Chapter 7 - WHAT A FATHER ADMITTED
Charles asked to speak to Rebecca after formal charges were filed, but Romero advised against any unsupervised conversation while witness testimony and family relationships remained entangled. Rebecca finally agreed to a meeting at a lawyer's office with both sides represented, not because she expected reconciliation, but because she wanted to know whether the man who had taught her to ride a bicycle could acknowledge the suffering concealed behind his financial success.
The office overlooked a crowded Dallas avenue, and Charles seemed smaller without a stage, expensive guests, or Grant standing beside him, although the posture he used to command board meetings had not entirely deserted him. He told Rebecca that he had built the company from a small workshop into a major supplier and that a missed government delivery could have bankrupted thousands of workers, then waited for her to accept the old family rule that his sacrifices explained everything.
"Those workers deserved leadership that told them the truth," Rebecca answered, remembering the technicians forced to sign certificates and the military families who trusted those certificates without ever seeing them. Charles looked wounded and insisted he had ordered a redesign, but when she asked why he had continued paying the intermediaries after he knew the modules were defective, his explanation collapsed into repeated claims that Grant and Kane had assured him everything would be repaired.
He finally admitted that he had feared losing the company more than he feared a system failure he could not picture, and the confession was devastating precisely because it was ordinary rather than monstrous. Charles had not stood in the extraction corridor or listened to the wounded on the radio; he had read numbers on a spreadsheet, decided he could manage the risk, and treated his daughter's warnings about responsibility as another challenge to his authority.
Rebecca asked why he assaulted her at the gala, and Charles said he had panicked when he saw her standing near officers who might recognize the Whitmore contracts. "You were the only person I could not order to stay silent," he whispered, and for the first time he acknowledged that the contempt he showed her had not come only from disappointment but also from fear of a daughter whose values exposed his own compromises.
She told him that understanding the fear did not excuse the assault, the humiliation, or the years he had spent trying to break her confidence, and that no amount of apology could restore the trust he had destroyed in front of people who honored service. He asked whether she would someday forgive him, and Rebecca answered that forgiveness was not a legal strategy or a reward for finally telling part of the truth, but a question she would decide only after she saw sustained accountability.
Grant, meanwhile, tried to persuade prosecutors that Sloane had controlled the fraud and that he himself merely approved paperwork prepared by specialists, but recovered messages placed Grant at the center of the substitutions and falsified certifications. His defense team then found evidence that Sloane's unauthorized data transfer occurred without Grant's knowledge, forcing prosecutors to separate what they could prove about financial fraud from what remained uncertain about intelligence compromise.
A counterintelligence review eventually established that the external account had indeed received procurement schedules but could not determine whether operational details from the extraction were part of that transmission. Rebecca felt disappointed by the uncertainty, yet she accepted the investigators' conclusion because her soldiers deserved findings that would survive scrutiny rather than accusations amplified by her family's scandal.
The injured medical officer, Captain Leah Morgan, testified in a preliminary hearing about the long rehabilitation that followed the convoy attack and the difference between learning to walk again and learning that preventable procurement failures had contributed to the danger. She did not ask the court to treat every tragedy of that night as the defendants' doing; she asked it to recognize that knowingly placing uncertified equipment into a mission had stripped deployed personnel of safeguards they had been promised.
Mercer reached out to Samir Haddad's family, and Samir agreed to appear through protective arrangements after hearing that Daniel Price and the laboratory witnesses had spoken. The growing network of independent testimony strengthened the case more than any single dramatic photograph, each witness describing a different piece of the process from inspection to shipment to field failure.
Before the trial, Rebecca revisited the damaged display photograph from the gala, which the hotel had carefully repaired and returned to the veteran's widow who originally donated it. The widow thanked Rebecca not for being a general but for catching the frame before the glass broke over it, and that small kindness reminded her of the person she wanted to remain after years of investigations and family conflict.
When Charles left the lawyer's office, he paused at the threshold and asked whether Rebecca remembered the summer he taught her to swim in a cold lake near their childhood home. She did remember the careful patience he showed then, the way he held one hand beneath her back until she stopped fearing the water, and that memory made the conversation harder rather than easier because it proved he had once known how to protect someone more vulnerable than himself. She told him that those good moments were real but did not cancel the later cruelty, and he nodded without trying to bargain for a different answer.
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Mercer later reminded her that military command could encourage people to believe every problem required a decisive order, yet family harm seldom yielded to a single instruction or confrontation. Rebecca agreed, realizing she could demand lawful accountability from her father without organizing her entire future around his response, and she began planning a long-postponed leave to visit June's farm after the court hearings ended. It was a small choice, but for someone whose private life had been swallowed by duty and scandal, choosing where to spend a quiet week felt unexpectedly radical.
As she left the hotel, Rebecca received a call from Romero announcing that Sloane had agreed to identify the beneficiary behind the unauthorized external account in exchange for consideration at sentencing. She stopped beside the entrance where her father had once thrown her cap, aware that the case might finally disclose the person who profited most from compromising information that should never have left protected government systems.
