Hidden liES of a ghost

The team discovers that Barry Berg, believed dead for five and a half years, was actually alive
until Logan unknowingly killed him lin Wroclaw, sending Dar into emotional turmoil.

Hereford – Safehouse

Veyr’s voice came through the comms, flat as ever. On screen, a grainy photograph appeared beside the name. “Barry Berg.”
 
Logan felt the room change before anyone said another word. He went still—the kind of stillness he reserved for the seconds before taking a shot, when moving at all might give the game away. Beside him, Dar’s posture altered, her spine locking as though someone had run a rod straight through it. He didn’t need to look at her face to know she’d gone somewhere else.
 
He kept his eyes on the tabletop rather than the screen. Barry Berg. The name landed like a delayed detonation. The assurance of five and a half years, a blanket woven from the certainty of his demise, had been ripped away, leaving them exposed and raw in the middle of their comms room, their safehouse, in Hereford.
 
Dar shrugged, a beat too fast, a beat too casual. “Lots of Barry Bergs.”
 
Rhys, leaning against the side workstation with his arms crossed, wasn’t buying it, and neither was Logan. Rhys’s eyes stayed on Dar. “Not in this world. There’s only one that matters.” His jaw tightened; he looked to Veyr. “What was his status?”
 
Veyr tapped her mug three times, paused, tapped again—the closest thing to a nervous habit she allowed herself. She watched Dar the way she watched everything: patiently, like she was waiting for a result to resolve. “Active, until last week. Freelance security. Mostly low-level logistics for the Eastern Bloc corridor.” Her tone didn’t shift. “He was driving the lead vehicle in Kozlov’s convoy in Wroclaw.”
 
She sipped her coffee, and for a fraction of a second her eyes moved to Logan before settling back on Dar. “Cause of death, a single round through the windscreen. Ballistics match your rifle, Ward. Fingerprints from the body match Interpol’s file for Barry Berg, no ambiguity in the comparison. He’s the man you shot.”
 
Logan didn’t look at her. He shifted instead, closing the gap between himself and Dar until his hand found her shoulder. He gripped it—firm, deliberate—needing her to feel it as much as he needed to do something with his hands. Callum’s fingers paused over the keypad; he’d clocked the touch too.
 
“The driver.” It wasn’t a question. Logan heard his own voice come out low, rougher than he’d meant it to. He was back there in his head—the crosshairs, the recoil, the windscreen spidering around a shape behind the wheel, a man he’d read as nothing more than another set of hands for Kozlov. His shot. His bullet. He stared at Dar, waiting for the fracture he was certain would show. “Berg died in that crash. Five and a half years ago. This has to be a mistake.”
 
Callum was already working, pulling the file onto the wall screen—fingerprint match, Interpol confirmation, a photo lifted from an old case file. He kept his eyes on the data rather than Dar. “There’s no mistake in this. Full ridge comparison. Interpol’s had him flagged as deceased since the accident report went through.”
 
Veyr set her mug down with a small, decisive click. “The identification is not in question, Ward. What’s in question is who told you Berg was dead in the first place, and why.” She laced her fingers together; attention fixed on Dar. “Someone died in that crash. It wasn’t Berg. He used the confusion to disappear and stayed disappeared until a bullet caught up with him in Poland.”
 
Logan felt the tremor before he saw it—a fine shiver running under Dar’s skin, right where his hand sat. He kept his grip steady, though something in his chest had gone tight and cold. “So he let everyone believe he’d burnt on that road,” he said, and the words sat wrong in his mouth, like biting down on a stone he hadn’t expected. “Months before Zoe died. None of that was true.”
 
Veyr’s expression didn’t change, though she was watching him now, cataloguing whatever he was giving away. “It wasn’t true,” she said simply. “Berg is confirmed dead as of last week, by your round. What we don’t know is who was in that car five and a half years ago, who identified the body as his, and who benefited from everyone believing he was gone. That’s the part worth chasing.”
 
Logan kept his eyes on the screen, grateful for the sunglasses hiding whatever his face was doing. Five years he’d watched Dar claw her way back together after Zoe, brick by brick, bordering on the assurance of a death that had never happened. The whole time, Berg had been alive somewhere, driving trucks through Poland like none of it mattered. “Fucking hell,” he muttered, and the words tasted the way they sounded.
 
He looked down at Dar, keeping his hand on her shoulder, willing some of his own steadiness into her through the rare contact. “Look at me, Dar. He’s dead. Properly dead now. That much hasn’t changed.”
 
He said it because it was the only thing he had to give her, not because he thought it would land clean. He watched her face for the crack he’d been dreading since the name first hit the screen, and there it was—brief, controlled, but there.

“He got away with it for over five years,” she said, her voice thin, scraped raw. “Someone burnt in that car instead.” Her eyes moved to the screen. “Someone’s family doesn’t know where he is.” A beat. “Who covered that up?”
 
She didn’t pull away from him. Logan felt her lean into his hand the way you’d lean on a rail on a boat in choppy water.
 
“I want to see the match myself,” she said, louder now, forcing it out. “Not because I doubt it. Because I need to look at it and believe it, with my own eyes.”
 
Rhys pushed off the workstation, and Logan could see something sitting just under his calm. “Fair enough,” Rhys said. “But he’s gone. What we’re hunting now is whoever buried a stranger in his place five and a half years ago.” He looked to Veyr’s feed. “That’s not a small thing to arrange. Takes access. Takes people who can make paperwork disappear.”
 
Logan said nothing. Five and a half years of certainty, and last week his own bullet had ended that cunt for real. He’d pulled the trigger on a ghost without knowing it. The only useful question left was who had kept the lie breathing.
 
Callum stayed by the screen, letting Rhys and Logan handle the immediate fallout, his eyes on the logistics instead. “I’ll get the original Canadian accident file pulled—coroner’s report, who signed off on the identification, who paid for the funeral. If someone arranged this, there’ll be a paper trail somewhere, even if it’s thin.”
 
He glanced at Dar. “We’ll find out who let this stand for five and a half years.”
 
Veyr’s face stayed impassive, though her eyes lingered on Dar a moment longer than the situation strictly required. “The fingerprint comparison you’re asking to review is already logged, Sibyl. I’ll have it sent through so you can see it yourself. There’s no ambiguity left to chase there. Where the useful work is now”—she flipped open a leather folio on her desk—”is the accident itself. Major Stroud, trace the money that paid for that funeral. Find out who identified the body. I want names.”
 
She glanced at a note on her screen. “One thread worth pulling straight away—Berg’s father and his brother were both serving police officers at the time. If someone with the right access wanted a death certified without too many questions, that’s not a bad place to start looking. I’m not calling it fact. I’m calling it the first place to look.”
 
Callum nodded once, already reaching for the secure handset. “Copy that. On it.”
 
Veyr leaned into the camera, her tone sharpening. “Focus. Whoever benefited from Berg’s disappearance, Kozlov may have benefited alongside them. Follow the money in both directions.”
 
She signed off without waiting for a reply.
 
The silence that followed was worse than anything she’d said. Logan felt it settle on Dar like weight, watched her stare at the dead pixels where Berg’s face had been, her breathing gone shallow and quick.
 
“That bastard,” she said, barely audible. He wasn’t sure if she meant Berg, or whoever had let the world believe he was dead, or both at once. She looked up—first at Logan, then at Rhys and Callum—her face hollowed out, but her eyes sharp with something close to panic. “I need to get out of this room. I can’t breathe in here.”
 
She was up and moving before Logan had fully registered it, pulling free of his hand, legs unsteady as she made for the door and then the stairs.
 
He gave her half a second’s head start, then pushed back from the table. “I’ve got her.” The look he gave Rhys and Callum wasn’t a suggestion—stay put. He took the stairs two at a time and caught her in the hallway.

He matched her pace without crowding it. “Let’s get some air, Dar.”
 
“I need a smoke. You have a fag, Lo?”
 
That one caught him off guard—she hadn’t ever really smoked, not that he knew of—but he kept it off his face and dug into his pocket as they hit the cooler spring air of the patio. He flipped his pack open, shook one loose, caught it before it fell, and held it out between two fingers. “Always.” Cupping his hands against the gusting wind, he lit it for her, then leant his shoulder against the rough brick and let her have the quiet.
 
They smoked without speaking until Dar flicked her butt into the ash can on the railing. The glowing tip arced through the air and went out with a faint hiss.
 
Logan glanced up from the patch of grass he’d been staring at, catching her colour out of the corner of his eye. Green. Not the good kind. “You alright?” he asked, keeping his voice low enough not to carry back into the house.
 
He pushed off the wall, tossed his own butt into the ash can. “Been a long time since you smoked, yeah?” He didn’t light a second one; the last thing she needed was more smoke on top of whatever her stomach was doing. “Want water? Or just put your head between your knees for five minutes. Nobody’s expecting you to process this right now.”
 
Dar rested her chin on her knees, turning her head enough to look at him, though she clearly didn’t trust herself to stand yet. “Long time,” she agreed, her voice a little raspy. “Think my body’s trying to reject any risk of a habit.” She took a slow breath. “I’m okay. Just—I needed to feel something else for a minute.”
 
Logan leant back against the railing, arms crossed, eyes drifting to the treeline out of habit. “I get that. Sometimes you need a shock to the system to remind you it’s still working.”

He watched her breathing, matching his own to it without deciding to, the way he used to when her fear had a different shape. He could still see that version of her sometimes, laid over the woman in front of him now. He kept his face still and his voice light. “Just don’t make yourself sick over it. Pam will kill me if she finds out I let you light up.”
 
He glanced toward the sliding door, checking for shadows inside. “Need anything else? Blanket? Or you just want to sit in the quiet for a bit?”
 
Dar hugged her knees tighter, a small groan escaping her throat. “Pam. Christ, Lo, Pam is going to lose it.”
 
Logan snorted. “She’s definitely going to have opinions. Want me to tell her?”
 
She bowed her head to her knees, which he took as a yes. He let her have the silence.
 
“Good call staying out here.” The stillness stretched, loaded but not uncomfortable, until raindrops started speckling the patio stones. He looked toward the house, then back at her. “Rhys is on the intel with Stroud. Let them run with it for a while. Stand down for now, Dar.”
 
“Thanks, Lo.” She sat up, waited a few seconds, then got to her feet. “I’m going to lie down for a bit. Don’t worry.”
 
Logan pushed off the railing, stepping just close enough to catch her if she swayed. The nicotine had hit her harder than she’d probably expected. “Go on. I’ll be out here a bit longer.”
 
He gave her a quick nod, his face doing its usual work of staying serious while something behind it softened. “And don’t worry about me worrying. It’s in the job description.”
 
He watched her head for the door.
 
“Mm.” She disappeared into the kitchen, the cat falling in at her heels.

Logan didn’t go straight down to the comms room. He sat instead on the top stair, elbows on his knees, and let the house go quiet around him.
 
He kept coming back to the same stretch of road in the warehouse district of Wroclaw, the same length of glass. He’d made the call, taken the shot, watched the driver drop without a second thought—another set of hands working for Kozlov, threat removed, job done. He’d had no reason to think it was anything else. And yet the man behind that windscreen had been Barry Berg, the man he’d told Dar would never get near her again.
 
He’d meant it as a promise, not a fact he’d need to check five and a half years later.
 
Someone else had burnt on that Canadian road instead. Dar had spent five and a half years believing one threat was gone when it had simply moved out of sight.
 
He didn’t know yet who’d arranged that first lie, or why, though he had a fair idea where the smart money would land: a father and a brother with badges and debts of their own, and a Russian who liked his people beholden to him rather than free of him. Theory, not fact.
 
Justice, maybe. Ugly and five years overdue. Underneath it sat something sourer: Berg should have been dead already.
 
He sat with that for a while.
 
Eventually he took out his phone and typed a message to Pam, then deleted it and typed a shorter one instead.
Coming over. Won’t be long. Need to talk to you about Dar.

He sent it before he could second-guess the wording, pocketed the phone, and went down to see what Callum had found.