New Jersey twilight.
“Who are you?” I demanded, backing toward my driver’s side door, my knuckles white against the steering wheel. “My father was a retired high school math teacher! He spent his weekends gardening!”
“Your father was a primary witness for the Department of Justice’s Organized Crime Division,” Agent Miller said, her voice completely devoid of warmth. “And for twenty years, Raymond Mercer was living under an unregistered, off-the-books protection protocol. The heart attack in his study was staged using a paralytic substitute, approved at the highest levels of federal enforcement.”
My phone stopped ringing, only to buzz immediately with a second text from my mother: Julian. The house is surrounded. Do not bring Celeste.
“She isn’t your mother, Julian,” Agent Miller said quietly, taking a step toward the metal door. “The woman standing at that graveside was placed in your home twenty-two years ago to monitor Raymond’s movements. Your real mother died in 1998.”
The world tilted beneath my feet. Twenty-two years of family dinners, holiday photos, Sunday morning phone calls—all of it collapsing into an intricate, terrifying web of theater.
Miller took the brass key stamped 17 from my numb fingers, inserted it into the heavy padlock on the storage unit, and turned it. The lock clicked open. She hauled the metal door upward with a sharp, echoing rattle.
Inside the small, windowless concrete space sat no furniture, no boxes of old clothes, and no family heirlooms. There was only a heavy steel desk, three glowing computer monitors showing live surveillance feeds of my parents’ house, and a glass partition separating the front from a back room.
Sitting in a wheelchair behind the glass, hooked up to an IV drip that beeped steadily, was my father.
He looked older, thinner, his face pale—but his eyes were wide open, staring straight at me.
To see the truth behind Raymond Mercer’s fake death, continue reading below for Part 3...
