Chapter 4 - The House of Straw
Back at the Harbor Point Yacht Club, the air was poisoned with panic.
The birthday party had disintegrated. The guests, sensing the toxic fallout of what had just transpired, made hasty excuses and fled into the rain. City councilmen slipped out side doors; business partners claimed early morning flights. No one wanted to be in the splash zone when a Rear Admiral and an armed military escort clashed with a local real estate developer.
By 2130, only Mason, Walter, and Tiffany remained in the cavernous dining hall. Half-eaten plates of filet mignon sat congealing on the tables.
Mason was pacing violently back and forth across the parquet floor, his smartphone glued to his ear.
“Pick up, damn it, Arthur! Pick up!” Mason snarled, running a hand through his carefully styled hair, which was now damp with nervous sweat.
“Who are you calling?” Walter demanded, sitting slumped in his chair. He looked a decade older than he had two hours ago. The golden birthday banner behind him looked like a mockery.
“My procurement lawyer in D.C.,” Mason snapped. “Caroline is bluffing. She has to be bluffing! She’s just trying to humiliate me because I called her out on her boring little career! She can’t just flag a multi-million-dollar proposal!”
“She had two armed officers with her, Mason!” Walter slammed his fist on the table, rattling the silverware. “An active Captain saluted her! You told me she was a paper-pusher! You told me she was an analyst!”
“That’s what she told us!” Mason yelled back, his voice pitching into hysteria. “For thirty years she let us think she was nothing! Why would she do that? What kind of sick person hides that kind of power from her own family? If I had known she was a two-star Admiral, do you think I would have treated her like that? I could have used her connections five years ago! We could have had the naval expansion contracts in Norfolk!”
“Is that all you care about?” Walter asked, a sudden, sickening clarity washing over him. “The contracts?”
Before Mason could reply, his phone finally connected.
“Arthur! Thank God,” Mason exhaled, turning away. “Listen, we have an issue with the NAVFAC Portsmouth bid. My sister is throwing some military weight around, claiming there’s an ethics violation regarding her name on the advisory board. I need you to file an emergency amendment to the proposal, strip her name off page four, and resubmit it before the morning review.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the line.
“Arthur? Are you there?”
“*Mason,*” Arthur’s voice sounded strange, hollow, and drained of its usual legal bravado. “*Where are you right now?*”
“I’m at Dad’s party at the yacht club. Why?”
“*Do not go to your office,*” Arthur whispered. “*And do not touch your computer.*”
Mason froze, his stomach plummeting into a freezing void. “What… what are you talking about?”
“*Forty-five minutes ago, four black sedans pulled up to the Reed Coastal headquarters in Virginia Beach,*” Arthur said, his voice trembling. “*They weren't local police, Mason. It’s NCIS and agents from the Defense Criminal Investigative Service. They served a federal search warrant on our IT servers and our procurement archives.*”
Mason’s knees buckled. He grabbed the edge of a chair to keep from falling. “A… a warrant? On what grounds? It was an administrative oversight!”
“*They aren't looking at an administrative oversight, you idiot!*” Arthur snapped, losing his composure. “*When you listed Caroline Reed, you didn't just list her name. You cut and pasted an old project clearance code you found in her storage boxes at your dad’s house to make the bid look authentic. Do you know what that code was?*”
Mason’s breath caught in his throat. His mind flashed back to three months ago, rummaging through the attic of Walter’s estate, finding an old footlocker belonging to Caroline, photographing yellowed military paperwork with his phone.
“It… it was just an old deployment identifier,” Mason stammered.
“*It was a classified compartmentalized access code for Special Operations Command!*” Arthur screamed through the phone. “*You entered a live, classified clearance string into an unencrypted commercial web portal! You triggered a Level-1 Counterintelligence breach! They aren't investigating fraud anymore, Mason—they are investigating espionage!*”
The phone slipped from Mason’s hand, hitting the hardwood floor with a sharp crack.
Walter stood up, his face ashen. “Mason? What is it? What did he say?”
Mason turned slowly to face his father. His eyes were wide, vacant, the eyes of a man who had stepped off the edge of a cliff and was waiting for the ground to hit him.
“They’re at the office, Dad,” Mason whispered. “The federal government… they’re tearing the office apart.”
May you like
Outside the yacht club, the high-pitched whine of sirens began to bleed through the roar of the rain. Blue and red lights reflected off the dripping glass doors, casting a grotesque, flickering glow across Walter Reed’s birthday party.
---
