-What?

-You should check my phone.

-What?

-Before you broke my legs. While you were walking down the aisle being dramatic. I photographed the altered records and sent them out. Eleven minutes ago. And I filed a preservation order on the logs. You can’t erase them now without leaving prints all over them.

The color drained out of his face.

-You’re lying.

-I filed it at 2214. You broke my first leg at about 2225. Look at the timestamps. You assaulted a senior officer eleven minutes after she reported a federal crime. That’s not a cover-up anymore, Garrett. That’s witness retaliation on a documented whistleblower.

-Who did you send it to?

I let him wait.

-Who did you send it to?

-People who are already reading it.

That was mostly true.

Here is what Garrett didn’t know. Here is what none of them knew.

Eighteen days earlier, an NCIS special agent named Dana Reyes had contacted me through a secure channel. She was running an investigation out of the regional field office into theft and resale of military equipment from three installations on the East Coast. Night vision. Comms gear. Ballistic plates. Climbing and breaching equipment. The kind of gear that is worth a great deal of money to the kind of people you never want to have it.

She had a paper trail that kept dead-ending at a depot under my command.

She didn’t think I was involved. If she had, she wouldn’t have called me. But she needed someone on the inside who understood the inventory system and had the authority to pull records without tripping alarms.

So for eighteen days, I had been quietly doing exactly that. The routine inspection tonight was not routine. I had been working a list Reyes gave me. The clip I found was the fourth item on it.

When I photographed the altered record and submitted the preservation request, the image didn’t just save to my device.

It uploaded to a secure NCIS evidence locker. Time-stamped. Hash-verified. Reyes got an automatic alert the moment it landed.

And the message I sent eleven minutes ago, the one Garrett was so desperate to trace, went to exactly one person.

Agent Reyes. Three words.

They’re here. Depot.

She would have seen it within seconds. She had a surveillance vehicle on the harbor side of the installation. She had been there for six nights, watching the depot, waiting for the people moving the gear to make a move.

They had just made it.

-You’re bluffing.

-Garrett. When has anything I’ve ever told you turned out to be a bluff?

He stood up.

He looked at the other three.

Marcus was holding his broken nose, blood running between his fingers, his eyes wide and jumping between Garrett and the exit. Cole had backed against the shelving, staring at my legs like he’d only just now understood what he’d done. Travis was already ten feet away, by the end of the aisle, half-turned toward the door.

-She’s lying. She’s trying to split us up. Nobody sent anything.

-Then take my phone.

He bent and ripped it out of my pocket.

He pressed the screen. It lit up. Locked, of course. A password field.

-Open it.

-No.

-Open it or I break something else.

-You can break every bone I’ve got. It won’t change what’s already sitting in an evidence server you can’t reach. You’d just be adding counts.

He stared at the phone. At the little lock icon. At the thing he couldn’t open and couldn’t erase and couldn’t undo.

For the first time, I watched Garrett Voss understand what he had done.

Not the legs. He didn’t care about my legs.

He understood that he had broken them eleven minutes too late.

-Garrett.

Travis, from the end of the aisle. His voice was thin.

-Garrett, man, if she sent something—

-She didn’t send anything.

-If she did, we need to not be here. We need to—

-Shut up.

-No. You shut up. You said we’d scare her. You said we’d lean on her and she’d back off the records. You didn’t say anything about—

He gestured at me. At my legs bent wrong on the concrete.

-I’m not going to prison for you, Garrett.

-Nobody’s going to prison.

-Look at her legs!

The word prison bounced off the metal shelving and hung in the air.

That was the moment the four of them stopped being a unit.

I’d seen it happen to the enemy more than once. The instant a crew realizes the plan has failed, the loyalty that held them together turns to vapor, and each man starts calculating his own exit. Garrett still thought he was in command. The other three had already left him. They just hadn’t told their feet yet.

I decided to help them along.