They weren’t hiding behind him by accident. They were using him. I took it straight to the captain. No theatrics. No certainty. Just the pattern, laid out carefully, and the risk of being wrong if we kept doing nothing.
He listened without interrupting, eyes moving from map to map, timeline to timeline. When I finished, he exhaled slowly. “If you’re right,” he said, “we’ve been chasing a ghost—and nearly buried an innocent man to do it.”