My husband thought it was funny that he slapped me in the mouth in front of his colleagues after I made a harmless joke. He leaned in and hissed, "Know your place." I smiled slowly, wiped the blood from my lip, and said, "You just slapped the wrong person." What he didn't know was that all the phones in the room had just recorded the moment his career ended.

The Anacostia boatyard was a graveyard of rusted hulls, rotting timber, and abandoned shipping containers sitting on the mudflats of the river. Rain lashed against the windshield of my car as I killed the engine two hundred yards from Unit 12—a dilapidated corrugated-metal warehouse perched on the water’s edge.

A single window on the upper floor cast a dull, yellow square of light into the darkness. Outside, two black sedans were parked near the rusted loading dock, their engines warm, exhaust curling faintly into the freezing November mist.

I opened the glove compartment, pulled out my earpiece, and tapped the connection.

"Evelyn, are you online?"

"I’m in the Halcyon boardroom right now, Clara," Evelyn’s voice came through, crisp, tight, and humming with background tension. "Eleanor is sitting at the head of the mahogany table. She looks pale, but she’s running the agenda. She’s already called for the formal vote to invoke the national security shield and seal Richard’s files."

"How much time do I have?"

"Seven minutes before the quorum closes the vote," Evelyn said. "I’ve got our technical director patched into their main projector system. Once you hit the broadcast button on your mobile link, whatever you’re seeing feeds directly onto the sixty-inch screen facing the entire board."

"Understood," I whispered. "Keep the link hot."

I slipped the .38 into my coat pocket, grabbed the aluminum briefcase, and stepped out into the pouring rain.

The side door of Unit 12 was secured with a heavy chain, but the lock had been cut recently and replaced with a temporary plastic zip-tie. I sliced through it with my pocketknife, pushed the door open an inch, and slipped inside.

The smell of diesel fuel and burning paper hit me immediately.

In the center of the concrete floor, a fifty-five-gallon steel drum was roaring with orange flames. Daniel Cross stood beside the barrel, feeding thick stacks of printed corporate documents into the fire. His tailored suit was ruined, smudged with soot and soaked with sweat, his tie discarded on a nearby oil drum.

Across from him, tied to a rusted steel support pillar, was Maya.

Her lip was split, her jacket torn at the shoulder, but her eyes were wide open, blazing with defiant fury. A piece of heavy duct tape covered her mouth, but when she saw me stepping into the shadows of the mezzanine above, her eyes locked onto mine, and she went utterly still.

Beside Daniel stood two men wearing tactical wet-weather gear, both carrying submachine guns slung across their chests.

"Hurry up with the flight logs," Daniel snapped at one of the guards, wiping soot from his forehead with the back of his hand. "The board is voting right now. Once Eleanor’s motion passes, we dump the girl in the river and cross into Maryland before the state troopers mobilize."

"What about Mercer?" the guard asked, tossing another binder into the flames. "The cops have him in holding."

"Mercer is finished," Daniel sneered, watching the papers curl into black ash. "His lawyer is going to offer him a plea deal: twenty years in federal custody or a fatal heart attack in his holding cell. He’ll take the plea to save his skin. He was always weak. A pathetic little bureaucrat who thought having a pretty wife made him a king."

I pulled out my phone, linked the high-definition camera feed to Evelyn’s secure server, and stepped out onto the metal grating of the mezzanine.

"You really should have checked his references, Daniel," my voice cut through the cavernous warehouse, ringing off the corrugated iron walls.

Daniel spun around, his hand instinctively dropping toward his holster. The two guards raised their weapons, scanning the dark rafters until their tactical flashlights pinned me in twin cones of blinding white light.

"Clara," Daniel breathed, squinting into the glare, his voice laced with venomous shock. "You actually came. And you brought the evidence."

"I brought Rebecca’s evidence," I said, holding up the weathered aluminum briefcase so the flashlights illuminated the polished metal. "The files you thought Richard burned ten years ago. The ones that prove you, Richard, and Senator Vance-Holloway murdered his first wife to cover up the defective titanium welds on the Trident drone fleet."

Down below, Maya made a muffled, urgent sound against the duct tape.

Daniel laughed—a harsh, dry bark that echoed off the metal roof. "You’re an amateur, Clara. You’re standing on a catwalk forty feet in the air with a briefcase and a split lip, surrounded by three armed men. Who do you think is going to hear your speech?"

"Everyone," I said calmly.

I tapped the screen of my phone.