I want to dismiss her, but I can't, because she's right and she's delivering it without condescension, and both of those things are rare enough in my professional life that they've earned my attention.
"What do you suggest?"
"Eat a real meal before noon. Keep your caffeine intake to something that wouldn't concern a cardiologist. And consider that the human brain consolidates problem-solving during REM sleep, which means the answer you're chasing through that encryption might surface faster if you let yourself rest."
"Noted."
"Is that your version of 'thank you but I'll do what I want'?"
"It's my version of 'you've made a valid point that I'll promptly ignore.' There's a difference."
Gwen's mouth curves. She doesn't push further on the medical side, and the conversation shifts into the space between two women who have each spent their careers being the smartest person in a room full of people who didn't want to hear it.
"How's the living arrangement?" she asks, and the question is casual enough to be professional and specific enough to be personal.
"Functional."
"Functional is what you say about a ventilator." She studies me. "Thatcher and I were 'functional' for about three days before functional became something else. Living with your protector is complicated in ways you don't see coming. The proximitymakes it impossible to keep the professional walls up because there's no professional space left. You're in their kitchen, you're in their bathroom, you're watching them walk around at six in the morning looking like they just stepped out of a recruitment poster, and at some point your brain stops filing them under 'assignment' and starts filing them under something else."
"I don't know what you're referring to."
"Of course you don't." Her expression says she's seen through me the way she sees through skin, reading the structures underneath with the confidence of someone who does it under fluorescent lights with a scalpel. "Griff Holland is a good man. Complicated, but good."
"He's my security liaison."
"And Thatcher was my protective detail."
She lets the parallel sit between us without commentary, which is worse than commentary because commentary I could dismantle. Parallels just exist, and this one exists with the quiet certainty of a surgeon who's already made the diagnosis and is waiting for the patient to catch up.
"I need to get back to work," I tell her.
"I know." She stands, picks up the tablet, and pauses at the door. "The encryption you're working on. Garrick's transmissions?"
"His handler's communication protocol. The encryption is the last wall between me and whoever is running this operation."
"You'll crack it."
"I know I will."
"And when you do, eat something before you brief Hartwell. You're going to need the energy." She leaves, and the room fills back up with the hum of servers and the weight of what I'm trying to break through.
I go back to the code. The handshake protocol has been fighting me since I first identified it in the relay device traffic.I recognized the structure from a contract in Frankfurt years ago, and the recognition gave me a foothold, but the actual encryption key has resisted every attack I've thrown at it. Standard brute-force methods are useless against this level of sophistication. The key space is too large, the rotation schedule too fast.
Except Garrick made a mistake last night.
I caught it at 0300 while everyone else on this base was sleeping, including Griff, whose bedroom door was closed and whose breathing I could hear through the wall because the loft is built for industrial storage and not for keeping a woman from tracking the respiratory patterns of a man she is not thinking about.
The mistake was small. Garrick's burst transmission just before 0300 used a key that was out of the rotation sequence. He sent a message, received no response, and sent it again using the correct key. The first transmission failed authentication at the receiving end, which means the content was rejected, but the handshake still completed. I have the wrong key and the right key for the same session, and the differential between them gives me the rotation algorithm.
Once I have the algorithm, I have everything.
My fingers move across the keyboard with the focused intensity that means the rest of the world has contracted to the space between my screens and the pattern unfolding inside them. The algorithm yields to the differential analysis, and the rotation sequence emerges with the clean inevitability of a proof reaching its conclusion. I apply it to the captured traffic, and the encrypted packets begin resolving into plaintext.
Most of the decrypted traffic is operational housekeeping: status updates confirming that Garrick's infrastructure modifications are in place and the timeline is holding. The language is terse, disciplined, stripped of anything unnecessary.It reads like two people communicating with the efficiency of a chain of command.
I scan through the decrypted log entries, and one of them stops my hands on the keyboard.
It references by name the joint training exercise that Tidewater has been coordinating for months, the one that brings SEAL and MARSOC teams together for an integrated readiness assessment. The message contains a countdown reference, a synchronization note, and a technical specification that makes the blood drain from my face.
