868 "She Threw Her FBI Badge in the Trash to Teach Her a Lesson—Ten Minutes Later, the Whole Precinct Was Plunged into Darkness as a Ruthless Mastermind Executed the Ultimate Inside Job!"

The sterile lights of the precinct medical bay hummed overhead, but I barely felt the paramedic wrapping my scorched hand in thick, silver burn dressings. My mind was racing, every neuron firing through the haze of shock and pain.

Fort Meade. The central nervous system of the United States Cyber Command.

"Explain," I demanded, ignoring the medic trying to pin my arm down and struggling to sit upright on the examination table.

Captain Lawson stood at the foot of the bed, her tablet clutched so tightly in her hand that her knuckles were bone-white. She looked like a woman who had just watched the world end and was waiting for the shockwave to hit.

"The server log wasn't an outbound transmission to the Navy," Lawson said, her voice shaking as she swiped through the cascading data streams on her screen. "It was an inbound packet extraction. While we were fighting to block the relay in the subbasement, Vance’s decoy upload forced Cyber Command to lower their firewall parameters to inspect the threat."

"He used our grid as a crowbar," I said, finishing her thought as the chilling reality set in. "He didn't want to steal Navy satellite coordinates. He used the emergency override protocols we triggered to slip a backdoor malware package directly into the Pentagon's primary intelligence mainframe."

The heavy metal door of the medical bay flew open, and Special Agent Marcus Vance—no relation to Viktor, despite the grim coincidence—strode into the room. Marcus was the regional director of the FBI’s Cyber Division, a man who rarely left his secure SCIF in downtown Washington unless a national security threat was actively imploding.

"Brooks," Marcus said without preamble, his face carved from granite. "I just got off the secure line with the Director and the Secretary of Defense. Fort Meade’s primary intelligence grid is completely compromised. Someone just downloaded every active deep-cover operative dossier in Eastern Europe and the Middle East."

"It wasn't a someone, Marcus," I said, swinging my legs over the side of the examination table and ignoring the sharp spike of pain in my head. "It was Viktor Vance. And he’s doing this systematically. He’s not just selling data to the highest bidder; he’s systematically dismantling our entire foreign intelligence apparatus."

Marcus crossed his arms, stepping closer to the bed. "The Secretary wants your task force pulled off the streets, Maya. They think your precinct raid triggered a rogue network loop that allowed the breach."

"My raid?" I snapped, rage flaring hot and fast through my veins, pushing past the pain. "If Officer Mercer hadn't thrown my badge in the trash and stalled our perimeter lock for twenty critical minutes, we would have caught Vance before he ever stepped foot in that subbasement!"

"Mercer is currently sitting in a holding cell downstairs," Lawson cut in sharply. "And he's singing like a canary. He admitted that his cousin Leo wasn't the only one on Vance’s payroll."

I stopped, my eyes locking onto Lawson. "Who else?"

"Mercer didn't know names, but he gave us an account number and a drop location," Lawson said, tossing a manila folder onto my lap. "A meeting is happening tonight at midnight at an abandoned dry-dock warehouse down by the harbor. Vance is scheduled to meet his primary buyer—a high-level foreign national who paid fifty million dollars in encrypted cryptocurrency for those operative dossiers."

Marcus leaned forward, his expression grave. "If we move on that warehouse, we can intercept the buyer, recover the flash drive with the stolen dossiers, and capture Vance before he leaks those operatives' identities to hostile foreign intelligence agencies."

I pulled the medical wrap tighter around my charred hand, picked up my Glock from the tray beside the bed, and slid it firmly into my shoulder holster.