"You did this with the explicit intent of securing illegal offshore financial compensation."
"You thought you were selling my personal secrets to humiliate me."
"Instead, you committed high treason against the United States of America."
"No!" Anthony screamed, tears bursting from his eyes, his voice cracking into a pathetic, high-pitched wail.
"No, you tricked me! You told me it was your personal server! You set me up!"
"I gave you a choice, Anthony," I said, my voice completely devoid of pity.
"You could have served your forty-eight months for fraud, kept your head down, and walked out a free man."
"But you couldn't resist."
"Your greed, your arrogance, your desperate need to feel superior to me... you couldn't turn it off."
"You built your own gallows."
"I just handed you the rope."
Agent Harrison stepped forward, tapping the dossier.
"Anthony Vance, you are being formally charged under the Espionage Act of 1917," Harrison announced, his voice booming in the small room.
"Your current sentence of forty-eight months has been suspended."
"You are now facing a minimum mandatory sentence of thirty-five years in a maximum-security federal penitentiary."
Anthony collapsed forward, his forehead hitting the metal table with a sickening thud.
He sobbed uncontrollably, a broken, ruined man who finally realized that he was nothing more than a pawn on a board he never even understood.
I stood up, buttoning my trench coat.
I didn't say goodbye.
I didn't offer him a final glance.
I simply turned and walked out of the room, leaving his pathetic cries echoing against the concrete walls.
Three hours later, the scene repeated itself at the Danbury facility.
Eleanor Vance was dragged into an interrogation room, still wearing her khaki uniform, her face a mask of aristocratic outrage that quickly melted into sheer, unadulterated terror.
When she saw me sitting there with the FBI, she tried to demand her lawyer.
She tried to claim she was a victim of political persecution.
Then Agent Harrison played the audio recording of her conversation with Elena Rostova.
He played the exact moment Eleanor eagerly surrendered my security protocols to a foreign spy.
Eleanor stopped screaming.
She shrank into her plastic chair, her hands covering her face, the reality of her actions finally piercing her impenetrable narcissism.
"You are being charged with conspiracy to commit espionage and aiding a foreign operative, Mrs. Vance," Harrison informed her.
"Your eighteen-month sentence is now twenty years."
Eleanor looked up at me, her eyes red, her makeup-free face showing every single year of her miserable, bitter life.
"You are a monster, Marissa," she whispered, her voice a fragile, broken hiss.
"I am a soldier, Eleanor," I corrected her smoothly.
"And you are collateral damage."
I walked out of Danbury, stepping back onto the tarmac where the Black Hawk was waiting, its blades spinning slowly in the cold afternoon air.
The operation was complete.
The hostile syndicate had been erased.
The traitors had been buried alive under decades of federal time.
My command was absolute, and my security was impenetrable.
I climbed into the helicopter, securing my headset as the aircraft lifted off the ground, banking sharply toward the south, heading back to Washington D.C.
I looked out the window as the prison complexes faded into small, insignificant dots on the landscape below.
For five years, I had allowed two greedy, arrogant civilians to believe they held power over me.
I had allowed them to spend my money, to mock my career, to treat my life as an accessory to their own vanity.
But the truth is, a tiger does not lose sleep over the opinions of sheep.
The tiger simply waits for the right moment to remind them who owns the jungle.
I leaned back against the heavy canvas seat, closing my eyes, the rhythmic thud of the helicopter blades sounding like a heartbeat of pure, unadulterated freedom.
I was Colonel Marissa Vance.