Blog Post Title Four (Copy)
Eyes Of Mercy — Chapter 2: Under the Skin
Simone didn’t sleep.
She lay still in the dark, counting her breaths—slow, controlled, deliberate.until the first gray light of morning slid across the ceiling. Outside her window, Washington hummed to life: distant sirens, early traffic, the city reminding her that it never truly rested. Her mind replayed the envelope, the symbol in the photo, and the black SUV outside her apartment. By sunrise, she had accepted it:
Someone didn’t just know Mara Ellison.
Someone knew Simone Lawson.
That changed everything.
She rose quietly, moving through the apartment with the muscle memory of someone trained to notice what didn’t belong. She showered in silence without turning on the fan, dressed plainly in layers she could shed quickly, and pulled her hair into a low knot that wouldn’t catch if she had to run.
No jewelry except the engagement ring.
Not sentiment.
Grounding.
Before leaving the bedroom, she walked the apartment the way Jordan trained her. Windows first checking for reflections. Doors next—looking for fresh marks, subtle shifts. Corners last. When she reached the kitchen, she stopped.
The wedding binder lay open on the table.
Venue photos.
Guest list.
A tab marked Vows – Draft.
She closed it without reading.
Her phone buzzed softly.
A voice memo from Jordan, sent while she slept.
She didn’t open it yet.
Instead, she slipped her laptop into her bag, pocketed two burner phones, and locked the apartment door behind her. She chose the stairs over the elevator—slower, quieter, predictable.
Jordan once told her:
“If they want you alive, they get sloppy. If they want you dead, they get quiet.”
Last night was too sloppy.
They wanted her alive.
For now.
Outside, the morning air was sharp enough to wake her fully. Simone didn’t head straight for the Metro entrance at the end of the block. She walked past it, turned the corner, crossed the street, and doubled back through a small park where joggers moved in looping patterns.
No one paid her any attention.
That was the point.
She entered the Metro two blocks away, merged into the morning crowd, and let the tide carry her onto the platform. Suits. Backpacks. Headphones. Everyone sealed inside their own urgency.
Simone became another body in motion.
When the train arrived, she stepped inside without looking back.
Twenty minutes later, she exited in Arlington.
Different jurisdiction.
Different cameras.
Different rules.
Exactly where she needed to be
Her first stop:
Federal Procurement Office, Arlington Division.
The Federal Procurement Office looked harmless enough—concrete, glass, no personality.
A place with holes big enough to fall through if you knew where to step.
She approached the front desk with a fake ID badge and a tone of controlled authority.
“Internal audit. Need archived manifests for the QX series—cargo flights only. Restricted dates.”
The clerk blinked at her, slow and dazed, like every bureaucrat who’d been underpaid for too long.
“Uh… let me check.”
He typed lazily, then frowned.
“That’s odd. These files were open before—they’re locked now. And whoever locked them has top clearance.”
Simone’s pulse didn’t change, but the corner of her mouth tightened.
“Who locked them?” she asked.
The clerk leaned closer to the screen. “Colonel… Richard T. Hawke.”
Simone kept her expression empty.
Hawke.
Jordan’s commanding officer.
She stepped back as the clerk disappeared into a storage room to check the paper archives. The moment he was gone, she leaned over the desk and snapped a photo of the access log on the monitor.
ACCESS RESTRICTED.
ORDER SIGNED: COL. R.T. HAWKE.
She barely pocketed her phone when he returned empty-handed.
“Sorry. The paper logs are gone too. Entire series. Cleaned out.”
Cleaned out.
Purged.
Like someone had erased a crime scene.
“Thank you,” Simone said, her voice low. “That’s all I needed.”
She walked toward the stairwell—quiet, steady, alert.
Two flights down, she heard footsteps behind her.
Too soft.
Too controlled.
Not civilian.
She kept walking.
Step. Step. Step.
The shadow behind her matched her rhythm perfectly.
She reached the next landing.
Pivoted left.
Vanished into a maintenance alcove.
The man stepped into view a second later—expression flat, movements precise.
Simone struck first.
Jordan’s training lived in her muscles—wrist, twist, shoulder to concrete.His breath exploded.
She ripped the comms device from his ear.
“Who sent you?” she demanded.
He grimaced but stayed silent—until he made one mistake:
“Didn’t expect her to be trained.”
Her.
Not Mara Ellison.
Not the journalist.
Her.
They knew Simone Lawson.
Before she could press again, heavy footsteps thundered down the stairwell above them.
Backup.
Simone didn’t hesitate. She hit the man’s knee, dropped him, and sprinted down three flights. Burst through the exit door. Cut through a back alley.
She hit the daylight and didn’t stop moving.
A black SUV idled at the far end.
The same shape as the one from her apartment.
Her blood stayed calm, cold.
She darted toward a loading dock, climbed a fence, scraped her hand, dropped into a parking lot, joined a cluster of office workers, and blended.
Breathing only when she knew she’d shaken them.
Her phone buzzed.
Jordan.
The timing made her chest constrict.
She answered with a steady breath. “Hey.”
“You okay?” he asked immediately. Wind distorted his words. “Something feels wrong over here. Hawke has us running drills at 3 a.m. Shipments are changing at the last second. Protocols shifted out of nowhere.”
Simone stopped walking.
“Hawke,” she whispered. “Jordan… I heard his name today.”
Silence.
Like the world held its breath.
“What did you hear?” he said carefully.
“I can’t tell you yet. Not over this line.”
“Simone—”
“Someone is after me,” she said softly. “Someone… organized.”
Jordan cursed under his breath.
Then his tone changed—hard, controlled, deadly serious.
“Listen to me. Don’t go home. Don’t use your cards. Don’t walk your usual routes. Move like you’re being hunted.”
“I am being hunted.”
“Damn it—Simone. Baby. Move. Now.”
“I’m already moving,” she said.
The line crackled.
“I don’t know what Hawke is involved in,” Jordan said, “but it’s not good. Just—stay alive. Hear me? Stay alive.”
“I will,” she whispered. “I promise.”
She hung up before fear could soften her.
She didn’t slow down.
She moved with intention—never running, never stopping abruptly—using reflections in storefront windows and parked cars to read what followed her. The SUV didn’t reappear. Neither did the man from the stairwell.
That didn’t mean she was clear.
It meant they’d lost her for now.
She crossed a busy intersection, slipped into a convenience store, walked its length, exited through a side door, and cut through a narrow alley that spilled her onto a different street. From there, she ducked into a dry cleaner, pretended to scan flyers near the counter, then exited again.
Three turns.
One pause.
Another reflection check.
Clean.
She descended into a Metro station—not the closest one, but the second down the line. She boarded a train heading the wrong direction, rode one stop, crossed the platform, and boarded another heading back toward her neighborhood.
Only when she surfaced near her apartment did her pulse finally slow.
Still, she didn’t go straight inside.
She walked past the building, circled the block once, then returned from the opposite direction. The street looked the same both times.
She unlocked the door, stepped inside, locked the door, waited ten seconds, then pressed her ear to the wood.
Nothing.
Only then did she breathe.
The apartment felt wrong the moment she stepped inside—too quiet, like it was holding its breath.
Simone set her bag down and moved into the kitchen on autopilot, chopping an onion she never cooked. The pan stayed cold.
She stopped.
The wedding binder waited on the table.
She opened it again, this time flipping to a fabric swatch taped beside a handwritten note:
Simple. Warm. Safe.
Her phone buzzed.
Jordan’s voice memo.
She pressed play.
“Hey, beautiful. I don’t know why I’m recording this instead of calling. I just… I miss you. Six months feels like a lifetime. When this is over, everything else can wait. Just come back to me the same.”
Her throat tightened.
“Always,” she whispered.
She went to the hall closet and pulled down a locked case. Inside: a handgun, spare magazine, and years of training embedded into muscle memory. She checked it, cleaned it, and respected it.
Jordan didn’t train her because he expected violence.
He trained her because he knew the world didn’t forgive women who told the truth.
Her laptop glowed with Mercy Flight files.
She cross-referenced names, dates, movements.
A pattern emerged.
Three journalists.
One contractor.
Two soldiers.
All connected to Mercy Flight.
All dead.
Different cities.
Different explanations.
Same outcome.
Mercy Flight didn’t intimidate.
It erased.
Her cursor hovered over an encrypted drop to an international watchdog outlet.
Her phone buzzed.
Jordan calling.
She didn’t answer.
She hit SEND.
The files vanished into the ether.
“They won’t stop now,” she said quietly.
And she didn’t want them to.
Once the files were gone, staying still felt dangerous.
Simone changed clothes, wiped down the counter out of habit, and took the stairs again. Outside, she walked three blocks, doubled back once, then boarded a bus toward the Archives district.
Public transit meant cameras.
Witnesses.
Cover.
Simone reached the National Archives Annex—an old stone building tucked behind a construction site. Most people walked past without knowing it wasn’t just historical record storage.
Her source stood beneath the scaffolding, wearing a yellow vest and holding a clipboard. A disguise, but an honest one—he worked here, after all.
His real name was Miles Cho.
Simone only ever addressed him by his chosen alias:s
“Finch.”
He looked up sharply at her approach.
“You’re late.”
“You’re early,” Simone replied.
His brows knitted. “Are you… okay? You look like you’re carrying a ghost.”
“Maybe I am,” she said. “I need you to run something.”
She passed him the photo from the envelope.
He glanced at it—and froze.
“Simone… where did you get this?”
She ignored the question. “Can you enhance the timestamp?”
“I can do more than that.” He lowered his voice. “Someone accessed the restricted personnel index yesterday. They searched for your name.”
Simone’s stomach tightened. “My pen name?”
Finch looked her dead in the eyes.
“No. Your real one. Simone Lawson.”
Her breath left her chest in one sharp exhale.
“How many people have that level of access?” she asked.
“Less than ten,” Finch whispered. “But only one of them is military. Colonel Richard T. Hawke.”
Simone’s pulse went cold and focused.
He searched her face. “Simone… what did you step into?”
“A hell someone built out of cargo crates.” Her voice stayed steady. “I’m stepping out the other side.”
Finch cursed. “Whatever you’re planning—don’t. Just walk away.”
“If I walk away,” she said, “someone else dies.”
Finch swallowed.
“You’re going to get yourself killed.”
“No,” she replied evenly. “I’m going to make sure I don’t die quietly.”
She didn’t walk directly from Finch to her next stop.
She ducked into a coffee shop, exited through the back, walked six blocks in the opposite direction, then took the Metro two stops before surfacing near a public library she’d used before.
Libraries were neutral ground. Her favorite place to vanish. Cameras, crowds, multiple exits. Perfect for digital misdirection.
Inside, she chose a terminal with sightlines to every exit and booted the terminal with the ease of a woman slipping into her second skin.
Jordan taught her combat.
Finch taught her access.
She typed without hesitation, her fingers gliding across keys in a rhythm of controlled rebellion. First, she routed her connection through four dead proxies. Then she cracked the military flight index—a low-level system she’d infiltrated once years ago but never exploited.
The screen flickered.
A list populated.
MERCY FLIGHT — INTERNAL USE ONLY
ACCESS LEVEL: EAGLE-RED
Simone leaned forward.
There it was.
A redacted list with black bars covering almost every detail.
She scrolled.
One entry wasn’t blacked out:
QX-504 — RETURN CARGO MANIFEST: CLASSIFIED
HANDLER: COL. R. T. HAWKE
Return cargo.
Whatever they were flying out…
they were bringing something back.
Something Hawke handled personally.
Simone whispered, “What the hell are you moving?”
She copied what she could—flight numbers, partial coordinates, scraps of metadata—onto a burner drive.
Then she planted a trap.
She created a false search entry on the system—something subtle, harmless-looking—but embedded with a microscopic tag, the kind that logged exactly who viewed it and when.
A beacon.
If anyone from the conspiracy checked the search logs, Simone would know.
And she would know their location.
She clicked SAVE.
The web of hunters and hunted tightened by a thread.
Simone exited the library through a side door and took twelve steps before she saw it.
A small brown package sat on a trash bin just beyond the steps.
Too clean.
Too deliberate.
Her full name written across it:
SIMONE LAWSON
She scanned the street.
A bus rolled by.
A bicyclist passed.
A couple argued on the sidewalk.
No one looked at her—but that meant nothing.
Simone approached the package with predator caution.
She opened it.
Inside was a burner phone.
It vibrated instantly, screen lighting up with a single message:
STOP DIGGING.
WE NEED YOU ALIVE.
FOR NOW.
Simone’s jaw clenched.
They thought they were frightening her.
But all they’d done was confirm she was close.
She slipped the phone into her pocket, turned her face toward the crowd, and walked with the calm precision of a woman preparing for war.
They had found her.
But now she had found them.
