Chapter 2: The Go-Bag
Chapter 2: The Go-Bag
I didn’t drive home. Home was a known location, a vulnerability mapped out on property records and GPS systems. Instead, I drove to a dilapidated industrial park on the outskirts of the city, pulling up to a dusty, rust-streaked storage unit I hadn't opened in a decade and a half.
I laid Lily gently in the passenger seat, locked the doors, and kept the engine running so the heater would keep her warm. I rolled up the heavy corrugated metal door of unit 42, the hinges screaming in protest. Inside, underneath heavy canvas tarps and forgotten moving boxes filled with a dead man's civilian clothes, sat a reinforced steel locker. I blew the dust off the dial and spun the combination lock.
May you like
Click.
The locker swung open, smelling of gun oil and old leather. Inside lay the dangerous remnants of the man I used to be. Passports with faces that were mine but names that weren't—men who didn't exist anymore. Stacks of untraceable currency wrapped in plastic. Encrypted satellite phones that communicated off the grid. And a meticulously maintained arsenal of tactical weaponry, gleaming under the harsh fluorescent bulb. I strapped a sleek, suppressed Glock 19 to my hip, feeling the familiar, comforting weight of it, and tossed a heavy canvas duffel bag into the bed of the truck. Arthur, the quiet, retired widower who gardened on weekends, was dead. The Ghost was awake, and he was hungry.
