Chapter 3 - The Freight House Ledger
The warehouse on the industrial outskirts of Gainesville didn't look like a front for anything sophisticated; it looked like a graveyard for broken dreams and rusted corrugated steel. The faded red lettering on the side read Vance & Sons Freight & Logistics, though half the letters had peeled away years ago, leaving ghostly white shadows against the weathered tin walls.
Captain Sterling’s SUV parked fifty yards away in the overgrown gravel lot. Two NCIS agents secured the perimeter, while Sterling and I walked up to the side personnel door. The heavy deadbolt had already been bypassed by federal cut-rate entry tools.
"We got a ping on your encrypted satcom unit from inside this building twenty minutes before we reached you," Sterling murmured, drawing his sidearm and pushing the door open. "Whoever set you up at the diner brought your satchel here first, tried to interface with our network, and tripped our internal firewall."
We stepped inside into the gloom. The air smelled of damp cardboard, motor oil, and old dust. Rows of empty wooden pallets stretched into the shadows, flanked by rusted shelving units piled high with forgotten freight crates. But as we moved toward the back office, something didn't fit. The floor was too clean near the office door. The dust had been swept away in a distinct pathway.
I pushed open the office door. Inside, a single metal desk sat beneath a flickering fluorescent light. On top of the desk wasn't an old ledger or a pile of shipping invoices, but a brand-new, open laptop connected via a heavy-duty cable to my classified satellite comms unit, which had been unpacked from my tactical bag.
Sterling walked over to the laptop screen. "They were trying to download the mission logs from your last deployment," he said, his brow furrowing as he read the scrolling command prompt. "Not standard operational data. Specific logs. The timestamp of the night Marcus Vance was lost in the Gulf of Aden."
I stepped closer, my eyes locking onto the screen. The decryption key being used to access those files wasn't a brute-force hacker program. It was a cryptographic personal signature—a private digital key that only one other person besides myself and command possessed.
It was Marcus’s personal security identifier. The exact cipher code he had used when we served together on the same combat team.
"That's impossible," I whispered, the ground seeming to tilt beneath my boots. "Marcus didn't survive the extraction. I pulled him out of the surf myself. I sat beside his body on the deck of the recovery vessel."
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"Did you?" Sterling asked quietly, turning to look at me with an expression that wasn't anger or suspicion, but a deep, sorrowful caution. "Aiden... look at the deployment manifest from that night again. Look at who authorized the mission parameters before you deployed."
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