“They’d made one attempt,” he said. “There was going to be a second. I could go into a protection program and stop working, or I could be dead and keep working.

I was fifty-nine years old and I had six years of documentation on a family that had bought a wing of the Pentagon, and every institution I could hand it to had at least one Vance-shaped hole in it.”

“So you went dark.”

“So I went dark.”

He’d spent eleven years running an off-books network — sources inside two contractors, an auditor at DCAA, a woman in a records office in Fort Belvoir who has since retired, and Maya Ellis, whom he’d found through a veterans’ forum in 2023 and spent four months persuading not to hang herself.

“That part I’d do again,” he said.