Chapter 12 - The Firewall Breach
The red warning box pulsed on the ruggedized screen: ACCESS DENIED: SECURE ADMIN CREDENTIALS REQUIRED.
The progress bar for the Pentagon logistics server purge ticked up another agonizing percentage point: 96%... 97%...
Agent Vance leaned over the coffee table, his eyes wide as he watched the countdown. "Major, you're out of time. At ninety-nine percent, the auto-purge will scrub the offshore registry permanently. Your father and your uncle will walk free on a technicality."
Maya didn't blink. Her fingers hovered over the mechanical keyboard, her mind racing through every security protocol, every backdoor she had learned during her intelligence briefings overseas. Thomas Sterling was old-school military intelligence; he relied on predictable administrative habits, the kind of rigid protocols taught back in the cold war era.
What was her uncle's administrative blind spot? His personal passcode. He always used dates tied to family milestones—specifically, anniversaries he never bothered to change even when assigned to classified postings.
She ignored the standard admin login prompt and dropped directly into the legacy command-line interface.
"Major, what are you doing?" Agent Vance demanded. "That's a raw kernel bypass! If you guess wrong three times, the terminal will format its own drive!"
"He’s predictable," Maya said, her voice dead calm. She typed in her late grandmother’s birthday, combined with the activation date of Thomas’s first commission.
The screen blinked. A yellow line of text appeared: AUTHENTICATION FAILED: 2 ATTEMPTS REMAINING.
"Damn it," Agent Vance muttered, gripping the edge of the glass table.
Maya took a slow, deliberate breath, steadying her pulse. She remembered her mother talking about Thomas’s obsession with his first posting in Berlin—the exact day the wall fell, a date he treated like a sacred personal holiday. She deleted her previous string and typed the historical date combined with his old battalion number.
The progress bar stopped dead at 99%.
For one agonizing second, the screen went completely black. Agent Vance held his breath. Then, a sharp, emerald-green confirmation banner flashed across the display: OVERRIDE ACCEPTED. SECURE QUARANTINE PROTOCOL DEPLOYED.
The remote data wipe at the Pentagon logistics annex halted mid-execution. Maya let out a long, slow breath she didn't realize she was holding. She quickly executed a mirror-copy command, downloading the entire classified audit trail—every fraudulent wire transfer, every forged proxy signature, every communication log between Thomas Sterling and Richard Vance—directly onto her encrypted thumb drive.
"Got him," Maya said quietly, pulling the drive from the port.
Before Agent Vance could reply, his satellite phone buzzed aggressively. He answered it, listened for three seconds, and went entirely pale.
"Major," Vance said, his voice dropping into a grim register. "That wasn't just a data wipe at the Pentagon. Your uncle wasn't operating from a terminal in the logistics annex."
Maya stood up slowly, the thumb drive clutched tightly in her hand. "Where was he?"
May you like
"He’s not in Washington," Vance answered, staring at her with undisguised shock. "According to base security, Lieutenant Colonel Sterling just landed a private charter flight at the local municipal airstrip twenty minutes ago. He’s heading directly for this house."
---
