I sat in the forward command jumpseat, the four-point Kevlar harness locked securely across my breastbone.
My physical presence in this aircraft was a deliberate exercise in absolute tactical focus. Behind me, across the dark expanse of North Carolina, the Vance estate, the strip malls, the country club holdings, and the commercial shell entities of Vance Commercial Equities had been garrisoned under the armed perimeter guard of military police from Fort Liberty and federal marshals. Harold Vance and his son Bradley were sitting in steel-paneled intake cells at the federal holding facility in Miramar, their camel-hair sports coats, Italian loafers, and unearned swagger replaced by coarse orange jumpsuits, discovering that four decades of calculated boundary encroachments, municipal payoffs, and sovereign defense espionage had collapsed into scrap iron under the weight of an unalterable military warrant.
The agonizing memory of stepping out onto my front porch twenty-four hours ago—looking down at the crushed petals of the marigolds Robert had planted for our anniversary while a twenty-two-year-old boy smirked from his motorcycle—had not broken my composure. It had burned off every shred of civilian vulnerability, every lingering shadow of the quiet widow who had spent thirty years watering perennials and minding her own business. It had cooled into an armor-plated trajectory.
