Trace Removal | Spies Like Us

I'm Not Who You Think I Am

Malcolm sets a thin folder on Lucas’s desk. “Pulled this from the data logs you requested,” he says, tone casual but eyes sharp. “You might want to have a look.”

Lucas opens the folder. The printout smells faintly of toner and fresh ink. The top page reads 

CONFIDENTIAL: INTERNAL DATA ACTIVITY LOG – DRIVE AUTHORIZATION PROJECT – HOLMES, S

He scans the first page. Routine reconstruction entries. Verification pings. Everything logged with Sherrinford Holmes’s credentials.

At first glance, it’s spotless.

Lucas flips the page, slower now. Something feels too perfect. Every process ends exactly on time, every checksum resolves without delay. No trace errors. No temp file clutter. No human fingerprint at all.

Malcolm leans against the wall. “Notice anything off?”

Lucas narrows his eyes. “It’s clean.”

“Too clean,” Malcolm says. “I ran a deep pattern scan. Cross-referenced the audit trail against the shadow cache. Someone masked a fork in the reconstruction sequence. Buried it under a looped system echo.”

Lucas looks back down. The logs are seamless, just like Malcolm said. The deviation only appears in a line of raw data so compressed it would pass unnoticed by anyone not actively searching.

He flips through the rest of the report. The sequence shows Sherrinford entering the system under proper authorization, but there’s a time gap, a few minutes unaccounted for, stitched together with mirrored timestamps.

Sherrinford covered his tracks well.

Lucas exhales, leaning back in his chair. “He’s good.”

Malcolm shrugs. “I almost missed it. He knew exactly where to hide it.”

Lucas’s jaw tightens. “Holmes certainly knows how to hide things.”

Malcolm hesitates. “You want me to escalate it?”

Lucas shakes his head. “No. Leave it with me.”

Malcolm nods and leaves without another word.

The door clicks shut, and silence returns. The faint hum of the radiator is the only sound.

Lucas studies the pages again. Sherrinford hadn’t gone on a joyride through the system. His access wasn’t random. The pattern of the buried queries suggests intent. A careful dig, personal but deliberate.

He trusts Holmes, or at least he thought he did. Still, he feels that old tightening in his chest, the same one that comes when someone breaks faith. The kind that used to mean survival or betrayal, nothing in between.

And before he knows it, the room begins to shift. The paper fades from white to grey. The hum of the radiator turns into the buzz of a flickering bulb. The air smells of mold and copper.

Flashback: St. Petersburg

A concrete room. Single lightbulb swinging from the ceiling. The smell of mold and copper.

Lucas blinks himself awake, wrists tied, head pounding. Jonathan Bale sits across from him, face swollen from the last round. The man with the clipboard stands between them, speaking calm Russian through an interpreter.

“Which of you is Bateman?”

Neither answers.

“Which of you accessed the Ghost Protocol files?”

The interpreter repeats the question in English, voice flat and tired.

Jonathan shakes his head. “We didn’t.”

The clipboard slaps across his face. A guard hits him again, across the shoulder this time. Jonathan grunts in pain.

Lucas keeps his gaze on the floor. Admit nothing. Survive.

But survival changes meaning when Jonathan stops moving.

The guards drag him out. Lucas can’t tell if he’s breathing. The door slams, and the silence feels heavier than the noise ever did.

The clipboard returns. The voice is calm again. “Name.”

Lucas stares at the table. He knows what happens next. He remembers the files they found, the reports of agents erased and rebuilt. The Ghost Protocol wasn’t dead. It was alive and working through the Wraith project, hidden under diplomatic funding.

They decided to expose it, but their own agencies weren’t clean. The money trail led straight back to London. They had been betrayed before the Russians ever touched them.

Jonathan’s voice comes back to him through the fog. “Make it out, at least one of us.”

He hesitates only a moment. “I’m John Bateman.”

The interpreter repeats it. The interrogator nods. The guards untie his wrists.

The ropes fall away, but the weight does not. It saves his life. It takes everything else.

Weeks blur into months. He is kept in isolation. They question him, break him down, call him by the wrong name until he stops correcting them. By the time he’s released, he barely knows what’s true anymore.

When MI5 recovers him, the records are a mess. Russian intel lists John Bateman as the surviving British agent. MI5 can’t prove otherwise. Lucas can’t either.

He signs the debrief under his real name, but it feels like a borrowed one.

Present

The sound of the radiator pulls him back. The office comes into focus again. The report is still open in front of him.

He studies it one last time. The edits are surgical. The data loops precise. Sherrinford Holmes covered his work like a man who knows what’s at stake.

Lucas exhales slowly. He could escalate it. He could file a formal report. But he knows what would happen next. The questions. The suspicion. The dismantling of a man who had simply looked too closely at something he shouldn’t have.

He knows because he lived it.

He opens his terminal. The report’s digital copy sits on the shared server. He deletes it, confirms the prompt. Then he picks up the paper version, draws a straight line across the final page, and writes:

No irregularities found.