Mercer shook his head. "You're turning an emergency response into an accusation."
"No, I'm preserving the order in which things happened."
The federal technician raised his hand. "Agent Williams, I can separate dispatch operations from the Sloan administrative environment."
"Will county communications stay online?"
"Yes."
"Can we maintain a read-only mirror of the hidden server?"
"Yes, but I need to cut external write permissions first."
"Do it."
He began isolating the systems.
Maya gave the next instructions carefully: "Keep dispatch operational. Keep the transport voice relay active. Block all outside administrative writes. Preserve existing sessions in the forensic mirror."
Mercer said, "You're changing department infrastructure without command approval."
Maya looked at him. "Federal evidence and a federal witness are both being affected by the same contractor environment. We're stopping additional modification while preserving public safety operations."
The technician confirmed the first separation. "External write channel blocked."
Lena checked the dispatch screen. "County relay is still live. Transport still connected intermittently, but the route is no longer accepting remote changes."
Maya nodded. "Good."
Another technician examined the cyber response configuration more closely. "There's a function here I don't like."
"What function?"
He enlarged the menu: Sanitize event chain.
Maya moved beside him. "What does it do?"
"It strips selected session relationships from the active incident history when the system enters emergency mode."
Lena looked at Mercer. "That isn't necessary for network isolation."
Mercer said, "I didn't design the software."
"No," Maya replied. "Calvin Sloan did."
Mercer crossed his arms. "Then ask him why it exists."
"We will."
The technician opened the command history. "Agent Williams, there's more." He displayed Mercer's activity from immediately before the cyber protocol had been activated: Mercer had opened an administrator configuration document, then accessed the emergency response section, then searched within the document. The search term appeared on the monitor: Sanitize event chain.
Maya read the sequence twice. "When did he open this?"