Chapter 6: Claudius Protocol — First Contact with the Contractor

The alumni directory was organized the way these things always are — by graduation year, then alphabetically, then by a professional summary that told you everything about what the person wanted you to think of them and nothing about what they had actually done. Daniel had been working his way through Georgetown Law's network for four days, cross-referencing names against Horatio's procurement record, against the partial log on the USB drive, against a mental map of the NSA's contracting architecture that he was constructing from publicly available Inspector General reports and two years' worth of appropriations footnotes that no one outside the relevant Senate subcommittees had ever been meant to read.

He found the name in a 2019 issue of the alumni bulletin.

Not in the directory itself. In the bulletin, in a three-paragraph item in the back section labeled *Community Notes*, which was where they put the things that weren't quite announcements and weren't quite news: a marriage here, a fellowship there, an adjunct position at a second-tier school. The bulletin item was about a man named Frank Delacroix who had started a private consulting practice after twenty-two years at the agency, and it mentioned, in the second paragraph, that his practice specialized in signals intelligence infrastructure advisory services, and that he had recently brought on a senior technical partner to handle his growing government-adjacent client base. The partner was identified by first name and last initial only — standard bulletin practice for anyone still inside certain non-disclosure windows.