Down in the conference room, the leader of the pack—a sixteen-year-old girl named Maya with neon-streaked hair—wasn't talking. She knew her rights, and she knew the NCIS agents couldn't prove she had the "package."

The mood in the room shifted. That locker belonged to a Navy Commander recently found dead in a staged hit-and-run.

The blue light of the monitors washed over the bullpen, but Special Agent Timothy McGee wasn't looking at code. He was looking at a group of teenagers sitting in the conference room—the "Brat Pack," as the night shift had already dubbed them. They weren't your typical street hoods; they were tech-savvy, bored, and remarkably efficient at bypassing high-level security.

"They didn't just break into the warehouse, Gibbs," McGee said, tapping his tablet. "They ghosted the entire grid. They used a localized EMP burst to knock out the cameras, then used a Raspberry Pi to spoof the biometric scanners. That’s not a prank; that’s professional-grade infiltration."

Maya’s bravado flickered. She looked at her friends through the glass, then back at Parker. "We thought it was just a dead-drop for high-end gear. We didn't know it was… that." "What is 'that'?" Parker asked.

"A key," she whispered. "But not for a door. It's a hardware wallet. We tried to crack the encryption, but it started a countdown. If we don't put in the right sequence in the next hour, it broadcasts our location to the owner."

Alden Parker leaned against his desk, sipping a Thai iced tea. "And yet, they didn't take the encrypted drives or the prototype hardware. They took… what, Knight?"