I stood up out of the switchgrass, stepping deliberately into the white glare of the cruisers' auxiliary spotlights.
"Don't move your cruisers, Deputy!" I yelled, keeping both hands raised wide above my head, fingers splayed open to show empty palms.
The beam of every spotlight pivoted violently, pinning me against the chain-link fence. The light was blinding, burning white across my water-soaked clothes and plaster-dusted face.
"Drop to the ground! Hands where we can see them!" the older deputy bellowed, leveling his shotgun directly at my chest as both officers moved rapidly behind their cruiser doors. "Down on your knees right now!"
"I am complying!" I shouted back, lowering myself onto my knees in the gravel, keeping my hands locked behind my head. "I am unarmed! My name is Paul Mercer, Senior Compliance Auditor, Employee Badge 4109! My credentials are on my belt, and the stolen military hardware is sitting in the two trailers behind you!"
"He's armed, Deputy!" Vance shouted, stepping forward with his hand raised, trying to push himself between the officers and the gate. "He fired a weapon inside Dispatch Two! Gallagher saw it! Put him down before he reaches for his jacket!"
"Shut your mouth, Vance!" I called out, my voice raw but rock-steady against the drone of the refrigeration compressors. "Ray, look at the dash cameras on those two cruisers! They're recording audio and video straight to the county server! If Vance tells these deputies to shoot an unarmed auditor who is face-down on the gravel, you are going to stand trial as an accessory to capital murder!"
Ray flinched as if I had struck him with an iron bar. He took two stumbling steps back, away from Vance, his boot catching on the curb of the guard shack. "He didn't fire at me, Arthur," Ray muttered, his voice cracking into a ragged whisper. "He didn't have a piece. It was my gun. We fought over the desk and it went into the ceiling."
The older deputy's eyes flicked from Ray's pale face back to mine. He didn't lower the shotgun, but his posture shifted, the immediate trigger tension easing out of his shoulders. "Keep your hands clasped behind your head, Mercer. Crawl forward three yards. Slowly."
I crawled across the gravel, the sharp trap rock grinding into my wet knees, until I reached the edge of the cruiser's front bumper. The younger deputy stepped up behind me, planting a knee firmly between my shoulder blades and clicking a pair of cold steel handcuffs around my wrists. He patted down my drenched pockets, pulling out my soaked notebook, my auditor badge, and the two electronic drives wrapped in my damp handkerchief.
"He's clean, Sergeant," the younger deputy called out. "No sidearm. Just an auditor card and some USB drives."
Vance walked up to the side of the cruiser, his expression hardening into a cold, dismissive mask of executive authority. "Thank you, Sergeant. Put him in the back of the vehicle. He's clearly delusional and suffering from severe paranoia. I'll take possession of the company hardware he stole from the dispatch terminal, and you can transport him to the county jail for booking on felony trespassing and commercial sabotage."
Vance reached out his leather-gloved hand toward the flash drive sitting on the cruiser's hood.
"Touch that drive, Vance, and you're tampering with evidence in an active Department of Defense arms trafficking investigation," I said, leaning my head against the cruiser's wet quarter-panel. "Sergeant, look at the outer manifest tag on that lead trailer."
The sergeant paused, his hand resting on his service holster as he glanced at the lead refrigerated hauler. "What about it?"
"The bill of lading on that truck says it's carrying empty refrigeration coils for contractor repair, tare weight fourteen thousand pounds," I stated, speaking loudly and clearly so the cruisers' dash microphones captured every syllable. "Check the dynamic weighbridge logs from Track 9 that were recorded at 10:22 PM. That truck crossed the sensor plate at thirty-eight thousand four hundred pounds. The second one weighed thirty-nine thousand one hundred. There are twelve tons of lead-cadmium shielded military telemetry processors in the belly of each trailer, stolen from railcar KTLX-8841 two hours ago."
"That is complete fabrication," Vance said smoothly, though the muscle along his jawline began to twitch. "Those trucks belong to an independent industrial repair firm. We don't verify contractor tare weights for off-site servicing."
"You did more than verify it, Vance," I said. "You approved the dispatch ticket under your private regional authorization code at 9:45 PM. And when I caught the seal discrepancy on Track 9, you plugged a hardware bypass dongle into Dispatch Two to blind the corporate security cameras in Chicago with a pre-recorded loop."
I nodded toward the plastic dongle on the cruiser hood. "The younger deputy has the bypass key right there. It has an embedded forensic storage partition. Open the root folder on your cruiser's field terminal, Sergeant. The cryptographic certificate that authorized that video blackout doesn't carry Ray's ID or mine. It carries the twelve-digit master security token assigned exclusively to Arthur Vance."