The Hostile Witness

The invoices triple every October. Deirdre Vance is being paid to find out why, and eleven days into it somebody mirrors her encrypted drive without leaving a fingerprint. The somebody is Tolliver Ash. Fifty years old, four combat commands, three defense contracts he should not legally hold, and a company named after himself. The contractor hired him to find out what she had. What she has is a shell network running through a Mississippi shipyard and a Cypriot bank account that funded an operation Tolliver ran in 2011 and has never once described out loud. So he does the thing that ends his career. He starts handing it to her. The contractor sends a former teammate to close the loop. Tolliver meets him in a parking garage in Rosslyn and comes down alone. Deirdre testifies first. He testifies second, under an agreement he negotiated himself, and does thirty-one months. She is at the gate with a car he did not ask for. He gets in anyway.