CHAPTER 273: THE BIG DISCOVERY

Yet, throughout that night and even the next day, Lilian couldn’t get what Darren had told her out of her mind.

It followed her to the next morning as she said goodbye to her little daughter and left her home, heading to the DFI Headquarters, Washington AD.

The moment she entered the building, she knew immediately that she was in trouble. Everyone was looking at her weirdly. Not weirdly, in fact, the expression was clear. They knew how horrible it had been yesterday, and Deputy Director Caldridge, including others at the upper seats, were unhappy about it.

She ignored their gazes, and kept her cool. After all, she was their boss. Rather than heading to her office, she went straight to where her presence was needed.

The door of the DFI’s upper chamber sighed shut behind her with a sound like a tomb sealing.

Lilian paused, looking at the corridor that stretched before her, a canyon carved from polished obsidian composite and frosted glass, lit by the sterile, unforgiving glow of recessed panels. She took a deep breath and walked forward. Her heels struck the floor, each ’click-click’ echoing with unnatural clarity in the sound-dampened space, amplifying the dull percussion hammering behind her temples.

Her mind kept heading back to the fucking Nevarro raid. What a mess that had been. A waste of resources, and even she knew it. Now, forever in her record was this failure of a raid; a phantom limb, throbbing with the absence of evidence and the weight of her team’s fractured trust.

And even after all this, all Lilian could think was that this was Darren Steele’s fault.

She entered the conference room.

Deputy Director Caldridge was there, but he was silent. He didn’t look up when she entered and remained like a monolith carved from expensive grey wool and cold efficiency, seated at the head of the obsidian table.

Light glinted from his cold spectacles.

Lilian swallowed.

"Sit," he commanded, the single syllable devoid of inflection, landing like a stone.

Lilian obeyed, lowering herself into the chair opposite. She folded her trench coat precisely over her lap, a conscious effort to still the tremor threatening her fingers. The silence stretched, broken only by the faint whir of climate control.

Caldridge finally spoke, his voice a low monotone that scraped against her nerves. "The Nevarro report. Report on the warehouse says it was empty." He paused, letting the word hang, corrosive. "Just like I told you it was. Mind explaining yourself, Greaves?"

Lilian drew a slow breath through her nose. "Sir, TALON did its job. It identified persistent anomalies in Steele’s logistics data streams. Correlated with unexplained power surges localized to Nevarro’s grid sector and off-book shipment manifests flagged by customs. The pattern—"

He slammed the file flat onto the table. Lilian flinched, a microscopic betrayal of control. Caldridge finally looked up, his eyes magnified and unnervingly sharp behind the lenses, pinning her.

"I warned you going into this didn’t I? I advised caution regarding Nevarro. I counseled restraint. You chose to interpret data fragments as a clarion call." He leaned forward slightly. "You strong-armed a judge into signing an invasive warrant based on circumstantial whispers. You bypassed Cyber Division protocols, commandeered TALON for a tactical operation predicated on... what? A feeling? Do you comprehend the precedent this sets? The vulnerability it exposes this department to?"

Her lips parted, but the arguments died before they formed. She hadn’t felt this small, this exposed, since her first field assessment failure.

Caldridge slowly stood, then he began to pace the perimeter of the table. "I entrusted you with this mandate, Greaves. I expected discretion. Professionalism. You delivered... zealotry." He stopped directly behind her chair.

"You’ve become obsessed with that boy. And it almost seems like you’re becoming... a fan of his," He looked at her. "You follow him everywhere."

Lilian narrowed her eyes. "I was only doing my job."

"Your job?" Caldridge’s voice dropped to a near-whisper that carried terrifyingly well, "Your job has left oversight breathing down my neck. Citing departmental overreach. Questioning resource allocation. Your job was to check Steele Investments for any possible illegal activities, not turn Darren Steele to a personal projection! This damn crusade of yours has its consequences."

"I followed the evidence trail, sir," Lilian stated, forcing her voice level, though it felt brittle.

"Then perhaps your trail is fundamentally flawed," Caldridge countered smoothly, resuming his pacing. He stopped at the head of the table again, tapping his desk rhythmically. "Or perhaps... the flaw lies in the agent interpreting it."

Lilian froze, gazing up at him. "What?"

What an accusation! It hung in the air, colder than the conditioned breeze. Caldridge was questioning her competence. Her judgement.

"Effective immediately," Caldridge announced, his tone regaining its bureaucratic finality, "TALON remains active. However, it operates strictly within established protocols. Pre-clearance for all investigative steps. Full disclosure to Cyber and Legal. Any deviation, any independent initiative..." He paused, letting the threat solidify. "I terminate the project. Permanently. And you’ll be reassigned to cyber assistance. Is that understood, Agent Greaves?"

All his words landed with the force of a physical blow. Lilian was shocked, frozen. This was the first ever time she’d be threatened of losing her job over a case.

"Understood, sir," she managed, the words bitter in her throat.

Caldridge took a deep breath, then glanced at his phone that beeped on. "Dismissed."

Saying nothing else, Lilian got up and left the office. And when she entered hers, she never left once, she never spoke to anyone for the entire day until midnight.

Being alone would have been peaceful if the ache in her skull wasn’t trying to kill her. Of course she was suffering from such a strong headache, after the meeting with Caldridge and her personal war with Darren Steele, it was expected.

She massaged her temples, fingertips pressing hard against the bone, but the pressure offered no relief. Her gaze drifted across the room, snagging on the blank expanse of the opposite wall. It wasn’t blank anymore. It was a screen projecting the insidious questions Steele had posed, the unsettling conviction in his voice as he spoke of predators in the light.

The terminal’s chrono read 00:47. The silence was absolute, pressing in on her. An almost autonomic urge took hold. Her fingers, moving with a will of their own, danced across her keyboard.

The TALON login screen flared, bathing her face in an eerie blue light. She bypassed the standard query fields, delving into the deeper, dustier archives rarely touched.

First she looked into the former cases that had been solved with TALON.

PRIOR CASES – LEAD INVESTIGATOR: DEPUTY DIRECTOR M. CALDRIDGE

STATUS: CLOSED / CONVICTION SECURED

ASSET CLASS: CRYPTOCURRENCY ADJACENT / DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE

TIMEFRAME: LAST 48 MONTHS

The system whirred softly. A list materialized: eight case files, each bearing Caldridge’s digital signature, each a trophy in the DFI’s hall of victories. ’Hydra Node Takedown’. ’Silk Road 3.0 Seizure’. ’Cerberus Mining Collapse’. All marked with the satisfying green stamp of ’ASSETS CONFISCATED’ and ’LIQUIDATED/DESTROYED’.

Nothing looked out of place there. It was standard procedure. Clean. Efficient.

Lilian’s cursor hovered. She couldn’t just stop there, and for whatever reason, perhaps curiosity or that daunting sentence by Darren ringing at the back of her mind, she drilled down, accessing the sub-level asset disposition logs for the first case, ’Hydra’.

What she saw was confusing.

The report listed confiscated items: 14 high-end mining rigs, 3 cold storage wallets containing various cryptocurrencies, the Hydra network control server. Destruction certificates were referenced.

But when she pulled the actual certificates, what she got was:

’Not found.’

A frown creased her brow. She tried the next case, ’Silk Road 3.0’: seized darknet marketplace servers, crypto payment gateways. Destruction records cited.

’Not found.’

She checked others. Case after case. Six out of eight. No verifiable destruction records for the core digital assets – the servers, the nodes, the wallets. The very items deemed too dangerous, too compromised, to exist.

The cases were all closed but for some reason the assets and illegal systems showed no proof that they had been destroyed. They had only just... disappeared somehow.

A cold prickle started at the base of her spine. Protocol demanded these items be either physically destroyed (with video evidence) or transferred to the ultra-secure, air-gapped DFI ’Black Vault’ for indefinite audit hold. She cross-referenced the Black Vault inventory logs using the specific asset IDs.

No match.

The assets hadn’t been destroyed, and they weren’t in the vault.

They were... gone.

Only thing that made sense was that it must have been moved somehow. And that would be very.... very.... criminal.

Quickly, she initiated a deeper trace, querying the internal routing logs that tracked the movement of digital assets after seizure, before final disposition. It was a labyrinthine path, often obscured by layers of bureaucratic coding.

But after seconds that stretched into an eternity, she found success. Two entries pinged back, faint echoes in the digital void. Both from the ’Cerberus Corporation’ case.

ASSET ROUTING: INTERNAL HOLDING TRANSFER

AUTHORIZATION LEVEL: NINE (9)

DESTINATION: [REDACTED]

CUSTODIAN: [REDACTED]

Level Nine Authorization. That meant this was protected by someone big. Level Nine clearance bypassed standard audits, existed beyond the reach of agents like her. It was a fortress within the fortress. And only a handful possessed the keys. Caldridge’s name topped that short, terrifying list.

Lilian pushed back her chair, shocked, scared to carry on with this. Her reflection stared back on the computer screen – hollow-eyed, skin drawn tight over sharp cheekbones. The face of someone realizing that her world was crashing.

Everything she believed in.

’Is this what Darren Steele meant?’ she thought, staring at the screen. ’And if it is, how did he know?’

She hesitated for a moment before sitting back down and typing on the computer. One last query.

She needed to know under whose command were all those cases done? Who was in control that would have known and verified such criminal transactions.

Ding!

The computer announced the result.

Lilian stared at the screen. Frozen. The name on the screen was Deputy Director Warren Caldridge.