"I came to tell you to prepare your lawyer."
"Because if they breach the Ashburn facility, they will add ten years to your sentence."
I stood up, smoothing my uniform jacket.
"I just thought you should know."
I hung up the phone and turned my back on him.
I walked out of the visitor room, my heels clicking sharply against the concrete floor.
I didn't need to look back to know what Anthony was doing.
He was already rushing back to his cell block.
He was already looking for Victor Aris.
He believed he had just been handed the ultimate weapon to destroy me.
He believed he had found the golden ticket that would make him rich again.
CHAPTER 4 — The Bait and the Breach
The cyber-warfare command center at Fort Belvoir was plunged into a state of absolute, adrenaline-fueled silence.
It was 0200 hours.
The massive digital map of the Eastern Seaboard dominated the front wall of the room, glowing with blue and green topographical lines.
I stood at the central command podium, my arms crossed, my eyes locked on the screen.
Dozens of elite military hackers and intelligence analysts sat at their terminals, their fingers hovering over their keyboards.
"Colonel," Captain Miller said, his voice tense but steady.
"We have movement."
"Aris transmitted the Ashburn coordinates through a smuggled satellite phone in the Allenwood laundry facility four hours ago."
"Our intercept confirms the signal was received by a hostile server in Eastern Europe."
I nodded slowly.
"And the physical location?" I asked.
"Tactical Team Alpha is in position at the Ashburn honeypot facility," Miller reported.
"They have thermal visual on two black SUVs approaching the perimeter."
"Hostiles are armed. They are carrying heavy digital extraction equipment."
"Elena Rostova is visually confirmed leading the breach team."
A cold thrill of anticipation surged through the room.
Anthony and Eleanor had done exactly what I needed them to do.
They had handed my "vulnerability" to a hostile syndicate on a silver platter.
"Hold all tactical elements," I commanded, my voice echoing clearly across the dark room.
"Let them enter the building."
"Let them connect to the servers."
On the main screen, a red icon began to flash in the sector marked Ashburn, Virginia.
Rostova and her team had bypassed the deliberately weakened physical locks on the warehouse doors.
They were inside.
"Colonel, hostiles have accessed the server room," an analyst called out from the second row.
"They are attempting a hard-line connection to the primary mainframe."
"Let them plug in," I ordered.
The room held its collective breath.
The red icon on the screen suddenly expanded, sending out a massive pulse of digital data.
"Connection established!" the analyst shouted.
"They are attempting to download the command logs!"
I smiled.
There were no command logs on those servers.
There was only a payload of the most aggressive, highly classified military malware ever engineered by the Department of Defense.
"Spring the trap," I said softly.
"Execute Protocol Checkmate."
Captain Miller slammed his hand down on his keyboard.
Instantly, the blue and green map on the main screen turned a violent, flashing crimson.
In the Ashburn warehouse, the moment Rostova's extraction drives connected to the honeypot, the malware surged through the hardline.
It didn't just block their download.
It inverted the connection.
The malware flooded back through their portable drives, hijacked their encrypted satellite uplink, and rocketed across the global network directly into the syndicate's mainframe in Eastern Europe.
"We have a direct line to their offshore servers!" an analyst cheered.
"Downloading their entire operational database!"
"We are pulling their financial ledgers, their agent rosters, their communication logs!"
"We own their entire network, Colonel!"
"Shut them down," I ordered, my voice ringing like steel.
"Burn their servers to the ground."
On the main screen, the data streams representing the foreign syndicate's global network began to systematically blink out of existence.
Years of hostile intelligence gathering, billions of dollars in illegal funds, and decades of espionage infrastructure were being digitally vaporized in a matter of seconds.
"Digital network is neutralized," Miller reported, a fierce grin breaking across his face.