Chapter 11: What Colt Said
The inquiry took four months.
Laura was not present for most of it.
She gave her formal testimony in a secure conference room on a Tuesday morning in February, with two IG investigators, a court reporter, and Greer's lawyer present.
She spoke for three hours.
She answered every question.
She did not soften anything.
Hawkins testified separately, in a different room, on a different day.
His legal status as a living person was quietly resolved through a process Laura was never fully briefed on, which she understood to mean it had been complicated and someone had called in a significant favor.
Mara submitted her six years of documentation—every file, every contact log, every piece of the case she had built from the outside—and then stepped back.
She had done what she came to do.
The audio forensics challenge Colt's team had prepared was filed.
The IG's technical unit examined the recording and the challenge simultaneously.
Their conclusion, delivered in a forty-page report Laura was allowed to read but not keep, was that the recording showed no evidence of manipulation.
The challenge was dismissed.
The intercept data was the thing that mattered most.
The metadata matched.
The file hashes matched.
The secondary frequency Colt had used to pass targeting data to a third party was traced, over three months of technical work, to a private defense contractor that had received two significant contracts in the eighteen months following Operation Clearwater.
The contractor's name was in the financial news on a Thursday in March.
Laura read the first paragraph and set her phone face-down on the desk.
She didn't read the rest.
She didn't need to.
Raymond Colt was formally charged on a Friday afternoon.
Laura was in a meeting when her phone rang.
She stepped into the hallway.
"They executed the warrant this morning," Greer's chief of staff said.
"His attorney is already filing motions."
"Did they get the contractor records?"
"All of it.
The financial transfers, the communications, the contract modifications.
Everything."
Laura looked through the glass at her colleagues waiting inside.
"Tell me when he's formally arraigned," she said.
"I will." A pause.
"Major Vance.
It's done."
She went back into the meeting.
She sat down.
Someone was presenting a quarterly report on something that had nothing to do with any of this.
She looked at the slides and thought about David, who had found something he couldn't leave alone.
She thought: *I know how you felt.*
Two weeks after the arraignment, Victor Hale called her.
She almost didn't answer.
She answered.
"I want you to know," he said, "that I withdrew from Colt's representation the morning after our flight.
I cited a conflict of interest.
The bar association accepted it."
Laura said nothing.
"I also provided a voluntary statement to the IG's office," Hale said.
"Regarding the conversation in the airport.
And the instruction I received to use your daughter as leverage."
"I know," Laura said.
"They told me."
A pause.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"For the airport.
For what I said about Sophie."
Laura looked out her office window at the Raleigh skyline.
A grey February afternoon.
A school bus moving slowly through the intersection below.
"Did you tell them everything?" she said.
"Yes."
"Then that's what matters," she said.
And ended the call.
Colt's trial was set for the following autumn.
Laura was listed as a witness.
She had already arranged for someone to take Sophie to soccer on the Saturdays she would be in Washington.
She had also, on a quiet Sunday in January, told Sophie everything.
Not all of it.
Sophie was eleven.
But enough.
Enough that Sophie had looked at her across the kitchen table with her father's eyes—David's eyes, the same shape, the same directness—and said: "So Uncle David was trying to do the right thing?"
"Yes," Laura said.
"And you finished it for him?"
Laura looked at her daughter.
"We're still finishing it," she said.
"But yes."
Sophie nodded slowly, the way she nodded when she was deciding whether something was acceptable.
May you like
"Okay," she said.
And picked up her fork.
