The Vanishing of Jessica Muir

Description

John Muir hasn’t slept through the night in eight years. Not since his wife Jessica vanished from a rural Washington backroad without a trace. The authorities moved on. Her family held a funeral. John — who’d retired at twenty-five as head of computer security at Goldman Sachs — bought a rifle, built software to scan every public database for her name, and never came down from the Cascades.

A hacked government data stream changes everything. Buried in classified feeds from a signals facility near the Yakima Training Center, John finds fields that don’t belong to any agency he can identify: uniques_captured, haarp_active, disposal_status — Waiting for full batch. And coordinates. His breach triggers an immediate federal response. Within hours, agents he’s never heard of are at his cabin. Sheriff Jeff Rogers — John’s last remaining friend and the only lawman who never closed Jessica’s case — gets there first.

Together they run — not away, but toward whatever the data points to. A facility beneath the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, buried deeper than the Cold War infrastructure above it. What’s down there makes the nuclear waste look like a cover story. The people who run it have killed to keep it hidden, and containment is failing.

Inspiration

The idea started with a logging legend told over bourbon — a creature that looked like a fur pelt but could devour a man whole. That story led me to the folklore of the Pacific Northwest: Bigfoot, the Thunderbird, spirits carved into totem poles. Then came the conspiracy theories — HAARP, ECHELON, Project Paperclip. At some point I stopped researching and started asking: what if all of it was true? What if every campfire story and government cover-up pointed to the same hidden thing? That question became this book.