Chapter 4 - The Paper Trail
The silence inside the trailer was suffocating.
Evelyn sank into the floral armchair, sobbing into her apron, repeating prayers that had lost their power decades ago. Freya stared at the white plastic flex-cuffs on the table as if they were venomous snakes.
"He... he has an office in the industrial park off Highway 17," Freya whispered, her bravado completely dissolved. The predatory socialite who had sneered at my wedding was gone, replaced by a terrified, hollow creature who realized the ledge she was standing on had just crumbled. "Sterling doesn't run the shipping himself. He works through a third-party broker called Apex Harbor Services."
"Who's the inside man at the naval depot?" I demanded.
"Chief Petty Officer Miller," she choked out, looking down at her hands. "Sterling paid him forty grand to swap the routing tags on the warehouse floor. Miller used your CAC terminal when you were on pre-deployment leave last month to authorize the clearance vouchers."
Spencer pulled out his phone, sending a rapid text to Vance. *Detain CPO Miller, Depot 4. Secure all local terminal logs immediately.*
"What about the payment?" Spencer asked.
"An escrow account in the Bahamas," Freya said, tears finally cutting tracks through her heavy makeup. "It releases the funds the moment the *Caspian Dawn* logs an outbound transponder signal past the harbor buoy. I was supposed to get twenty percent. Sterling keeps the rest. Marilyn, please... you have to believe me. I didn't know they were military turbines. He told me it was surplus industrial machinery—overstock that was going to be scrapped anyway!"
"Stop lying," I said, my voice ice cold. "You brought that box to my wedding. You looked me in the eye while my friends and fellow officers were standing there, and you dared me to stop you. You knew exactly what you were doing. You wanted to drag me down into the mud with you so you wouldn't feel so alone at the bottom."
"Marilyn, she’s your sister!" Evelyn wailed from the chair, rocking back and forth. "You can't let them take her! We’re your family! If you do this, you’ll kill me! You’ll kill your mother!"
I turned to look at Evelyn.
For twenty years, that phrase had been an invisible leash around my throat. *We’re your family. You have to understand. You have to sacrifice.* When they needed bail money, I didn't buy textbooks. When Freya wrecked her first car drunk, I spent my leave working double shifts to fix it.
I looked at the woman who had birthed me, and for the first time in my life, I felt nothing. No anger. No guilt. Just the clean, sterile emptiness of a debt that had been paid in full and closed forever.
"My family is standing right beside me," I said, nodding toward Spencer. "And unlike you, he would bleed to protect my name, not sell it for a down payment on a sports car."
Spencer stepped over to the table, grabbed Freya’s laptop, and tucked it under his arm. He took Freya by the elbow, pulling her up from the chair. She didn't resist. She was shaking, her knees weak.
"Where are you taking her?" Evelyn screamed, scrambling to her feet. "Spencer, please!"
"To a secure holding room at the Provost Marshal's office," Spencer said without looking back. "She’s a material witness in a federal treason and espionage investigation. If she stays here, Sterling’s fixers will put a bullet through this window before noon."
We marched Freya out the door. The humid morning air hit us, heavy and smelling of impending rain. Spencer opened the rear door of the truck and put Freya in the back seat, locking the child-safety doors from the front console.
As Spencer got behind the wheel, my phone buzzed again.
It was Hayes.
"Sullivan," Hayes’s voice crackled through the speaker, breathless and tense. "We have a situation at the gate."
"What kind of situation?"
"Two unmarked black Suburbans just pulled up to the commercial holding bay at Savannah Berth 14. They didn't show port credentials. They blew through the private security gate and breached the perimeter. They’re moving toward the turbine crates right now."
"Sterling isn't waiting for the transponder," Spencer said, throwing the truck into reverse and kicking up a spray of red clay as we whipped around the driveway. "He knows the window is closing. He’s taking the hardware by force."
"How far out are we?" I asked, grabbing the dashboard as Spencer slammed the truck into drive and floored the accelerator.
"Forty minutes if I drive like a maniac," Spencer said, his knuckles white against the steering wheel.
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"Then drive like a maniac," I said, reaching into the glove compartment and pulling out two extra magazines for the Sig Sauer. "Because if those turbines leave that dock, my career isn't the only thing that dies today."
***