Chapter 4 - The Ledger’s Secret
I pushed the door open the rest of the way with the edge of my boot, my eyes sweeping the room in a fraction of a second.
It wasn't an ambush.
The room was small, sparse, and smelled faintly of stale coffee and old paper. A single metal desk sat beneath a grimy window overlooking the dark water of the harbor. On top of the desk was a battered leather-bound ledger—the exact kind military accountants used before everything went digital—and a small reading lamp casting a harsh yellow circle of light.
Standing by the window with his back to me was a man in a rumpled gray trench coat. He didn't turn around when I entered, but he spoke in a low, gravelly voice that carried a familiar cadence.
“You’re slower than you used to be, Alexis,” he said.
My muscles locked. I knew that voice. It belonged to a man who was supposed to be six feet under in Arlington National Cemetery.
“Colonel Henderson?” I said, my voice dropping into a dangerous register. “You died in a helicopter crash in Djibouti four years ago.”
The man turned slowly. It was indeed Colonel Thomas Henderson, the commander who had signed off on every single mission our task force ever undertook. But he looked older, gaunt, his face lined with deep stress wrinkles and a jagged scar running down his left jawline that hadn't been there before.
“Official reports are remarkably flexible when a project gets shut down by congressional oversight,” Henderson said quietly. He walked over to the metal desk and tapped the leather ledger with his index finger. “And David Vance was the man keeping the books on projects that officially never existed.”
I stepped inside the room, kicking the door shut behind me, keeping my eyes locked on him. “Explain.”
“Your task force wasn't disbanded because the war in Africa wound down,” Henderson said, his eyes hard and direct. “It was disbanded because David found out where the black-budget funding for our operations was actually coming from—and where the surplus equipment was being diverted after we rotated home.”
“Diverted to who?” I asked.
Henderson opened the ledger to a marked page filled with dense columns of serial numbers, destination codes, and unauthorized signatures.
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“To private security firms operating inside the continental United States,” Henderson said. “Firms owned by the very defense contractors who are currently bidding on multi-billion-dollar homeland security contracts. And the man leading that private army?”
Henderson looked up at me, his eyes grim. “Gunnery Sergeant Marcus Crawford.”
