Chapter 5 - The Safehouse Deception
The interrogation room at the FBI’s Norfolk field office smelled of stale black coffee and floor wax.
Derek Nolan sat on the other side of the metal table, his resort linen shirt rumpled, his hair disheveled, and the steel handcuffs clinking softly against the bolts of the chair every time he trembled. The casual, arrogant confidence he had projected on the deck of the Caribbean cruise ship was completely gone, replaced by the shivering panic of a cornered coward.
Special Agent Vance sat across from him, flipping slowly through a thick dossier of printed bank statements, IP routing logs, and server forensic reports.
Hannah stood quietly in the shadowed corner of the room behind a one-way mirror, watching every micro-expression on her husband’s face.
“Let’s go over it one more time, Mr. Nolan,” Vance said evenly, tapping a finger against a photograph of the hallway server rack. “According to our financial trace, the twenty-five thousand dollar wire transfer into your shell LLC didn't just come from a random tech investor. It came from an encrypted account tied to an international cyber syndicate known as the 'Redwood Group.' Care to tell us what kind of data they were routing through your daughter’s hallway?”
Derek swallowed hard, his throat dry. “I—I swear to God, I didn't know! Vince told me it was just commercial data caching! High-speed proxy traffic for overseas streaming companies! He said nobody would ever trace it to a residential IP in Chesapeake!”
“And the man who used the manual override key to download the local cache seventy-two hours ago?” Vance leaned forward, narrowing his eyes. “Who was he, Derek?”
Derek flinched, looking away from the agent’s intense gaze. “I... I don't know his name! He just called himself ‘The Courier.’ He gave me a burner phone and instructions on when to leave the house unlocked so he could service the hardware without me being there.”
“You left your four-year-old child alone in a house because a criminal told you to clear the premises,” Vance said, his voice dripping with disgust. “Do you have any idea how long prison is going to be for child endangerment combined with federal cyber-terrorism facilitation?”
Outside the observation glass, Hannah’s phone buzzed sharply against her tactical belt. She pulled it out. The text message was from Captain Marcus Bell of the Chesapeake PD:
“Major, we just ran the license plate of the vehicle spotted on your neighbor’s security camera during the manual override download. The car is registered to a P.O. Box in Norfolk, but the physical owner has a record for federal weapons trafficking and extortion. Name is Viktor Vance—no relation to the agent. We’re tracking his last known cell ping heading south toward the Outer Banks.”
Hannah’s tactical instincts flared instantly. The criminal network hadn't just used Derek as a patsy; they were actively cleaning house now that the local node had been seized by federal authorities.
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If Viktor Vance was heading south, he wasn't running away—he was coming back to retrieve the encrypted physical drive that had been stored on a secondary backup module inside the server. A module that wasn't in the FBI's possession yet because it was hidden in a secondary compartment behind the drywall.
Hannah didn't wait for the interrogation to finish. She turned on her heel, pushed open the heavy steel door of the observation room, and strode down the corridor toward her car.
