"Command-detonated," I say. "External trigger signal, specific frequency. Not time-based."
"So someone has to make the decision. It doesn't go off on its own."
"Correct."
"Which means removing it isn't enough. You have to find the person holding the trigger."
My rings press into the arm of my chair where my hand has wrapped around it, and I don't know when I grabbed on. "Yes. That's exactly what it means."
His gaze drops to my hand on the chair arm, then comes back up. His expression doesn't change, but his attention sharpens the way a lens focuses, and I can see him registering the grip, filing it, choosing not to comment on it. The restraint is worse than if he'd said something. I could parry something spoken. The quiet observation just sits there, seen and acknowledged and left alone, and I have no counter for it.
"I'll have the physical access cross-reference to you by end of day." He straightens off the frame and tips an invisible hat that should be ridiculous and instead makes my stomach tighten. "Try to eat something that isn't shortbread."
"How do you know about the shortbread?"
"You had crumbs on your collar yesterday. Process of elimination." The grin arrives exactly when I'm most off-balance, precise and warm and gone before I can mount a defense, and then he's walking down the corridor and I'm staring at the space where he was.
I release my grip on the chair, deliberately, and put my hands back on the keyboard. Weeks ago, he asked about the base's legacy encryption protocols with enough specificity that I had to recalibrate my assessment of him entirely. I'd written him off asanother uniform with a limited operating range. Griff Holland keeps proving that wrong, and each correction lands somewhere I haven't built defenses for, somewhere that smells like soap and gunpowder residue and doesn't respond to logic.
Rivera appears in the doorway before I've fully recovered. She doesn't knock, which I've come to understand is an NCIS prerogative she exercises deliberately.
"Ms. Bradshaw. Can I have a minute?"
"You can have thirty seconds. I'm in the middle of something."
Rivera steps inside and closes the door behind her. The gesture is quiet but pointed.
"NCIS has been tracking a pattern across Tidewater for the better part of a year," she says. "It started with Dr. Fallon McKay's coastal vulnerability research. Boat sabotage, data theft, a sophisticated cyber intrusion that accessed her findings through the base network. Then the hospital supply chain was compromised. Critical equipment systematically diverted over months. Now the communication systems."
I lean back in my chair. "You're telling me you don't believe this is isolated."
"I'm telling you that someone is systematically mapping every vulnerability on this base. Physical infrastructure in the McKay case. Medical response capability in the hospital case. And now digital communications." Rivera's expression is flat and professional, but her eyes carry the particular intensity of someone who's been connecting dots that nobody else wanted to see. "Three separate attacks, three different systems, one pattern. Someone is building a comprehensive picture of how to cripple Tidewater."
My mind is already racing, threading connections. The sophistication of the malware, the patience of theintrusion timeline, the military-grade understanding of network architecture.
"You think it's the same actor behind all three," I say.
"I think it's coordinated. Whether it's one person or an organization, the methodology is consistent. Patient, strategic, and focused on infrastructure rather than personnel." Rivera holds my gaze. "Which means your breach isn't the endgame. It's the third piece of something bigger."
What I'm sitting inside just expanded from a network breach to a coordinated campaign against a military installation. The malware on my screens isn't an isolated intrusion anymore. It's a data point in a pattern that stretches back through two previous attacks, each one more sophisticated than the last.
I turn back to my monitors and start a new analysis framework, cross-referencing the malware signatures against known attack patterns in my personal database. Somewhere in this code is a fingerprint, a habit, a signature that connects it to whoever compromised Fallon McKay's research and the hospital supply chain.
And in the back of my mind, underneath the analysis and the pattern-matching and the fury of a woman whose network has been violated, there's a drawl that won't quite stop echoing.
"Try to eat something that isn't shortbread."
I reach for the plate before I remember that I left the shortbread at the B&B. I eat a granola bar from my bag instead and pretend that's what I reached for in the first place. But the drawl lingers, and the fingerprint I'm chasing through the code is starting to look less like a ghost and more like someone who knows this base from the inside.
3
GRIFF
The call comes in at o'dark thirty.
I'm already half awake, the way I always am between midnight and dawn, my body clock still calibrated to a deployment schedule that ended two years ago. The phone lights up on the nightstand, and the number belongs to Tidewater's overnight security desk, which means this isn't a wrong number or a buddy who lost track of time zones.
"Holland."
