Chapter 6 - The Unencrypted Truth
The dashboard display of the government sedan cast a pale, electronic blue glow across Auditor Thorne’s focused face as she shifted the transmission into drive and pulled away from the country club curb.
My phone screen was still lit, displaying that single, terrifying subject line from the unknown proxy server: The real reason Alan targeted your carrier group.
“Commander Hayes?” Thorne asked, glancing sideways at me as the car accelerated down the dark suburban highway. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
“Pull over,” I said, my voice dropping into a razor-sharp command.
Thorne blinked, her hands tightening on the steering wheel. “We’re on a secure timeline with the base JAG investigator, Commander—”
“I said pull over, Auditor.”
With a reluctant flick of her wrist, Thorne signaled and edged the sedan onto a deserted industrial access road, cutting the engine as the headlights beamed against a rusted chain-link fence.
I didn't hesitate. I tapped the screen, bypassed the proxy warning, and opened the encrypted attachment.
A digital audio file and a scanned ledger popped up simultaneously. My thumb hovered over the play button for a second before I pressed it.
The audio crackled with static, followed by the unmistakable sound of Alan Brooks’s voice, slurring slightly as if he had been drinking heavily.
“...you don't understand, the girl is a ghost anyway,” Alan’s voice rasped through the car's speakers. “She’s been out at sea for six months at a time. Nobody checks her personal authentication tokens unless a major audit hits. And even if they do, we route the subcontracts through the Singapore subsidiary. By the time the Navy realizes the Pacific Fleet’s logistics pipeline has a hole in it, the shell company will have liquidated the millions into offshore real estate.”
A second voice chimed in—smoother, colder, and chillingly familiar. It was a voice I had heard at family barbecues, a voice that had offered me a glass of iced tea and asked about my deployments with a warm, grandfatherly smile.
“Just make sure you don't touch the primary command token tied to her direct tactical group,” Richard Vance—or someone sounding chillingly like him—cautioned in the recording. “We only need the supply delays to look like ordinary bureaucratic backlogs. If her specific carrier group starts screaming about missing ordnance, the Pentagon cyber command will be all over our servers in forty-eight hours.”
The phone speaker fell silent, save for the low, rhythmic hum of the car’s electronics.
Thorne stared straight ahead through the windshield, her breath catching in her throat. “That wasn't just corporate wire fraud, Commander. That was intentional sabotage coordinated with an external contractor network.”
Before I could answer, my phone buzzed again with a real-time tracking notification from the proxy server.
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The file hadn't been sent from a random IP address. The geographic coordinates embedded in the metadata pointed to an active terminal located less than three miles away—inside the private hangar bays of the local municipal airfield.
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