My fingers brushed against the metal casing of my backup hard drive.

“Will this work?” I asked, pulling out the rugged, rubber-coated external drive I used for storing our family photos.

Reyes grabbed it from my hand like it was made of solid gold.

“It’s perfect,” Reyes said.

He plugged the blue cable into his tablet and then into the side of the drive.

A small white light on the plastic casing began to blink.

“The transfer logs are heavily encrypted using the base’s legacy finance system,” Reyes explained, his eyes reflecting the blue light of the screen.

“Who encrypted them?” Jake asked.

“The request came from an off-base IP address,” Reyes said, his voice dropping. “But it used a military credential to bypass the firewall.”

“My credential,” Jake said.

It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” Reyes said. “They used your digital signature while you were still in the intensive care unit in Landstuhl.”

My stomach turned over.

While Jake had been fighting for his life under a ventilator, his own family had been using his identity to systematically strip his bank accounts.