Chapter 5 - THE ATTORNEY’S CUT"Don't reach for anything, Natalie," Henderson said smoothly, his voice completely devoid of the polite, professional tone he had used in the courtroom hours earlier. "Keep your hands where I can see them and slowly step away from those crates."
I raised my hands slowly, keeping my body low in the root cellar.
"You're not just his lawyer, are you?" I said, my voice steady despite the adrenaline surging through my veins. "A defense attorney doesn't follow a client’s sister to a farm with a suppressed weapon. You're the buyer."
Henderson smiled thinly, stepping down the wooden ladder into the narrow cellar space. "Let's just say Brandon was the muscle and the logistics guy, but I was the broker. Do you have any idea what private defense contractors in Eastern Europe will pay for tactical satellite encryption hardware with intact DoD codes? Millions, Natalie. Absolute millions."
"And my mother?" I asked. "Does she know her star son and her hotshot lawyer are international arms traffickers?"
Henderson laughed, a short, dry bark. "Evelyn? Evelyn is an idiot. She’s so blinded by her hatred for you and her golden-boy obsession with Brandon that she swallowed every lie we fed her. She actually believed Brandon was just trying to keep the farm in the family. She was our perfect shield."
He gestured with the barrel of the gun toward the safe resting behind me.
"Open it," Henderson ordered. "Brandon said the master key code for the hardware's secondary encryption drive is inside that safe. Open it now, or I put two rounds in your head and search the safe myself."
I looked at the digital keypad on the fireproof safe. Then I looked at Henderson.
In combat, panic is a death sentence. The Army medical corps hadn't just taught me how to stitch wounds; they had taught me how to assess a threat under extreme fire, find a weakness, and strike with lethal efficiency.
"The code isn't a number," I said quietly, reaching out toward the keypad. "It’s an emergency lockout sequence. If I hit the wrong button, the internal thermite charge inside the drive triggers and incinerates the hard drives instantly."
Henderson’s eyes narrowed. "Don't play games with me, Carter."
"I'm not playing," I said, my fingers hovering over the keypad. "You want these drives intact? Then you better let me put in the override code correctly."
May you like
He took one step closer, bending down slightly to watch my fingers on the keypad.
That single step was his final mistake.
