Chapter 5 - The Perimeter Breach
The realization hung in the damp air like a physical weight. Deputy Miller lowered his rifle slightly, staring at Claire in disbelief. “A director? Internal Affairs?”
“Higher than that,” Marcus corrected, his eyes fixed on the front door of the cabin thirty yards away. “Policy and Oversight. The man who has final sign-off on every off-the-books extraction since the nineties.” He looked over at Claire. “If he’s here personally meeting with your uncle’s old boss, it means the leak goes all the way to the top of the chain of command. They aren't just hiding files, Claire. They’re rebuilding the network.”
Claire adjusted the strap of her tactical vest, her fingers moving with absolute mechanical precision. “Which means we have less than ten minutes before their scheduled encrypted transmission uploads the entire archive to an offsite server in Zurich. Once that data hits the cloud, every asset we have in the field is burned.”
Vance unclipped his heavy-duty flashlight, his hand steadying despite the adrenaline surging through his veins. “What’s the play? We can't just storm the front door. They’ll torch the hard drives before we clear the threshold.”
“There’s a root cellar access hatch around the back,” Deputy Miller offered suddenly, his voice surprisingly firm. He pointed through the thick undergrowth toward the rear corner of the cabin. “My uncle built it back in the seventies to store canned goods. It connects directly to the crawlspace underneath the main floorboards.”
Claire looked at the young deputy, evaluating his resolve. “Good catch. Marcus, you take the front with Vance. Create a distraction, make enough noise to draw their eyes toward the windows. Miller and I take the cellar.”
“Negative,” Marcus hissed, shaking his head. “I’m not sending you down that hole alone with a high-level target. He recognizes your face.”
“That’s the point,” Claire retorted, her eyes locking onto his with an intensity that brooked no argument. “He thinks I’m dead or sitting in a holding cell three states away. When he looks up and sees me standing in that doorway, the shock will buy us the three seconds we need to secure the drives.”
Without waiting for Marcus’s permission, Claire slipped away from the log and began crawling silently toward the rear of the cabin through the wet ferns. Deputy Miller scrambled to follow her, low to the ground, his boots slipping slightly in the mud.
May you like
Vance swallowed hard, turning to Marcus. “Well, you heard her. Let’s go make some noise.”
---
