The realization hit me with the force of a physical blow.
The air in the vault went cold.
The Empress hadn't just triggered an audit to expose Cho. She had anticipated that the Golden Koi would try to fix the ledgers. She had fed Cho false information about the IA team's schedule, knowing Cho would pass it to me.
It was a trap. She wanted to catch the ghost of the Golden Koi inside a federal evidence vault.
My pulse was loud in my ears.
"They're thirty seconds away from the security desk," Claire warned. Her voice was tight in the comms.
"We can't go back out the front door," Ethan said, his eyes wide in the green glow of the NVGs. The green made his skin look sick. "If we engage federal marshals, we're dead."
I looked around the vault. It was a reinforced concrete box. There were no windows, no secondary doors, and no drainage grates.
The walls were bare. The ceiling was low. The air smelled like dust, paper, and metal.
