Chapter 10 - The Interrogation in the Dark
The holding room was windowless, smelling faintly of damp concrete, stale coffee, and industrial disinfectant. The overhead fluorescent tube flickered with a maddening, irregular buzz, casting stark shadows across the scarred metal table where Jax sat with his hands securely zip-tied to a steel loop bolted into the center of the table surface.
The heavy steel door swung open with a hollow screech, and a man in a tailored charcoal suit stepped inside. He didn't look like a field agent; his shoes were polished to a mirror shine, and his silver hair was combed back with meticulous precision. It was Assistant Director Sterling of the Department of Defense Oversight Division—the man whose signature appeared on the secondary distribution memos of the Pelican case files.
Sterling pulled out a metal chair, sat down opposite Jax, and folded his hands neatly on the table. He didn't speak for nearly a full minute, letting the buzzing fluorescent light and the ticking of his expensive wristwatch fill the silence.
"You've made this remarkably complicated, Sergeant Miller," Sterling said smoothly, his voice carrying the calm cadence of a seasoned prosecutor. "You were supposed to accept your backpay, collect your pension, and live a quiet, uneventful life in the suburbs. Why couldn't you just leave well enough alone?"
"You killed my squad, Sterling," Jax said, his voice flat, exhausted, but carrying an underlying current of pure venom. "You traded twenty-four American lives for a defense contract test run, and then you tried to bury the evidence by declaring me dead."
"We didn't bury you; we preserved you," Sterling corrected gently, leaning forward. "Firebase Alpha was a classified tactical test of autonomous artillery targeting algorithms. It was unfortunate that your platoon was caught in the kill zone, but the data collected saved thousands of lives in subsequent deployments. You were a casualty of progress, Sergeant. But instead of accepting your role in history, you crawled out of the dirt and started digging into things that don't belong to you."
"Where is my daughter?" Jax demanded, straining against the zip-ties until the plastic bit sharply into his wrists, drawing a thin line of crimson. "If you laid a hand on Lily—"
"Your daughter is currently being looked after by child protective services while local authorities search the woods surrounding your farmhouse," Sterling interrupted, his expression unwavering. "An extensive search, I might add. Though as of three hours ago, our teams haven't been able to locate her. Which brings us to an interesting question, Jax: what did you give her before we breached the kitchen?"
Jax laughed, a harsh, humorless sound. "You think I'd tell you? You lost, Sterling. The flash drive is already in hands that will broadcast the entire archive to every major news outlet in the country by sunrise."
Sterling’s calm facade slipped for a fraction of a second; his jaw tightened, and his eyes narrowed into cold slits. "You're bluffing. A nine-year-old child hiding in a Virginia forest in the middle of a torrential downpour doesn't have the technical capability or the network access to upload classified military servers."
"You underestimate what a child will do when she's trying to save her father," Jax replied steadily.
Before Sterling could answer, the heavy steel door burst open without warning. A frantic tactical agent rushed in, whispering urgently into the assistant director’s ear. Sterling’s face drained of color as he listened, standing up so abruptly his chair screeched against the concrete floor.
"What do you mean she's not at the drop point?" Sterling hissed, turning away from Jax.
May you like
Jax looked up from the table, a grim, defiant smile touching the corner of his bruised mouth. The agent had just handed Sterling a printed tablet screen showing a live security feed from the local bus station three miles down the highway—where a small blonde girl in a wet tie-dye shirt had just boarded an interstate bus bound for Washington, D.C.
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