"Everyone sit down," Colonel Miller said. His voice lacked the sharpness of an order given on a live range; it was level, flat, and hollowed out by thirty years of watching men ruin their lives inside windowless rooms. "Hands on top of the tables. Palms flat on the laminate. Vance, you take the side door. If anyone touches a keypad before the provost marshal gets here, put them on the deck."
Lieutenant Vance stepped backward toward the wall rack, unsnapping the retention strap of his sidearm holster with a crisp click. He did not draw, but his right thumb remained hooked over the grip. The twenty-two men of Bravo Team moved together, a collective rustle of nylon rigs and combat trousers as they sat back down. Nobody looked at each other. They kept their eyes fixed on the blank projection screen behind me, staring at the green digital timestamp ticking in the corner of the display.
Cole had not sat down. He stood three paces from the edge of the riser, his shoulders pinned back against the yellow fire extinguisher mounted on the concrete pillar. His tactical vest was cinched tight, the ceramic plate riding high over his chest, but his breathing was shallow enough that the fabric barely moved. His right hand remained near the radio harness on his web gear, his thumb tucked into the nylon loop.
"Captain Grant is confused, Colonel," Cole said. His voice was too steady, rehearsed with the brittle precision of an alibi prepared twelve hours in advance. "She's reading from an unsynchronized diagnostic printout. The relay tower on Route 9 had a power glitch during the lightning storm at twenty-one hundred. Communications maintenance was resetting the packet router all night. If my credential key was logged, it was because the night-duty sergeant used my terminal to clear the static."
"The maintenance log doesn't generate an uplink packet, Ray," I said. I stayed behind the lectern, keeping my left hand flat over the paper to prevent the desk fan from fluttering the sheets. "A maintenance reset pings the local loop. It doesn't query the tactical server for our vehicle loadout, and it sure as hell doesn't export our grid coordinates to a Del Rio IP address through a civilian cellular bridge."
"You don't know what you're looking at," Cole snapped, taking half a step toward the center aisle before Vance's boot shifted against the floor tiles, stopping him cold. "You’ve been out of the field for seven months, Hannah. You spent half a year in physical rehab listening to division clerks talk about server protocols. You don't know how the border relays handle bleed-over when the tactical networks cross the commercial bands."
"I know how to read an encrypted session header," I answered. I turned the folder ninety degrees so Miller could see the bottom margin. "Look at line twelve, Colonel. That's the cryptographic handshake. It didn't bounce off an open commercial channel. It used the private secondary key assigned to Cole's command tablet. The one he checked out from the arms room yesterday at fourteen hundred."
Miller adjusted his glasses, leaning closer to the yellow thermal paper. His jaw muscles tightened, the skin over his cheekbones turning pale against the overhead lights. "Where is the tablet right now, Ray?"
Cole's jaw set hard. "In my wall locker in the ready room. Locked in the metal bin where it belongs."
"No, it isn't," I said. "I checked the armory turn-in log twenty minutes before I walked in here. The locker was empty. The arms room clerk told me you took the tablet out to your personal truck at zero-six-thirty this morning, claiming you needed to run a firmware diagnostic before the pre-mission convoy rollout."
The silence in the room deepened, thickening into the heavy, suffocating atmosphere of a trap snapping shut. Cole’s gaze darted from Miller’s stone-cold expression to the closed blast gate at the rear of the bay. He realized then that I hadn't simply stumbled onto a routing error; I had spent the last three hours quietly closing every exit behind him.
"You went into my vehicle?" Cole’s voice dropped an octave, the artificial deference stripping away to reveal the raw arrogance that had simmered beneath his rank for months. "You broke into an NCO's personal property without a search authorization from the base magistrate? You're done, Grant. Even if that paper says what you think it says, you contaminated the chain of custody. Any JAG officer will laugh this out of the hearing room before the ink is dry."
"I didn't touch your truck, Ray," I said evenly. "I asked the military police gate sergeant to pull the security camera footage from the South Gate parking enclosure. The camera looks right through your windshield. Your tablet wasn't sitting on the console. It was connected to an external high-gain antenna clamped to your roof rack, drawing power from your battery jumper pack."
I reached into the folder and slid the second document across the table. It was an eight-by-ten still frame printed from the perimeter security feed. The image was grainy, washed out by the early morning sodium lights, but the license plate on the black pickup was unmistakable, and the blue power indicator on the dashboard transmitter was glowing bright.
"That's a wideband repeater," Miller said, his voice dropping into a dangerous whisper as he looked up from the photograph. "You weren't just reading the files, Sergeant. You were broadcasting them outside the wire."