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 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.