A corrupt Sheriff shot my 17-year-old son, permanently destroying both his kneecaps. "Shouldn't have looked at me wrong, boy," the cop laughed, protected by his union. I rushed into the ER in my cheap janitor uniform. My son wept, "Dad, I'll never walk again." I didn't scream or cry. The arrogant Sheriff thought he had just ruined a powerless janitor's family. I pulled out my phone and called my old team. That was the moment his nightmare began. / Chapter 6 / 20

Chapter 6 - The Interrogation

Barnes thrashed against the mahogany desk, his heavy frame groaning under the weight of my boot pressed firmly between his shoulder blades. The tear gas filtered thin and acrid through the open window, but the panic in his lungs was pure, raw terror.

"Irwin?" he choked out, his voice raw from the gas. "Are you out of your mind? This is a federal crime! You’re taking a law enforcement officer hostage! You’ll spend the rest of your pathetic life in a maximum-security cage!"

I didn't answer him. I reached down, grabbed him by his thick collar, and hauled him upright, slamming his back against the heavy leather chair behind his desk.

The room was pitch black save for the eerie green glow of our night-vision optics and the sharp white beam of Dax's tactical flashlight illuminating Barnes's red, sweating face.

Dax stood by the door, his suppressed carbine held at low ready, keeping watch over the stairwell. Downstairs, Ghost and Viper were busy systematically harvesting every hard drive, server blade, and backup tape from the precinct’s digital vault.

I pulled up a chair across from Barnes, sitting down slowly. I reached up and pulled my tactical facemask down, exposing my face.

Barnes blinked through his streaming eyes, his mouth gaping open as he looked at me. "Who... who the hell are you?"

"Seventeen years ago, I was the man they called when a warlord in the Helmand Province needed to disappear without leaving a single footprint," I said softly. "You thought I was just a blue-collar ghost sweeping up your cigarette butts and wiping spit off the courthouse walls. You thought because I didn't yell, I was weak."

I reached into my vest, pulled out a small portable tablet, and flipped it open. On the screen was the raw, unedited dashcam footage from his cruiser—the high-definition video showing him dragging Tyler out of his truck, shooting both of his knees at point-blank range, and throwing the silver folding knife onto the pavement.

Barnes’s jaw went slack. The blood drained from his cheeks until he looked as white as the plaster on his walls.

"Viper intercepted the file before your union rep could overwrite it," I told him. "By six o'clock this morning, this raw video, along with forty gigabytes of internal precinct communications, will be delivered simultaneously to the State Police Internal Affairs Division, the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, and every major news network in the tri-state area."

"You... you can't leak that," Barnes stammered, his confident swagger completely shattered. "Roy Miller... the union... they have injunctive protection! The judge will throw it out!"

"Judge Vance won't be signing any injunctions today, Wade," I replied cold-bloodedly. "Because at three o'clock this morning, Viper leaked the private offshore bank statements showing Vance taking a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in kickbacks from your property development syndicate. Federal marshals are knocking on his front door right about now."

Barnes began to shake—a violent, uncontrollable tremor that rattled his handcuffs against his belt. "What do you want from me?"

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I leaned forward until my face was inches from his.

"I want you to experience what my son felt when he was lying on that asphalt," I whispered. "I'm not going to shoot you, Wade. I'm going to do something much worse. I'm going to let the world see what you really are."