"I want you to not touch it," Nadia said.
"That wasn't a request."
"Neither was mine."
Renata, standing eight feet away with Okafor's hand on her arm, watched this exchange with the focused attention of someone running a calculation. Her jaw was set, her breathing was controlled, but something moved behind her eyes: a recognition, a recalibration of exactly how far this was going to go before it stopped.
Calhoun reached for the module.
"Captain," Nadia's voice cut through cleanly, "that device contains encrypted federal records. If you remove or damage it, you will have destroyed federal property under active evidentiary seal."
Calhoun's hand paused. His hand paused for exactly four seconds. Then he reached in and wrenched the module free.
It came out with a sound of torn wire and cracked housing. A small indicator light, green until that moment, went red, then dark.
Calhoun held it up and turned it in the light. The casing had split along one seam. "Federal records," he said. "Sure."
He set it on the car roof. Then he picked up the crowbar that Sharp had been using on the door panel, and he brought it down on the module. Once. Twice. On the third swing, the housing shattered.
What Calhoun did not know, what he could not have known because he had destroyed the only visible evidence of it, was that the module had completed its encrypted transmission at 4:19 a.m. The data it carried had been received by a secure federal server in Quantico, Virginia, timestamped, logged, and assigned a case reference number. The destruction of the module had accomplished nothing except to add one more item to a list that was already very long.
Nadia looked at the broken module on the roof of her car. "The data already transmitted," she said.
Calhoun looked at her. "What did you say?"