Chapter 16 - Daniel’s Missing Memory
Daniel asked Megan to speak privately.
They stood near the mirrored wall while agents continued interviewing guests.
“I remember pieces,” he said.
“The explosion?”
“You.”
Megan looked away.
Daniel remembered waking beneath the wrecked vehicle.
He remembered Megan pressing a bandage against his chest.
He remembered her saying:
“You are not dying here.”
He remembered asking her name.
She refused to answer because enemy forces were monitoring open radio channels.
Then he remembered something no official report mentioned.
Another wounded soldier had been with them.
A young interpreter named Samir.
Daniel believed Samir died before extraction.
Megan’s expression changed.
“He survived the first attack.”
“What happened to him?”
“He found the invoices proving the armor fraud.”
Daniel understood.
Samir was not simply an interpreter.
He was the original whistleblower.
Megan carried Daniel toward extraction while Samir took a separate route with the documents.
He never arrived.
The military declared him killed.
No body was recovered.
Diane’s company later paid Samir’s family a private settlement.
Daniel asked, “Was he murdered?”
“I don’t know.”
Megan had spent nine years trying to answer that question.
The serial plate could expose procurement fraud.
But the missing invoices could prove that executives knowingly endangered troops and eliminated a witness.
Diane was afraid of more than one piece of metal.
She feared Megan knew where Samir had hidden the original records.
May you like
And Megan did.
But retrieving them required returning to the place she had sworn never to visit again.
