Chapter 26 - The Wire and the Wolf
The cold began to sink into my marrow, but inside my chest, a fire was burning hotter than jet fuel.
They hadn't just tried to steal a house. They had orchestrated an entire naval operation to bury four hundred million dollars in black-budget defense fraud behind the cover of my "heroic death at sea." If I died as an active officer, the Navy's investigative branch closed the books on the missing telemetry payloads without a civilian trial. Charles took the corporate buyout; Sarah took the Tahoe real estate; Sterling took a seat on the board of Titan Defense.
And I took a six-foot patch of cold dirt in Arlington.
I slid out of the granite fissure and worked my way along the ridgeline, keeping the crest of the mountain between myself and the helicopter’s thermal cameras. Three miles south lay a decommissioned Forest Service cabin that hadn't seen a ranger since the mid-nineties. In its root cellar was a bug-out cache I had buried two years ago: cash, a clean passport, an unregistered burner phone, and an encrypted satellite transceiver.
By 0340 hours, my boots hit the rotting floorboards of the ranger shack.
The lock gave way with a crisp snap of my stolen tactical knife. Inside, the air smelled of stale cedar and dry rot. I dropped to my knees, pulled back the braided rug, and lifted the subfloor trapdoor.
The Pelican case was right where I had left it, sealed with tamper-evident tape.
I flipped the latches. Inside sat $25,000 in crisp hundred-dollar bills, a SIG Sauer P229 with three loaded magazines, a satellite phone linked to an independent Baltic network, and the master hard drive containing five years of unedited communications between the Hayes family business and the Pentagon procurement office.
My father thought he was the only one keeping records. He forgot that before I was a line officer, I was a forensic intelligence analyst.
I powered on the satellite phone. The screen flickered green, hunting for an orbital uplink against the stormy Sierra sky.
When the signal bars locked at maximum, I dialed a number memorized during my first week at the Naval War College—a private direct line to the Inspector General of the Navy's Special Investigations Division.
The line rang four times. Then an older, gravelly voice answered.
"Speak."
"Admiral Vance," I said, my voice cutting through the static. "This is Commander Evelyn Hayes."
A dead silence fell over the other end of the line. For five agonizing seconds, all I could hear was the faint hum of a secure terminal fifty miles away in Washington.
"Evelyn?" Vance's voice dropped an octave, heavy with genuine shock. "That's impossible. We received the encrypted casualty report from Baja six hours ago. Your father is scheduled to receive the posthumous Legion of Merit on your behalf tomorrow afternoon in San Francisco."
May you like
"Cancel the ceremony, Admiral," I said coldly. "The corpse has a few questions for the guest of honor."
***
