Burner

Naomi bought a twenty-dollar phone from a drugstore two towns over, the way Imogen had taught her back when Imogen still had knees for stakeouts.

The number from the tip email answered on the first ring, like it had been waiting.

"You came alone?" A voice, digitally flattened, gender scrubbed by whatever app was running underneath it.

"I came alone."

"Good. Your father's file number was 4471. Ask him. He'll remember it — it's on the last paycheck stub."

She would ask him. She hadn't decided that yet, but she would.

"Why him," she said. "Why now."

"It's not about him. It's about October ninth. That's his vesting date. There's a report — HR runs it every quarter — anyone hitting a bonus threshold in the next ninety days gets flagged. 'Cost exposure review.' That's the actual term in the file. Cost. Exposure."

"You're saying they target people right before payout."

"I'm saying I built the query that pulled the list. Four years running. I didn't know what it was for the first year. I knew by the third."

Naomi's pen had stopped moving. She stared at the blank page instead of writing anything down — some habits from three years of source protection didn't switch off even for a stranger on a burner.

"How many people," she asked.

A pause long enough that she thought the call had dropped.

"I stopped counting after ninety," the voice said. "It's not just this plant. It's every Castellan facility with a legacy pension plan. I have the spreadsheet. Names, dates, dollar amounts they saved per person. It's clean. It's methodical. Somebody built this on purpose and somebody signs off on it every quarter."

"Send it to me."

"I will. But you need to understand something first." The voice dropped, and for the first time it sounded less like a filter and more like a person actually frightened. "I'm not the only one who knows I reached out to you. I got a call this morning. Internal security, asking about 'unusual data access' on my old credentials. Credentials I haven't used in eight months."

"Who called you?"

The line clicked dead mid-question, the way a landline used to when someone slammed it down in a movie — a sound Naomi hadn't heard a cell phone make before.