Chapter 20 - THE BURNING TRUTH
We breached the lower chamber in total tactical synchronization.
Smoke from burning magnetic media filled the subterranean corridor, thick with the acrid stench of molten silicon and toxic plastic. Through the gray haze, three figures in tailored suits were frantically feeding black hard-drive canisters into an industrial thermite incinerator at the end of the room.
"Federal agents! Put your hands on your heads and step away from the furnace!" Kane roared, leveling his rifle.
Two of the men immediately dropped to their knees, terrified civilian contractors shaking with terror.
The third man—taller, with silver hair and an arrogance that even an NCIS tactical raid couldn't extinguish—turned slowly around.
It wasn't Senator Sterling.
It was Deputy Secretary of Defense Vance Albright—the Senator's brother, the man who had overseen every classified defense procurement budget for the United States Navy for the last decade.
"Commander Grant," Albright said calmly, holding a single, unburned optical storage disc in his gloved right hand, just inches above the glowing mouth of the 2,000-degree thermite furnace. "I must compliment your tenacity. Most men would have taken the hint after the third traffic stop."
"Step away from the incinerator, Vance," I ordered, my sidearm pointed dead center at his forehead. "You're done."
"Am I?" Albright smiled thinly, his eyes devoid of fear. "You think this was about Arthur Sterling's defense contracts? You think this was about some dirty sheriff taking bribes in Annandale? You still don't understand the scale of what you stepped into on that highway."
"Explain it to a federal judge," Kane barked, taking a step forward.
"Don't move, Agent Kane!" Albright warned, twitching his hand closer to the flames. "This disc contains the source code for the automated maritime combat grid. If it burns, the Navy’s entire fifth-generation autonomous fleet becomes completely blind. And if it survives... it proves that the United States government didn't buy those autonomous ships from Sterling Aerospace. We bought them from an offshore syndicate fronting for foreign intelligence."
My blood ran cold.
The six stops on Route 7 were never meant to intimidate me into silence over small-time kickbacks. They were testing the autonomous tracking algorithms on my vehicle—using my daily commute as a live-fire calibration run for an illegal domestic surveillance AI that had been quietly integrated into the entire national defense network.
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"You turned the homefront into an experimental proving ground," I said, the horror of the realization settling into my gut.
"We modernized it, Commander," Albright countered smoothly. "And now, you either let me walk out of this bunker with diplomatic immunity, or I drop this disc, and thirty billion dollars of naval infrastructure turns into useless junk."
