Chapter 17 Atticus
ATTICUS
The federal transport van pulled away from the hotel, taking Luke to the airport in chains. I stood frozen in the parking lot, watching the convoy disappear around the corner while Brenna’s words echoed in my head. I expected you to fight harder for him.
She was right. I should have trusted what I knew about Luke’s character. Instead, I’d quoted evidence at him like some bureaucrat who forgot that Luke had saved my career once, standing up to a colonel when it could have destroyed his own future.
“The plane’s waiting,” Admiral said beside me, his hand on my shoulder. The weight of it was meant to be comforting, but all I felt was the burden of my failure.
“Which plane?” I asked.
“The Gulfstream. Executive terminal.”
Great. K19’s private jet would take us back to headquarters while Luke and Brenna traveled across the country in God knew what kind of FBI-owned aircraft.
Half an hour later, we climbed aboard at SFO.
The cabin smelled like coffee and leather, familiar scents that felt wrong, given what had just happened.
I dropped into one of the seats, the same one I’d occupied on the flight out here when I was worried about keeping the woman I loved—the one who wouldn’t even look at me when she walked past—safe during the investigation that had gone to hell in ways I never could’ve imagined.
“Kodiak and Tank are maintaining surveillance on Trevor Collins,” Admiral said as we settled in. “Emma’s accompanying Brenna through the transport process.”
“At least she’s not alone.” Though having Emma there might make it worse—a constant reminder that a friend had shown up for her while I’d stood there, spouting probable cause.
The familiar whine of the engines spinning up filled the cabin. Outside the window, the tarmac blurred as we taxied toward the runway.
Admiral pulled out his tablet as the pilot’s voice crackled over the intercom. “Flight time to Albany is approximately five hours, then another hour by helicopter to headquarters. Weather looks good.”
“She’ll come around when we prove Luke’s innocent,” Admiral said as we taxied toward the runway.
“Then, let’s start by reviewing the evidence against him.”
I opened my laptop and turned it so he could see the screen too.
Admiral leaned forward. “What am I looking at?”
“Compression. Every piece of evidence—the deposits, the system access, the encrypted communications—all of it appeared within the past week.” The Sierra Nevada mountains emerged through breaks in the clouds as I pulled up more files.
“Real espionage doesn’t work this way. Asset development takes months, sometimes years of cultivation.
This looks like someone crammed an entire recruitment cycle into days. ”
“Devil’s advocate—maybe Luke got desperate. His company’s struggling, his partner’s pushing for expansion—”
“Luke doesn’t do desperate. He does methodical.” I pulled up additional records.
We hit turbulence over Nevada, and the coffee sloshed in the cup Admiral had poured himself. He steadied it while studying the deposit records. “These are textbook structuring. Nine thousand nine hundred, nine thousand eight hundred fifty, nine thousand nine hundred twenty.”
“Too textbook. Real money laundering has human error. People get nervous, make mistakes, forget the limits, round to even numbers because humans like patterns. This is someone following an algorithm.”
“The intervals are interesting too,” Admiral noted, pulling up his own tablet. “Forty-seven hours, then seventy-one, then forty-three.”
“Someone’s trying to look random but using a mathematical sequence to do it. Luke would never be that obvious. Remember, this is the guy who created his own encryption protocol at the academy because he didn’t trust the standard ones.”
We were passing over Utah when Admiral called Alice and put her on speaker. “We’re three hours out, and we need you to dig into something.”
“One step ahead of you.” Alice’s voice filled the cabin. “Brenna called me before boarding and asked us to dive deep into the evidence against Luke. We’re already finding things that, upon closer inspection, don’t add up.”
“How so?” I asked.
“The timestamp manipulation uses NSA-level chronology modification protocols. We’ve seen these exact patterns in state-sponsored operations. But whoever did this was working on an impossible timeline and made several mistakes.”
“What kind of mistakes?” asked Admiral.
“The digital signatures show signs that they were created in a rush—likely late Friday night through early Saturday morning. Professional intelligence services take weeks to properly layer this kind of evidence. This was done in under forty-eight hours.”
I leaned toward the phone. “Alice, I need you to look specifically at Trevor Collins. Luke’s business partner.”
“Way ahead of you. Dragon found financial irregularities going back three months. Not to Trevor directly—to his wife, Mindy Collins.”
“Three months is before Brenna’s investigation even started,” Admiral said, frowning.
“Classic recruitment pattern. They were grooming him as a potential asset long before they needed him,” I said, recognizing the timeline immediately. “Morrison probably identified Trevor months ago as someone with financial pressure they could exploit if needed.”
“See you soon, sweetheart,” Admiral said to his wife.
“Hurry up,” she replied.
After Admiral disconnected, I stared out at the clouds below, trying to figure out how to exonerate Luke.
The rest of the flight passed in fragments.
Admiral coordinating with DOJ contacts, trying to delay Luke’s processing.
Me digging through every piece of data, looking for the thread that would unravel this disaster.
The mountains gave way to plains, then the Great Lakes appeared through the window, and finally the familiar landscape of upstate New York.
The helicopter ride from Albany to K19 headquarters took us from the setting of the sun into the darkness of the remote area. The Adirondacks were invisible below, just black spaces between scattered lights of small towns.
We touched down on the landing pad carved out of a meadow, then made our way to the command center that had been installed on the upper floors of the great camp’s boathouse.
Alice and Dragon were there, waiting with three active screens filled with cascading data streams. Tex’s face occupied the main display, his usually relaxed expression replaced with the intensity I’d only seen during major investigations.
“You were right about the timeline,” Alice said immediately, not bothering with greetings. “But it’s more sophisticated than basic backdating.”
She gestured to the code structures filling one screen. “The metadata compression signatures are inconsistent with gradual evidence accumulation. This was a rush job—professional tools, amateur timeline.”
“But?” I could hear the qualification in her voice.
Tex leaned closer to the screen. “The authentication tokens show sequential generation despite supposedly being created days apart. Real operations have randomized token generation. They were creating everything in one session, probably panicking after Friday night.”
Dragon pulled up another data stream. “The system access logs show Luke’s credentials accessing classified databases.
But the hardware signatures are all wrong.
Different MAC addresses, different chip architectures.
Luke uses a MacBook Pro for everything—I pulled his purchase records.
These accesses came from a Dell running Windows 11. ”
“Someone cloned his credentials but forgot about the trail he’d leave behind.” I moved closer to the screens. “What about Trevor?”
Windows on Alice’s screen opened and closed faster than I could track. “Trevor Collins has been receiving payments for three months, but not directly.”
She pulled up financial records that made my stomach drop. “His wife, Mindy Collins. Deposits from seventeen different shell companies. All traced back through Cyprus, then the Caymans, then—” She paused. “This is interesting.”
“Define interesting,” Admiral said.
“The money originates from legitimate venture capital funds. Morrison’s funds. But it’s been laundered through so many cutouts that it took me two hours to find it.”
“So Morrison’s been paying Trevor for months,” I said. “For what?”
Tex pulled up Redpoint’s government contracts on another screen. “They handle federal grant management systems. Nothing classified, but valuable. They can see which projects get funding, which contractors win bids, which technologies the government is investing in.”
“Industrial intelligence,” I muttered. “Does this prove Trevor’s been the one selling insider information?”
“Yes. It was small stuff at first,” Alice confirmed, building a timeline. “Which contracts were likely to be renewed, which departments had budget increases. Nothing illegal enough to trigger alerts, but worth millions to someone like Morrison who could front-run investments.”
Dragon added communication metadata to her display. “Encrypted messages between Trevor and unknown parties started six months ago.”
“Can you crack it?”
Alice smiled. “Already did. Well, partially. They made one critical mistake. They reused an encryption key across multiple operations. Once I cracked one message, I could decrypt them all.”
“How long for the complete dataset?”
“I’ve got seven parallel instances running on our quantum cores. Two more hours for everything.”
While Alice’s systems worked, I dug deeper into Trevor’s background with Dragon. Stanford ROTC, graduated same year as Luke and I did from the Air Force Academy. They’d met at Rayodyne Defense Systems before starting Redpoint. On paper, clean as fresh snow.
But Dragon found the cracks. “Mindy Collins’ spending patterns.” She threw receipts onto a screen like dealing cards. “Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Cartier. New Tesla Model S Plaid last month. Hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar renovation on their Palo Alto house.”