"That's what she'll tell us when we find it. Our job is the physical search. We open panels, photograph everything, and report what we see. She reads the network side in real time and tells us if we're getting warm."
"And if we find something?"
"We document the scene and preserve it for the NCIS chain of custody. Don't disconnect anything." I fold the map. "Comms on channel seven. You'll hear Ms. Bradshaw's voice. Follow her guidance on locations."
Nox comes through the earpiece as we approach the server farm, clear and precise, and the effect of her landing directly inside my skull while I'm working with my hands is an operational problem I should have anticipated and didn't.
"Holland, I'm seeing elevated traffic at node three on your map. South wall of the server farm. The signal is intermittent but consistent with a low-power relay transmitting in bursts."
"Copy. Moving to node three." I gesture Rowe left and take the right approach myself. The corridor hums with cooling systems, the air carrying the constant low vibration of processors keeping themselves from overheating.
"You should see a bank of junction boxes along the south wall. Gray housings, labeled with sector designations. The anomaly corresponds to sector seven-alpha."
I find the panel and crouch, pulling my flashlight. "Rowe, photograph the housing before I open it."
"Holland, slow down." Her voice drops half a register, and the command in it shouldn't hit the way it does when I'm crouched in front of a panel with a flashlight in my teeth. "Walk me through what you see before you touch anything."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Don't call me ma'am."
"You're giving orders from a kitchen island while drinking tea from the kettle you bought for my apartment. Ma'am feels earned."
"Your kitchen didn't have a kettle. That's not a lifestyle choice, Holland, that's a humanitarian crisis. I corrected it."
"You also bought loose-leaf tea and a tin caddy. For a temporary arrangement."
"A person can't drink instant. Focus."
A kettle. A tin caddy. For a temporary arrangement. It should irritate me that she's claiming counter space in my kitchen. It doesn't.
The panel in front of me has a paint seal along the upper right corner that's been broken and reapplied. Someone opened this housing, and they were careful about it, but careful and invisible are different things when the person looking knows what fresh sealant looks like under a flashlight.
"Nox, I'm seeing evidence of recent access on the seven-alpha panel. The paint seal has been compromised and reapplied."
"Standing by. I'll watch for a traffic change when you expose the interior."
I remove the screws and swing the panel open. The cabling inside looks standard, fiber optic lines color-coded and bundled along the mounting brackets, everything arranged exactly the way it's supposed to look when someone competent hides something in plain sight.
Then I see it. There's a device roughly the size of a deck of cards mounted flush against the back wall behind the primary cable bundle. It's wired into the main fiber line through some kind of inline splice, with a second lead tapped into the junction's electrical supply.
"I've got something." I keep my voice level. "Rowe, get a shot of this and send it to Bradshaw."
Rowe leans in with his camera, and I hear the shutter click twice before Nox's voice comes back.
"Don't touch it. Let me see what the network does." She goes quiet for a count of ten while I hold position. When she comes back, the professional calm has shifted into a tighter register, a gear catching that wasn't turning before. "The traffic pattern justshifted. It registered your panel access and attempted a burst transmission. I've captured the packet. That's a passive network tap. It's spliced into your fiber trunk and drawing power from the junction's electrical feed. It's splitting the signal without interrupting data flow, which is why nobody noticed it on routine checks. Whoever planted this can read every packet that crosses this trunk line."
"Copy. Rowe, full documentation."
"Don't disconnect it," Nox adds. "If I can monitor its communication while it's still live, I can trace where the data goes."
I nod at Rowe to start the photo sequence, and then Nox is back in my ear, quieter, pitched below the operational register into a frequency that has no business being on a tactical channel while Rowe is standing right there with a camera. "I've been watching you work for the past hour through the traffic logs. You're methodical."
"That a compliment?"
"It's an observation. Don't let it go to your head."
It's already too late for that. She's been in my ear all morning, calm and precise and occasionally bossy in a way that makes my hands want to do exactly what she says, and the part of my brain that should be focused on the mission won't stop circling back to this: her in control, focused, certain, a little ruthless. I like it more than any EOD officer should like being directed by a civilian who just scolded him about tea preparation.
