Chapter 17 - THE AFTERMATH IN THE DISTRICT
By noon, the marble lobby of the Hart Building looked less like a government office and more like an occupied war zone.
Federal Marshals, Department of Justice internal investigators, and military police units swarmed the corridors, impounding servers, seizing encrypted comms gear, and escorting high-ranking DIA officials out of the building in zip-ties and handcuffs.
I sat on a stone bench outside the pillared entrance of the building, the autumn wind whipping my jacket around my shoulders as I watched the gray patrol wagons line the curbside.
Marshal Vance walked up, holding two paper cups of steaming black coffee, and handed one to me before sitting down heavily on the bench beside me.
"Well," Vance said, taking a slow sip and staring out at the blocked-off D.C. traffic. "The Attorney General is already calling emergency press conferences. The White House press secretary just resigned. And half the sub-cabinet of the Defense Intelligence Agency is currently sitting in a holding cell downtown."
"And Sterling?" I asked, staring into the dark surface of the coffee.
"Locked in an isolation cell at Quantico," Vance replied grimly. "His lawyers are already trying to invoke national security privilege, but with the entire Project Janus ledger sitting on the public record across three thousand independent judicial servers, the privilege argument isn't going to fly this time. Your father would have been proud."
I felt a heavy knot loosen in my chest—a knot that had been twisted tight since the night our home burned down in Virginia twenty-five years ago.
"He wasn't a traitor," I murmured softly. "He was just trying to stop a machine that got too big to control."
"Maybe," Vance said, clapping a heavy hand onto my shoulder. "But you're the one who finally managed to jam a wrench into the gears."
My tactical phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out, expecting another encrypted warning or an urgent call from the DOJ investigators.
Instead, it was an incoming text message from an unknown, unlisted international number originating from Zurich, Switzerland.
I swiped the screen and opened the message. It contained a single image and a short text block:
May you like
The image showed an old, weathered leather journal sitting on a wooden desk, bearing my father’s unmistakable handwriting on the open page.
The text read: The audit was only the beginning, Nathan. Meet me where the river meets the wall. Zurich, 0800 hours.
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