The Pattern
The second witness died four days later, in Safe House Seven in Medellin. Same method — a single round through a window, from an elevated position with a pre-identified line of sight. Daniela did not wait for authorization. She moved the witness in Safe House Three to a location that was not in the system — her cousin's apartment in Cali, a place that existed in no database and that she had told no one about. Then she sat down with the files and began looking for the pattern.
The pattern was in the access logs. Every safe house had a digital lock system that recorded entries — who opened the door, when, with what credential. The logs for Fourteen and Seven showed nothing unusual. But when Daniela pulled the logs for all eight houses and compared them against the master schedule, she found a discrepancy. Each house had been accessed once, outside of scheduled visits, in the seventy-two hours before the killings. The access credential belonged to a maintenance account — a system-level login used for updating the lock firmware, a login that should have been disabled after installation. The maintenance account had last been officially used eighteen months ago. Someone had kept it active.
She traced the maintenance account through the procurement records and found that it had been created during the initial setup of the safe house network, by a contractor who no longer existed.