My parents walked into federal court to save my golden-child brother from prison by framing me for treason. They expected me to rot in a federal cell. But then, the light caught the solid gold insignia shining on my crisp lapel. The family who abandoned me 10 years just realized they were staring at the government’s most lethal weapon…

I sat back down at the desk and opened my heavily encrypted drive. I had access to the unredacted discovery files the DOJ had gathered on Grant’s current operations, but I also had my own archives. Ten years of digital ghosting. Ten years of quietly scraping servers related to the Geneva summit.

I didn’t need to find a way out of Vance’s trap. I needed to build a bigger bomb.

Hours bled away. My eyes burned as I sifted through thousands of lines of code, deleted emails the FBI cyber division had recovered, and encrypted audio files I had intercepted years ago but lacked the context to use. Grant was smart. He had layered the current money through offshore accounts and a network of fake subcontractors. But he was arrogant, and arrogance always leaves a fingerprint.

At 3:15 AM, I noticed a discrepancy in a legacy server file tied to the Moore family estate. It wasn’t about the current veteran fraud. It was a deeply buried, localized backup from exactly ten years ago. The week I was in a coma.