TradeSecrets:
SOURCE

When does a source stop being trustworthy?

At Boston-based Verity Exchange, reliability is not merely an opinion. It is a classification. The company’s SOURCE INDEX helps institutions decide which information can be used, which requires caution, and which should no longer be trusted at all.

Dr. Evelyn Rusk, Verity’s Director of Source Integrity, changes one consequential classification from restricted reliance to UNRESOLVED — ACTIVE REVIEW REQUIRED.

Then she is murdered.

Maya James enters the investigation expecting to reconstruct why Rusk challenged the classification and who needed that challenge reversed. Instead, the case begins leading toward a record that Maya cannot dismiss as simply another subject in another archive.

The similarities reach into her own Army counterintelligence history: contested judgment, incomplete validation, correction, concealment, authority conflict, and the consequences of deciding what can still be believed.

Maya has spent the TradeSecrets series following evidence into the institutions that produced it. Now the evidence may be following her.

TradeSecrets: SOURCE turns the series’ questions of evidence, custody, authority, and institutional memory toward Maya James herself—forcing her to confront the possibility that her relationship with Axiom Strategic Group began long before she understood she was part of the system.