Chapter 36
A small wooden desk stood in the corner of the locker, a single metal chair pushed beneath it.
I sat down and set the satellite phone on the dusty wood.
The room was silent except for the low, distant hum of the interstate highway a mile away.
I pulled my father’s yellow notepad from my bag and laid it next to the phone.
The handwritten cyphers on the yellow paper matched the formatting of the numbers on the index card.
I turned on the satellite phone. The screen flickered to life, displaying a prompt that read: ENTER ACCESS CODE.
I began typing the numbers from the yellow notepad, my fingers moving slowly over the rubber keys.
The cypher was a double-transposition key, the same system my father had used to send his daily reports to the counter-intelligence desk in the eighties.
When I entered the final digit, the phone did not ring.
Instead, the screen cleared, and a small green light at the top of the casing began to blink in a steady, three-beat pattern.
A single text message appeared on the display: USE THE LINE AT FIVE.
The sender’s number was restricted.
I checked the digital clock on my wrist. It was exactly thirteen hundred hours.
I sat in the quiet locker for another ten minutes, holding the phone in my lap.
The files in the boxes around me were the work of a lifetime, a meticulous reconstruction of a massive defense fraud scheme that had cost lives in Syria.
My father had not just survived; he had spent eleven years gathering the bricks to dismantle the Vance family legacy piece by piece.
And he had used me to pull the final trigger.
I packed the files back into the boxes, leaving only the satellite phone in my hand.
I pulled the heavy blue metal door down, locking the padlock with the brass key.
The facility was silent as I walked back to my car, the cold wind blowing dry leaves across the gravel lot.
At four past four, I unlocked the front door of my penthouse.
May you like
The apartment was clean, the dust gone, but it felt hollow without the monitoring programs humming in the background.
The server room was dark, the blue monitor lights turned off for the first time in six weeks.
