A Marine shoved me across the Pentagon cafeteria

By mid-afternoon, Caldwell and I were back inside the Pentagon, descending into the high-security detention facility located three levels beneath the building’s lowest concourse.

Colonel Vance sat behind a thick sheet of bulletproof glass, wearing an orange Department of Corrections jumpsuit. The swagger, the arrogance, the polished Marine uniform that had intimidated the entire cafeteria twenty-four hours earlier were completely gone. He looked ten years older, his shoulders hunched, his eyes bloodshot from weeping and interrogation.

When Caldwell and I sat down on the visitor side of the partition, Vance didn't even look up at first.

“Jonathan was arrested,” I said through the intercom. “On live television. Outside the Hart atrium.”

Vance let out a dry, rattling laugh that sounded like dry leaves scraping across concrete. “Serves the bastard right. He told me he had the Justice Department in his pocket. He told me the White House would intervene if things got sticky.”

“Nobody is intervening, Vance,” Caldwell said, his tone devoid of pity. “You are looking at life imprisonment at Fort Leavenworth for treason, espionage, and conspiracy to commit murder. Unless you give us the access codes to Project Chimera.”

Vance finally raised his head. He looked at Caldwell, then his gaze shifted to me. There was a flicker of genuine terror in his eyes.

“You think Sterling and I were running this?” Vance whispered, leaning as close to the glass as his hand chains would allow. “Mercer... we were just the bagmen. We were the grease in the gears.”

“Who has the Chimera keys, Vance?” I pressed, leaning forward. “Who is the buyer?”

“The buyer isn't a foreign government,” Vance whispered, his breathing becoming shallow. “The buyer is a private entity. An off-grid contractor funded by a shadow consortium inside our own defense research apparatus. They didn't want the drones to fail because they were cheap. They wanted the drones to fail so the Pentagon would scrap the public program and award a twenty-billion-dollar sole-source contract to their proprietary system.”

“What proprietary system?” Caldwell demanded.

“Project Cerberus,” Vance said. “An automated, fully autonomous kill-chain AI that doesn't require human command authorization. And the man who wrote the operational code isn't in Geneva.”

Vance swallowed hard, his eyes darting toward the security cameras mounted in the corners of the interrogation room.