Chapter 3 - The Intruders at Quarters
The drive to Nico’s off-base rental home on the outskirts of Jacksonville took less than fifteen minutes, but the silence inside my rental car felt like an interrogation.
Nico sat in the passenger seat, staring fixedly out the window, his jaw clenched so tight I could see the muscle twitching. The revelation of my past had been upended by an immediate, tangible crisis, fusing my old life with his current one in a way neither of us had anticipated.
When we pulled onto his residential street, two military police cruisers were parked curbside with their emergency flashers off, casting rhythmic pulses of red light across the brick facades of the townhomes.
Master Gunny Marcus Vance—a broad-chested Marine with graying temples and a scar cutting through his left eyebrow—was standing by the front porch talking to an MP.
Nico killed the engine before the car had even fully stopped and threw his door open.
"Vance! What happened?" Nico demanded, striding across the small front lawn.
Vance turned, his face grim. He glanced past Nico to where I was walking up behind him. His eyes flicked over me with a mixture of professional respect and deep unease.
"Someone popped the back window, Romano," Vance said, jerking his thumb toward the rear of the house. "Nothing was stolen from the living room or the kitchen. The local police were about to write it off as a botched juvenile B&E until the responding officer found what the intruder was actually looking for."
My instincts, buried under ten years of administrative routine, snapped back into sharp focus. "What were they looking for, Master Gunny?"
Vance looked at me directly. "Your brother's deployment files from his time assigned to the II Marine Expeditionary Force intelligence liaison office. Specifically, the hard drives containing joint-service exercise logs from six months ago."
Nico stopped dead in his tracks. "My liaison logs? Why would anyone break into my house for routine exercise logs?"
"They aren't routine," Vance said flatly. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a heavy plastic evidence bag containing a small, wiped USB drive. "The local police didn't find this. I did, tucked underneath your mattress right where the intruder dropped it when the patrol car pulled up. It's an encrypted secure-data module. Standard Department of Defense issue, but encoded with Air Force software protocols."
I stared at the plastic bag in Vance's hand. The cold knot in my stomach tightened into a fist.
Air Force encryption protocols.
In a Marine housing unit in coastal North Carolina.
"Nico," I said, my voice dropping into a register I hadn't used since my briefing days at Stuttgart. "Did you copy any joint-service files onto your personal system during your last rotation?"
"No!" Nico protested, his hands flying up. "I follow protocol to the letter. You know that. Whatever I handled stayed on the secure network at the base."
"Then why target your apartment?" Gunny Barrett, who had followed us in his own truck, stepped up onto the porch. "A professional break-in doesn't happen by accident. If they bypassed the front deadbolt and went straight for your bedroom, they knew exactly what they were looking for—or they wanted to plant something there."
Vance nodded slowly. "That's my read, Gunny. The intruder didn't steal anything. They left that drive behind. If the MPs had searched the house without me present, that module would have been logged as belonging to Sergeant Romano. Within twenty-four hours, he’d be facing a court-martial for possessing classified Air Force intelligence on a civilian network."
The implications cascaded through my mind with terrifying clarity.
Someone wasn't just investigating my past; they were using Nico's present to build a trap. And the architecture of the trap bore the distinct fingerprints of a system I thought I had left behind years ago.
May you like
Nico looked between Vance, Barrett, and me, his face pale. "Who would do that? I'm a platoon sergeant. I don't deal in high-level intelligence."
"You don't," I said quietly. "But your sister does."
