CHAPTER 8: THE GUARDROOM INTERROGATION
“The manifest doesn’t exist on the garrison registry, technician,” Investigator Vance—no, the Inspector General’s representative, Special Agent Kincaid—said, her knuckle rapping against the laminate surface of the table. The sound was flat, deadened by the heavy layers of wet canvas her team had draped over the guardroom chairs. “What you handed me at the gate is a commercial stock slip from a scrap yard that ceased operations six months ago. Legally, it’s a piece of trash.”
The holding room was tiny, six-by-eight feet of institutional cream-painted cinderblock that held the chill of the morning rain like a meat locker. A single window looked out onto the internal corridor of the security detachment building, the thick glass wire-reinforced and filmed over with yellowing nicotine stains from decades of shift changes. On the desk between us sat my tactical gloves, my unzipped tool pouch, and the yellowed paper manifest I’d carried out of the server room.
“The numbers match the freight inventory on the flatbeds that went out to Sector Four,” I said. My hands were flat on my thighs, the dampness of my coveralls soaking into my skin. “The zinc transponder I snapped onto the rear axle of truck three is currently broadcasting a position report that puts it four miles outside the perimeter on the training trail. If your team queries the satellite relay, you’ll see the vibration log is already showing a three-axis deviation. The suspension brackets are tearing themselves apart.”
Kincaid didn’t look at the ruggedized ledger beside her hand. Her face was a mask of calculated federal indifference, her short brown hair tucked neatly behind her ears, her eyes tracking the movement of my jaw every time I spoke. She wasn’t an investigator looking for a bad supplier; she was an auditor looking for the boundary line of a leak.
“We don’t query unauthorized commercial transponders during an active training cycle,” she said, her voice dropping into that rhythmic, anti-expository cadence used by bureaucrats who know they are being recorded. “Right now, the only authorized log we have is the local armory registry. And that registry says Sergeant Miller inspected, verified, and cleared every piece of hardware on those vehicles. If those trucks go into the ditch, Miller goes to Leavenworth. It’s a closed loop.”
“Miller signed under administrative coercion,” I leaned forward, the metal legs of my chair scraping against the gray linoleum floor with a sharp, piercing squeak. “The encryption key was injected from the commander’s office. If you check the terminal logs from the sub-basement at zero five twelve, you’ll see the legacy command sequence—”
“The sub-basement terminal suffered a catastrophic power surge at zero five seventeen,” Kincaid interrupted, her pencil point coming down precisely on the margin of her note pad. “The storage sectors are unreadable. There is no legacy command sequence. There is no terminal footprint. There is only you, found in a restricted sector at dawn with proprietary corporate paperwork in your pocket.”
She stood up, her blue windbreaker rustling against the cinderblock wall as she stepped toward the heavy iron door. Through the wire-glass window, I saw a stocky silhouette in a tan military polo stand up from the bench across the hall. Miller was there, his face flushed, his hands shoved deep into his khaki tactical trousers. He wasn’t under guard, but he wasn’t leaving either.
My eyes drifted past Kincaid’s shoulder to the guardroom desk near the main door. A standard-issue armory maintenance kit sat open on the counter—the kind we used for field repairs on the security detachment’s sidearms. A pair of heavy-duty industrial wire cutters was missing from the molded plastic tray, leaving a clean, empty silhouette in the blue foam lining.
Miller hadn’t come here to defend his signature. He had come here to clear the workshop before the garrison command sent the sweep team in. If he had those cutters, he was going after the torque wrench—and if he cut the transmitter lead before the data was pulled by an outside agency, the only physical proof of the surveillance ring would be reduced to a handful of loose copper filings in a trash bin.
“Stay here, technician,” Kincaid said, her hand settling on the heavy brass door handle. “We’re waiting for the garrison commander’s legal representative to clear the jurisdictional waiver. Don’t touch the tools on the table.”
The lock clicked into place with a heavy, double-throw clunk that echoed through the small space. I waited two seconds, listening to the retreat of her leather soles down the hall, before my hand shot across the laminate table toward my unzipped tool pouch. My fingers bypassed the calibration gauges and closed over the small, silver-plated magnetic extraction rod hidden in the lining—the only tool they hadn’t logged because it looked like an ordinary ballpoint pen.
