Chapter 17
“He did it because he knows what they will do to you if those files disappear,” Rachel said.
Two hours later, I was sitting at my kitchen table, which had been converted into a makeshift workspace. Marcus had set up two laptops side by side, their power cords tangled around the legs of a wooden chair.
Marcus adjusted his headset and tapped a sequence of keys, his fingers moving with a rapid, nervous energy.
“The partition is encrypted with a third-generation block cipher,” Marcus said, pointing to a progress bar that had stalled at twelve percent. “I can bypass the first layer, but the secondary files are locked behind an administrative signature.”
“Use my father’s old cipher,” I said, reaching into my bag for the yellow notepad.
I opened the dusty pad to the third page, where three rows of handwritten numbers were listed under a date from twelve years ago.
“Try the second sequence,” I said. “The one ending in seven-four.”
Marcus typed the numbers into his terminal, and the progress bar instantly jumped to ninety-eight percent. A green dialog box opened on the screen, revealing a folder titled Project Aegis.
“It worked,” Marcus said, his voice quiet. “But these are not standard procurement files, Claire.”
I leaned closer to the screen, my eyes scanning the directories.
“Open the invoice subfolder,” I said.
The monitor flickered as a list of three hundred individual transactions populated the screen. Each entry showed a line-item charge for ceramic armor plating, delivered to an assembly facility in Texas.
“Look at the unit cost,” Marcus said, pointing to a column on the right. “Four hundred and twelve dollars per plate.”
“That is half the price of standard military issue,” I said.
“And look at the digital signature on the approval form,” Marcus said.
He clicked the file, expanding the metadata at the bottom of the document. My own name, spelled out in the agency’s official cryptographic script, sat directly above the authorization line.
“This was generated last Tuesday,” I said, my finger tracing the date on the glass. “While I was sitting in the divorce court.”
“There is more,” Marcus said, scrolling down to the wire transfer details.
The screen displayed millions of dollars routed through her personal cyber architecture, each transaction leaving a permanent digital footprint that pointed straight back to my private accounts.
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We printed the routing tables before dawn, the ink smelling sharp and warm in the quiet kitchen.
By nine-thirty that morning, Rachel and I were sitting in the mahogany-paneled office of Senator Hayes.
