Chapter 4 - The Audit Trail
I stepped across the threshold, the metal door creaking softly behind me. The air inside smelled of damp concrete and old copper wire.
Hayes didn't look like an investigator anymore. Her blazer was draped over a spare wooden crate, and her sleeves were rolled up, revealing a small, faded scar across her left forearm—the exact same jagged shape as the shrapnel mark I’d pulled out of my own sergeant’s arm back in Kandahar.
"You're not IG," I said, keeping my weight balanced on the balls of my feet. "You're Internal Compliance, Bureau of Historical Review. They don't investigate logistics leaks. They bury them."
Hayes finally turned her chair around. She wasn't holding a gun. She was holding a cracked ceramic mug of black coffee, watching me with a terrifyingly calm expression.
"Compliance is too messy a word, Sloane," Hayes said softly. Her voice lacked the crisp, bureaucratic edge she’d used in the office. It was raspy, worn down by years of speaking in whispers. "We’re the ones who decide which operations get to be history, and which ones get classified as operational errors."
"Firebase Vanguard wasn't an error," I said, my grip tightening on the knife handle in my pocket. "My team was sold out so the command could write off three million dollars in missing munitions without an external congressional audit."
"Your team was collateral damage in a much larger cleanup," Hayes corrected, her eyes locking onto mine without a flicker of remorse. "Do you have any idea what happens when a Black Ops unit starts asking questions about where those surplus radios went? They trace them right up to the Pentagon's black budget. Rick Danner was just a greedy middleman. The real problem was that you and your girls wouldn't let it go."
"We lost good people."
"And you survived," she shot back, her tone sharp as broken glass. "Which makes you a loose end. Every year you stay retired, the trail gets a little colder. But you couldn't stay away, could you? You had to come back to the sandbox."
"I didn't come back for you," I said. "I came back because someone sent an anonymous packet to my home address with the coordinates of this base."
Hayes paused, her coffee mug halfway to her mouth. The amber glow of the monitor flickered across her face, casting strange, dancing shadows under her eyes.
"An anonymous packet?" she repeated, her brow furrowing for the first time. "Sloane, nobody sent you that packet. I’ve been tracking you for six months, trying to figure out how to neutralize you before you opened up this archive yourself."
My blood ran cold. If Hayes didn't send the packet, and Rick Danner was too cowardly to poke a sleeping bear, then someone else wanted me here. Someone who knew about Firebase Vanguard, knew about the bunker, and wanted both of us in the exact same room at the exact same time.
May you like
Before I could ask another question, the heavy steel door behind me slammed shut with a deafening crash, followed by the sharp, metallic clack of a heavy padlock sliding into place from the outside.
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