The vulnerability data that nearly got Fallon killed is about to catch the man who tried to kill the woman I love.
The word lands before I can stop it.Love.It isn't intentional or important or the most careful thing I've ever held. It's love, the blunt, stupid, no-exit-strategy version, and I'm standing in a corridor next to a bomb I just disarmed, thinking it while Thatcher holds the channel.
"Take him alive," I tell Thatcher. "Rivera needs him talking."
"Understood."
Rowe appears at the corridor entrance. He looks at the inert device, then at me, and gives a single nod that carries everything a debrief would take twenty minutes to say.
The radio clears further. Sullivan reports the diversionary device at the perimeter rendered safe, minimal structural damage. Rivera checks in from the NCIS command post. Holden's SEAL teams are securing the training areas and reporting no additional threats.
I hear Thatcher again after enough radio traffic has passed to mark the time. "Garrick is in custody. He made it to the waterline before we closed the gap. No shots fired."
One asset is down. The handler who recruited him, who built the C2 infrastructure and coordinated parallel operations across multiple installations, is still out there. Garrick is a tool. The hand that wielded him hasn't been touched, and Rivera's going to need everything Garrick knows to find it.
The base exhales.
I sit on the concrete floor of the power distribution center with my back against the wall and my toolkit beside me. The shaped charge sits inert on the opposite wall, its timer dark, its firing circuit severed. Through the open door, the corridor lights burn steady, and the sound of radios restoring across the base fills the infrastructure like blood returning to a limb.
Nox's voice comes through the earpiece one more time, clear now, the signal fully restored. "Base communications are operational. All systems recovered. The malware is neutralized."
"Copy that."
She pauses. Then her voice comes back, quieter, pitched just for the channel. "Griff."
"Yeah." I lean my head against the wall. "I'm sitting on the floor of the distribution center, for the record."
"You're right. The version of me that doesn't need anyone is the one I built when needing someone cost too much. But that'snot an excuse. It's just the architecture." She pauses again. "And you're not a device. You don't get the calm voice and the steady hands and nothing underneath."
"What do I get?"
"Everything underneath. When you're done sitting on the floor."
"I'm getting up."
"Then I'll be here."
The channel clicks to silence. I sit for a few more seconds, letting the adrenaline bleed off, feeling the post-render-safe stillness settle into my chest the way it always does when the wire is cut and the world goes wide again.
The rest of it won't. The rest of it is the woman on the other end of the radio who watched me break my own protocol on a live charge, telling her she's the most important thing I've ever touched, and who responded by pulling up the forensic data I needed to survive it. She called me at three in the morning because the part of saving this base she couldn't finish alone required the one person she told herself she didn't need.
I get up. I pack the toolkit. Rowe falls into step beside me without a word, because Rowe has always understood that the most important part of a render-safe isn't the moment you cut the wire. It's the walk back.
The comm building is across the base. I cover the distance without looking back.
14
NOX
The base comes back online the way a patient wakes from anesthesia: in stages, disoriented, blinking at the light.
My screens show it in real time, Tidewater's communication grid rebuilding itself across the network topology map I've been staring at for hours. Red nodes turn amber, turn green, the cascade reversing itself under the interception protocol I spent every sleepless night building. The malware is collapsing into the counterstrike's architecture, each infected node scrubbed and restored and returned to operational status, and the code is performing exactly as designed because I wrote it and I am very, very good at what I do.
The comm building hums with restored power. Fluorescent lights that flickered and died during the cascade are steady again. The radio channels on my auxiliary monitor carry clear traffic, voices coordinating across the installation with the clipped efficiency of operators who've just survived something they trained for but hoped would stay theoretical.
Griff arrives while I'm running the final system verification.
He fills the doorway completely, one hand on the frame. His tactical vest is streaked with concrete grit from the distributioncenter. His toolkit hangs from his left hand, and the knuckles on his right are scraped from working inside the junction panels. He looks at me for a long count, and whatever he finds is enough to make the line of his shoulders drop by a fraction, the controlled exhale of someone who's been bracing since before dawn.
