Chapter 3
That name landed differently than the punches.
I knew what they had done to him. I had enlisted and requested this specific base not for the career opportunity or the assignment but because I had needed to be in the place where it happened, standing on the ground where his life ended, close enough to find whatever he had left behind for someone who knew where to look.
The drive was not on me.
It was hidden in the collar of Ranger — Caleb's retired Belgian Malinois, an aging K9 that the kennels had been trying to schedule for euthanasia because he snarled every time Garrick walked past. Dogs remember what men pray gets buried.
Two days earlier, during my off-base pass, I had stopped at the post office. I had mailed a letter containing a microdot copy of the encryption key to an address in Washington that I had memorized rather than written down. One person at that address. One person who would know exactly what the key meant and exactly what to do with it.
Garrick checked his watch again. "Ten minutes," he said. "The civilian transport from the regional facility arrives in ten minutes. Sign the confession, give me the drive, and maybe you get a cell that doesn't face north. Refuse, and you disappear under charges of espionage, treason, and theft. The Army has a file for you already. I wrote it myself."
I lay with my cheek against the hot concrete.
I thought about the letter.
I thought about the address.
I smiled through the blood on my teeth.
"You're a dead man, Garrick," I whispered. "You just don't know it yet."
His mouth tightened. "Briggs. Fix her face. Make sure she can still sign her name."
Briggs lifted his boot.
Miller shut his eyes.
Callahan gripped his rifle until his knuckles went the color of the asphalt.
May you like
Then the ground began to vibrate.
Not the vibration of a generator or a transport. Lower than that. Heavier. A mechanical roar rolling in from the northern perimeter like weather that had decided to arrive early.
