Chapter 5 - The Handshake
"Ben?" I said, keeping my tone guarded. "How did you get this number?"
"I'm sitting in a mobile command center three miles from your location, Mason," Ben replied, his voice heavy with fatigue. "Vance locked down my team two hours ago. He knows you have MWD-4482. He knows about the drive. He's framing you for the theft of classified defense property and the murder of a contractor at your cabin."
I clenched my fist against the steering wheel. "The contractor isn't dead. Ranger took him down, but I left him breathing."
"It doesn't matter what you left, Mason. Vance's team swept your cabin thirty minutes after you fled. They cleared the body and logged a homicide report with the county sheriff. Every law enforcement agency in three states has a warrant out for your arrest right now. They're describing you as an unstable veteran suffering from severe PTSD, traveling with a dangerous, untamed animal."
I looked down at Ranger. He was resting quietly, completely oblivious to the massive net tightening around us.
"Why are you involved in this, Ben?" I asked bluntly. "Where do you stand?"
A long pause hung on the line before Ben answered. "I was put in charge of Vanguard's security audit six months ago. I didn't know what they were doing to those dogs until two weeks ago when the whistleblower tried to get out. I couldn't stop Vance from locking down the facility, but I've been tracking the assets ever since. I'm the one who tipped off Margaret at the county shelter to alter Ranger's intake date so Vance's men wouldn't find him in the public system before you did."
The pieces began to fit together. Margaret's fear, the altered shelter paperwork, the restricted military record—it was a desperate attempt by Ben to keep Ranger alive in the public record until I could locate him.
"What's your plan, Ben?" I asked.
"There's a secondary server at the Blackwood Facility where Vance keeps the raw telemetry and the financial paper trail connecting Vanguard to DARPA's off-book accounts," Ben explained. "The micro-SD card you have contains the encryption key, but without the physical hard drives at Blackwood, Vance can claim the files on your card are forged digital fakes. We need to physically access the server room, link your card to the mainframe, and broadcast the unencrypted raw feed directly to the Inspector General's secure server."
"And where is Vance right now?"
"He's at Blackwood, overseeing the final destruction of the facility's evidence. Once he wipes the mainframe tonight, the paper trail dies forever, and you become a fugitive for the rest of your life."
I looked out the window of the truck toward the dark horizon. The rain had started to fall, heavy drops drumming against the metal roof of the loading bay.
"Meet me at the old railroad junction near the eastern perimeter of Blackwood in one hour," I said. "If you bring a single Vanguard contractor with you, I won't hesitate, Ben."
"I'll be alone," Ben said softly. "Bring Ranger. He knows the layout of that facility better than any of us. He spent three years inside those walls."
I hung up the phone, pulled the battery from the casing, and tossed both onto the floorboard.
May you like
I bent down and looked Ranger square in the eyes. "Looks like we've got one more mission, buddy. One last run."
Ranger lifted his head, his ears perking up at the word mission. The fog in his eyes seemed to clear for a split second, replaced by the unmistakable fire of a Navy working dog ready to step back into the storm.
