What neither of them knew was what my last deployment had actually been.

Not a rifle in a trench.

Financial intelligence — six months embedded in the precise, patient work of tracing how money moves when someone is trying very hard to hide it, how shell companies nest inside shell companies, how offshore accounts are structured to look like nothing, and how, with the right tools and the right people, all of it can be pulled back into the light and laid in front of a judge.

I had spent half a year becoming an expert in exactly the crime my brother had committed against my family.

It was the blackest joke of the whole affair: while Torsten was setting up his shell entity and his offshore accounts, confident that his soldier brother was too far away and too simple to matter, that same brother was on the other side of the world learning, professionally, how to take apart precisely the kind of structure Torsten was building.

They had committed a financial crime against the one member of the family who had just spent six months being trained by the federal government to unravel financial crimes.