They loaded me onto the gurney. As they wheeled me down the aisle, I turned my head.

Garrett was face-down on the floor, hands zip-tied behind him, an agent’s knee between his shoulder blades. He had turned his head to watch me go.

Our eyes met.

I didn’t say anything. There was nothing left to say to him. I’d said all of it eleven minutes before he understood any of it.

He was the one who looked away first.

They took me to the regional naval hospital. Surgery that night on the left leg, which was the worse of the two. An intramedullary rod down the tibia. External fixator first, then internal. The right leg the next morning. Plates and screws.

I woke up in a recovery room with both legs suspended and a morphine drip I used sparingly, because I wanted my head clear.

My head needed to be clear. Because the easy part was over.

The easy part had been the four of them. Four men in a room. That’s a problem you can see and touch and count.

The hard part was everything behind them.

Because here is the thing I had understood even while I was lying on that floor: Garrett Voss did not have the brains to build a theft ring that stole military equipment from three installations and resold it without getting caught for a year. Garrett couldn’t pass a readiness eval. Garrett couldn’t plan a cover story that survived first contact with a timestamp.

Somebody above him had built the machine. Garrett and his crew were just the hands inside the depot. The muscle. The part that moved the boxes and altered the numbers.

Somebody had told them I was getting close. Somebody had told them to make me stop.

And that somebody had access to the fact that I’d been pulling records. Which meant that somebody had eyes inside the system Reyes and I thought was quiet.

Reyes came to the hospital on the second day. She sat in the chair beside my bed with a laptop and a cup of terrible coffee and a look on her face that told me she’d been thinking the same thing I had.

-How are the legs.

-Attached. Tell me what you’ve got.

She didn’t argue. She’d learned fast that I wasn’t interested in being managed.

-All four are charged. Voss is looking at the most. Aggravated assault, conspiracy, obstruction, witness retaliation, theft of government property. Barrett and Kane, assault and conspiracy and theft. Reed cut a deal before his lawyer finished his coffee.

-Reed’s talking.

-Reed won’t stop talking. He gave us the whole depot operation. How they pulled items tagged for destruction, altered the serials, logged them as reissued, then walked them out the harbor-side door into a boat.

-A boat.

-A thirty-eight-foot sport fisher. Registered to a shell company. We seized it this morning. There were four cases of night vision devices in the hold.

-Who owns the shell company?

Reyes’s expression didn’t change. That’s how I knew we were getting to it.

-That’s the part you’re not going to like.

-I haven’t liked any of it. Keep going.

She turned the laptop toward me.

-The shell company’s registered agent is a law office in Virginia Beach. Standard. But the operating account that paid for the boat, and that received the wire transfers from the buyers, traces back through two more shells to a single authorized signatory.

She tapped the screen.

I read the name.

Captain William Hale.

My commanding officer. The man two levels above me. The man who had signed my orders to this installation fourteen months ago. The man who, three weeks ago, had told me in his office, with real warmth in his voice, that I was the best inspecting officer he’d had in twenty years and that he was going to make sure it got noticed in my next evaluation.

I looked at the name for a long time.

-Rebecca.

-I’m reading it.

-I know who he is to you. I know he brought you here.

-He brought me here fourteen months ago. Reyes, think about that. Think about the timing.

She nodded slowly. She’d already thought about it. She just wanted to see if I’d get there on my own.

-He brought you in because you have a reputation for being incorruptible. Impossible to pressure. A commander who fails people who deserve to fail. Who writes up every violation.

-Window dressing. He put the most honest officer he could find in charge of the depot so that nobody would ever look twice at it. Who inspects the inspector? Nobody. Because everyone knows Brennan’s clean.

-And then you actually did your job.

-And found the thing I was hired to be the camouflage for.

I lay back against the pillow. The morphine sat untouched in its little bag. I wanted to feel all of this. Anger is useful. Clean anger, pointed in the right direction, is a tool.