The records.

The altered inventory logs. The ones I’d photographed. The ones under the preservation order. As long as those existed in a form that could be traced upward from the depot to the financial structure, Hale was exposed. Garrett and the crew were insulation, but the paper wasn’t. The paper didn’t care about the structure. The paper just showed what had happened.

Hale needed those records gone.

But he couldn’t touch them himself. The preservation order meant any access to the originals left a trace. He couldn’t risk his own credentials anywhere near them. He needed someone else to do it. Someone with depot access. Someone who could be made to, or paid to, or frightened into reaching into the system and corrupting the logs badly enough that they’d be useless in court, in a way that wouldn’t point back to him.

So I gave him a door.

The third thing I’d asked Reyes for.

We created a record. A real one, in the real system, with real credentials. A maintenance note, buried in the depot’s administrative log, where a careful man reviewing the aftermath of his collapsed operation would eventually find it. The note said that the original inventory logs, the ones under preservation, were going to be physically migrated to an archive server during a scheduled system maintenance window. A forty-minute window. On a specific night. Six weeks out.

During that window, the note implied, the logs would be briefly out of the preservation system’s protection. Writable. Vulnerable. For forty minutes, someone with depot access could alter them and the change would look like a migration error, not tampering.

It was bait shaped exactly like the thing Hale needed most.

And then we waited to see who would walk through the door.

I’d guessed it wouldn’t be Hale himself. He was too careful to put his own hands on it. He’d send someone. And the someone he sent would be the next thread. Pull it, and it would lead back up to him, because whoever he trusted enough to send into that window was necessarily someone close to the head of the operation, not the already-arrested hands.

On the night of the maintenance window, I was not in the depot.

I want to be clear about that, because Reyes made me promise it eleven times. I was in a surveillance vehicle on the harbor side, in a wheelchair that didn’t fit well in the back of a van, with my legs braced straight out in front of me and a headset over my ears, watching the depot’s interior camera feeds on a tablet.

Reyes was inside. So were six other agents, in the dark, between the shelving, in the exact aisle where Garrett had broken my legs.

The window opened at 0100.

At 0114, the harbor-side door opened.

A figure came through it. Alone. Moving with the quiet competence of someone who’d been in that building many times. They went straight to the administrative terminal. No hesitation. No searching. They knew exactly where to go, which told me everything: this was someone who’d had full access to the system, someone who’d watched me work, someone who knew the building as well as I did.

The figure sat down at the terminal and logged in.

On my tablet, in the van, I watched the login credential populate the access log.

It wasn’t Hale’s credential.

It was better than Hale’s credential.

It was a service account. An administrative backdoor account, the kind that exists in every large system for maintenance, that isn’t tied to a person, that a careful man would use precisely because it isn’t tied to a person.

But service accounts have to be provisioned. Someone has to create them and assign them. And every service account, no matter how anonymous it looks in the access log, has a creation record. A record of who made it, and when, and under whose authority.

Reyes’s team had pulled that record two weeks earlier, once we knew to look for backdoor accounts in the depot system. The service account the figure was now using had been created fourteen months ago. The same week I arrived at the installation.

Created under the authority of, and provisioned by, Captain William Hale.

The figure at the terminal began to work. On the camera feed, I watched them navigate to the preservation-locked logs and begin the process of corrupting them.

That was when the lights came on.

Every fluorescent bank in the depot, all at once. The whole building went white.

-NCIS. Hands where I can see them. Step away from the terminal.

The figure spun in the chair.

I was watching the camera feed, so I saw the face a half-second before Reyes did.

It was Lieutenant Commander Sarah Pike.

The depot’s deputy officer. My second-in-command. The woman who had sat across from me in briefings for fourteen months. Who had brought me coffee. Who had covered the depot the nights I worked late, except, I understood now, the nights she needed me not to be there. Who had access to every system I had access to, and the trust that came with the second chair, and who had been feeding William Hale a view of everything I did for over a year.