Chapter 3
GRIFF
The call comes in at o'dark thirty.
I'm already half awake, the way I always am between midnight and dawn, my body clock still calibrated to a deployment schedule that ended two years ago.
The phone lights up on the nightstand, and the number belongs to Tidewater's overnight security desk, which means this isn't a wrong number or a buddy who lost track of time zones.
"Holland."
"Lieutenant, Norfolk PD is responding to a suspicious device call at the Kellaway Bed and Breakfast on Harbor Road. The guest who reported it is Lennox Bradshaw, our civilian contractor. PD is requesting we send an EOD team since the target is Tidewater-affiliated. Your team is on rotation."
My feet hit the floor before the second sentence finishes. "Call Petty Officer Rowe and tell him to meet me at the shop in ten. We need the truck and the kit."
The drive to the EOD shop takes minutes at this hour.
Rowe beats me there, already pulling on his boots in the parking lot.
He's my number two, solid and quiet, the kind of bomb tech who doesn't waste breath at three in the morning.
We check the response vehicle to ensure everything is there including the portable X-ray unit, the robot, the full bomb suit, and the standard tool kit, then roll for Harbor Road.
The B&B is a short drive from base at this hour.
Two patrol cars and an ambulance sit at angles in front of the Kellaway, their lights painting the Victorian facade in alternating red and blue.
The gingerbread trim and wraparound porches look absurd framed in emergency strobes, like a dollhouse dropped into a crime scene.
I badge through the outer cordon and find the responding officer, a Norfolk PD sergeant named Davis who I've worked with twice before on suspicious package calls. She's the kind of competent and calm that you want on the other end of an incident.
"The device is on the second-floor exterior landing," Davis says, pointing up.
"The guest called 911 a little after 2 AM, said she was heading out to her car and spotted a package on the landing that hadn't been there earlier.
Dispatch contacted Tidewater security when they learned she's a defense contractor with your base.
We evacuated the building and established a hundred-foot perimeter. "
"Anyone touch it?"
"Negative. She said it looked wrong and backed off. She called from downstairs after she cleared the building herself."
"Where is she now?"
Davis tips her head toward the far side of the parking lot, past the ambulance. "Over there. Refused to leave. Said she'd wait for, and I quote, 'someone who actually knows what a detonator looks like.'"
That tracks.
I spot her behind the ambulance, outside the security perimeter but close enough that she can see the second-floor landing.
She's wearing a silk robe and nothing on her feet, her arms crossed tight against her ribs.
Her pixie-cut hair is flattened on one side from sleep, and the robe is a deep green that catches the emergency lights every time they rotate past. She doesn't have a coat, and the overnight chill off the water has to be cutting through the silk, but her jaw is set, her spine is straight, and she's watching the second floor like she's memorizing it.
I stop a few paces from her because something about her posture says that closer would be a miscalculation. "Bradshaw."
Her chin lifts. The green eyes find me, and for a fraction of a second the tight set of her mouth loosens before the composure locks back into place. "Holland. Took you long enough."
"I was in the middle of a dream about a beach in Galveston. Very rude of someone to plant a bomb and interrupt it."
"Terribly inconsiderate." Her voice is clipped and controlled, but her fingers are pressed white into the sleeves of the robe where her arms cross. The rings she always wears dig into the silk. "It's on the landing outside my door. Tucked against the base of the doorframe on the hinge side."
"You saw it?"
"I was heading out to my car for something I'd left in the trunk.
The landing light caught something that shouldn't have been there, a small package with matte wrapping, no postmark, positioned against the doorframe.
I didn't touch it. I went downstairs, woke the innkeepers, and called 911 from the front lawn. "
"Good." I turn back toward the truck where Rowe is staging equipment. "Stay behind the perimeter. We'll handle it."
"I know you'll handle it. That's why I asked for EOD and not the Norfolk bomb squad."
There's something underneath the sarcasm that I file without comment. Rowe and I run through the pre-approach brief at the truck. He'll manage the cordon and monitor comms while I make the approach, which is standard two-man protocol for a suspected device of this size.
The bomb suit is an option, and protocol says I should wear it.
But the narrow Victorian staircase barely accommodates my shoulders, and the suit cuts my dexterity in half while adding enough weight to make the old wood a structural question I don't want to answer at three in the morning.
The package is small-profile, which means the approach is about precision, not protection. I need my hands.
I make the call and tell Rowe I'm going up without the suit. He logs it because everything gets logged, and if this goes sideways, someone will read that log at my memorial and shake their head.
"Approaching on foot, no suit," I tell him over the radio. "Device is small-profile, suspected anti-personnel, low yield."
"Copy. Timer's running."
The staircase creaks under my weight as I climb to the second floor.
The exterior landing smells like old wood and salt air, and the motion-sensor light above the door clicks on as I reach the top step.
The device sits exactly where Nox described it, a rectangular package roughly the size of a hardcover book, matte brown wrapping, no visible wires or triggers on the exterior.
I set up the portable X-ray that Rowe passed up to me and position it carefully. The image resolves on my tablet, and my hands go still.
The components are too clean. Inside the wrapping sits a small charge of commercial explosive, a simple electronic detonator wired to a pressure-release switch, and a battery pack.
The construction methodology is textbook, literally textbook.
Military ordnance training materials teach this exact configuration as a demonstration device.
The charge is real but minimal, enough to blow the door off its hinges, throw shrapnel across the landing, and cause burns and lacerations to anyone standing close.
It would terrify and hospitalize, but it wouldn't kill unless you were standing directly over it when it triggered.
The pressure-release switch tells me the rest. The device is sitting under slight tension from its own weight against the doorframe.
Anyone opening the door outward would bump it, shift the package, release the pressure plate, and close the circuit.
But the placement on the hinge side, combined with a charge this small, means the door absorbs and redirects most of the blast force.
Whoever built this chose a trigger, a charge size, and a position that would wound without killing. That's not amateur desperation. That's someone who understands ordnance well enough to calibrate the damage, and who wants Nox alive but terrified.
If Nox had opened her door without looking down, her foot or the door itself would have shifted the package. She'd be in surgery right now instead of standing in a parking lot in a silk robe, insulting the response time of everyone who showed up to help her.
This is a message, not a murder attempt.
I render it safe in minutes. I disconnect the detonator leads, remove the battery, and separate the charge from the initiator. Each step is deliberate and certain, and I photograph everything before I move anything because the chain of custody starts the moment I touch the first wire.
"Device rendered safe," I tell Rowe over the radio. "Pressure-release trigger, small charge, commercial explosive, electronic det. Get Rivera on the phone. NCIS is going to want this."
When I come down the stairs carrying the components in evidence containers, Nox is exactly where I left her, arms still crossed, jaw still tight. She watches me walk toward her, and her gaze drops to the containers and then back to my face, searching for whatever the surface isn't giving up.
"Pressure-release trigger," I tell her. "Small charge, commercial explosive, electronic detonator. It's a military training configuration. You'd have lost the door and caught shrapnel if you'd stepped on it, but you wouldn't have died."
"How comforting."
"It's meant to be. That's the point." I set the containers on the tailgate of the truck and face her.
"Whoever built this knows exactly how much explosive it takes to scare someone without killing them.
That's not a random threat. That's a calculated message from someone with ordnance training, and the craftsmanship says they wanted you to know it. "
Her rings glint as her grip tightens on her own arms. Behind us, Davis is on her radio coordinating with Tidewater's security office, and the first gray light of pre-dawn is starting to soften the sky over the harbor.
Nox looks smaller out here than she does behind her monitors, standing on cold asphalt in a robe meant for a heated room and a short walk to the car, not a crime scene early in the morning.
Someone just left a bomb on her doorstep like a calling card.
"I need to call Hartwell," I say.
"Obviously."
"And Rivera's already being notified. NCIS will take custody of the device components."
"Fine."
"And you're not staying here tonight."
Her chin comes up, and the look she gives me could strip paint off a bulkhead. "Excuse me?"