Chapter 8: The Quiet Sabotage
The calm that followed the scandal felt deceptive, like a curtain drawn over a stage that was still burning behind it.
The headlines had quieted, the hashtags faded, the reporters turned to newer controversies. Yet beneath the polished surface of Congress, the machinery of rumor continued to hum, steady and unseen.
Sarah Cruz returned to the communications office on a Monday morning that smelled of rain and cheap coffee. The marble floors reflected light like glass, and her heels echoed against the corridor with deliberate precision. She smiled at the guards, greeted the secretaries, nodded at the interns. Everything appeared normal… but normality, she had learned, was often the first disguise of betrayal.
Her workstation had been moved.
A stack of papers she'd left on Friday was gone.
Her mug, the one Ralph had quietly placed beside her laptop after a sleepless night in the safehouse, was missing too.
The room was colder.
When she entered, conversation paused for half a heartbeat, then resumed, softer, like an edited recording.
Sarah sat down, opened her computer, and felt her pulse quicken. Her access drive was rearranged. Some files were gone. Others had been renamed. She clicked open the shared folder labeled Draft Speeches, and the screen flickered with lines of text that were almost right… but not quite.
"Congressman Del Mar supports the President's new allocation for private contractors…"
Her eyes stopped there.
Ralph would never say those words.
The document was dated two nights ago.
Authored by Sarah Cruz.
Her fingers froze on the keyboard. Someone had been using her credentials. Someone had slipped into their system and planted political poison in her name.
She leaned back in her chair, controlling her breath. Fear was useless now. Clarity was her only weapon.
Sarah checked the document's metadata, cross-referencing timestamps and IP addresses. It came from a terminal inside the office, during the hour she was still at the safehouse with Ralph. Someone wanted the story to point to her. Someone inside this building.
Her assistant, Nina, knocked lightly. "Ma'am, the Congressman is in session. Should I ---?"
"Close the door," Sarah said.
The girl obeyed.
"Who had access to the shared drive over the weekend?"
Nina hesitated. "Only the director from the PR subcommittee, ma'am… and someone from the Speaker's office requested remote clearance. They said it was temporary."
Sarah's lips parted, but no words came.
The Speaker, the Villaflor brother.
So it begins, she thought.
At the Congress hall, the air was heavy with hypocrisy. Cameras clicked, pens scratched, men in expensive barongs smiled as they crafted speeches about morality and public trust.
Ralph Del Mar stood at the podium, voice measured, words deliberate. His latest proposal, a transparency bill to regulate government contracts, was under review. The Villaflors sat across the room, listening, smiling faintly, their expressions too polished to be genuine.
He spoke of reform, of accountability, of the people's right to know. Yet beneath his steady tone was an ache, the image of Sarah's face that morning, pale under the fluorescent light, as she told him she'd go back to the office.
His phone buzzed once, quietly, in his pocket. He ignored it until applause filled the hall. When he checked, the message was coded, brief, and unmistakable.
They're inside the house.
Ralph's throat tightened. He raised his gaze across the chamber and met the Speaker's eyes. A slow, practiced smile crossed the man's lips, the kind of smile used to congratulate and threaten at the same time.
Ralph continued his speech. But now, every word about betrayal, every phrase about corrupted institutions, carried a weight heavier than politics.
That evening, the communications office emptied slowly. Laughter drifted from the corridors as staffers left for dinner. Sarah stayed behind, her mind methodically tracing the threads of what she'd discovered.
The planted files.
The remote access from the Speaker's terminal.
The subtle whispers that began the moment she entered the room.
She logged into the secondary server and found an entire cluster of duplicated data, speeches rewritten, statements modified, ready to be leaked at the perfect moment. All signed under her name.
Her phone buzzed again. Ralph.
"Tell me," his voice came, low and restrained.
"They used my clearance. Someone on the inside copied and edited your drafts. It's professional, deliberate, and they left a trail that points to me."
He was silent for a beat. Then, "You're sure it's internal?"
"I traced the IP to our own system. The breach was through admin-level access. That means one of our own people was bribed."
Ralph exhaled slowly. "If they want war, they'll have it."
"It's not war they want," she said softly, "it's control. They want to remind you who runs the chamber."
There was another silence. But this one was heavy with something unsaid, something raw.
When Ralph finally spoke, his tone had changed. "They're after you, Sarah. Not just professionally. They'll try to break your credibility, your name, your peace. And I won't let that happen."
Her throat tightened. "You can't protect me from every bullet, Congressman."
"Maybe not. But I can make sure they regret aiming at you."
The quiet that followed was too intimate for colleagues, too dangerous for confession.
He ended the call but didn't move for a long while. His reflection stared back from the glass walls of his office, tired and resolute.
He'd seen sabotage before. Political enemies planting evidence, insiders leaking memos. But this time, it wasn't about politics. It was personal. It was about her.
Sarah was more than his aide. She was the pulse of his campaign, the strategist who spoke in data and silence, the one who could steady his temper with a single glance. And now she was being hunted, not for her mistakes, but for her proximity to him.
In the corner of his desk lay a photo of his late mentor, the man who once told him: Power will test your principles. Love will test your silence.
He hadn't understood it then. Now he did.
Hours later, the building was quiet. The last lights flickered in the corridor. Sarah's eyes burned from staring at the monitor, but she couldn't stop. She needed proof. Evidence of who had betrayed them.
She opened a new folder by accident, one mislabeled Press Materials. Inside was a single video file. She clicked it.
The footage opened in grainy color. A small living room. Dim light. Two figures at a table.
Her breath caught.
It was the safehouse.
Her and Ralph.
The night they'd planned the counterattack against the scandal.
The camera angle was from above, hidden, discreet. Every word they said, every moment of silence between, captured.
She froze. Then she scrolled the timestamp. The recording began two hours before they arrived. Someone had been inside before them.
The safehouse had been compromised.
Her heart pounded against her ribs.
Her first instinct was denial, then rage, then a cold clarity that settled deep inside her.
She closed the video, copied it onto a private drive, and locked the door.
When she finally leaned back, the city lights outside looked almost beautiful in their cruelty.
It was nearly midnight when she called again. Her voice was low, calm, but beneath it he heard the tremor of fury.
"They planted a camera in the safehouse, Ralph. They've been recording us."
He didn't speak. Didn't breathe.
"I have the footage. I'll secure it off-grid. But we need to act fast. If this leaks, they'll twist it into something scandalous again."
He pressed his palm against his temple. "No one knew that location except,"
She cut in. "Except someone from the upper office. The same person who approved your budget transfer last month. Check your circle, Congressman. The enemy's closer than you think."
He wanted to say her name, but the word caught in his throat. All he managed was, "Come back to the safehouse. Now."
She hesitated. "I'm not sure it's safe anymore."
"Then I'll come to you."
"No, Ralph… not tonight. Let them think I'm broken. Let them believe their lies are working. Tomorrow, we'll give them a reason to regret it."
The line clicked off before he could answer.
She sat there in the dim office, listening to the hum of the air conditioning, the echo of her own heartbeat.
Politics was a game of appearances, but survival was an art of shadows. And Sarah Cruz had learned long ago that strength was not about loud victories, but quiet endurance.
She whispered to herself, half a prayer, half a promise, "They think I'm the woman behind the congressman. They have no idea I'm the woman behind the war."
Her screen glowed one last time before she shut it down.
A new email blinked open from an anonymous sender.
We warned you once.
Attached was a photo, a still from the safehouse video, her face blurred, Ralph's unblurred.
Outside, thunder rolled again over the city.
Somewhere in the silence, power shifted hands.
She had never been afraid of the dark corners of the office, but that night the shadows felt teeth, poised and patient. The building hummed with the soft breath of late air-conditioning, the corridors empty, the emergency lights casting a sickly amber. Sarah stayed because the footage needed one last pull, one last backup off-grid, and because she trusted herself to move faster than rumor.
Her chair scraped the tile as she stood to stretch, the laptop's glow painting her wrists silver. The lights in the hallway flicked, once, twice, a lazy stutter… and then the door behind her snapped shut with the dry finality of a locked oath.
She turned before the panic could form. Five silhouettes filled the doorway, human as their jackets and gloves, their faces half-hidden beneath caps and masks. It was an ugly, familiar choreography that had followed her career enough times to recognize a hit-team when it stepped out of the dark.
"Miss Cruz," the closest man said, voice muffled, practiced. "We'll take it quietly, and no one gets hurt."
For a breathless second, she weighed options the way she always did, logic first, emotion second, but the calculus ended on instinct. There was no time to craft an argument. There was only the movement of five people, closing like the tide.
She moved the way she always had, before speeches, before strategy maps… like a body remembering every hard hour on the mat. Her stance shifted, subtle and efficient, rooted at the hips, knees soft. Martial training was not just motion, it was language, and tonight she spoke in a grammar of balance and timing.
The first man lunged, short and brutish, arms out to pin. Sarah stepped aside, guiding his momentum with a light palm to his chest, redirecting rather than meeting force. He stumbled, surprised, and she used the opening, an Aikido wrist twist, the kind that bent the attacker into his own imbalance. He hit the floor with a heavy thud and only a curse to show for the fall.
Second came harder, angrier, a flurry of punches and a grab for her laptop bag. She blocked, then ducked, her forearm taking a swing she met with a low kick to the knee, measured and sharp. He buckled, breath knocked out of him, and she followed with a judo-style shoulder throw that sent him crashing, head spinning.
The others moved with coordinated menace, circling like predators used to group hunting. One reached for a taser, fingers certain, confident. She saw the glint in a sliver of metal, and she changed the fight's geometry. Her hand found the man's wrist, the grip closing like a vice, and she turned, folding his arm so his own weight brought him down. He cursed, a broken, surprised sound.
It was not graceful. It was efficient. Years at West Point had taught her endurance, martial arts taught her leverage, life had taught her to move when the world expected her to still be silent. She drove an elbow into the ribs of the nearest assailant, twisting to use his disorientation, and in a move drawn from Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu she locked an arm around his shoulder, took him off balance, and slid him to the floor where he lay groaning.
One of them pulled a knife, small and mean, the kind that lives shirtless in a back-pocket and thrives in close quarters. Steel met the light and for a fraction Sarah's chest narrowed, the old calculation flashing, distance first, disable second. She side-stepped, closed in tight, and the blade became useless. Her forearm came up to trap the wrist, bone-on-bone, and with a precise hip check she sent the attacker over, the weapon skittering useless along the tile like a dropped thought.
By the time the fifth man lunged, panting, the room smelled of hot breath and the copper edge of danger. He aimed for her head in a wild swing, a desperate arc, and Sarah ducked low, planting her foot and driving upward into his chin with a clean, reverberating palm strike. He convulsed, then collapsed, the air leaving his lungs in a rasping complaint.
She moved through them the way she'd moved through a thousand tougher things, fast, economical, without false drama. Her hands were steady, her breathing controlled. The office was a small battlefield, chairs overhead like broken trees, spilled coffee a map of haste, laptops blinking in the dim like tiny, wounded stars. She did not relish the violence. She took pains to avoid permanent damage. Her training insisted on control; her mind insisted on survival.
When the last man tried to crawl away, she was already there, boots on his back, throat-level distance between them. Her fingers found the zip of his jacket, and she pulled hard, bringing his face up to meet hers.
"Who sent you?" she asked, voice low and empty of anything like pity.
He spat blood into his palm, eyes brillo-bright with pain and fear. "Villaflor," he breathed, slurring the name into a threat and a confession. "We were told… make it look like her. Make it look like her and him, then the rest will fall… we don't,"
The sound broke off into a wet cough. Sarah held him with a grip that throbbed dully in her palm, the man's fracture of will making the night feel thinner, easier to see through.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket, an abrupt, mocking chime. She let it vibrate, then pulled it out. A single message glowed on the screen, anonymous, clinical.
Good work. The next step is quieter. Don't make noise.
She stared at the words, and the room swam briefly with the aftershock of adrenaline. Outside, somewhere far and merciless, the city breathed on, unaware that she had turned back five men with nothing but her body and the strategy of a hundred small preparations.
She didn't let the man speak again. Her thumb swiped the nearby security camera footage, and for the first time the chill in her spine found a new angle, there were blind spots in the office feed, gaps in the timeline, windows to the building that should not have been accessible. Someone with a key, or someone with the right code. The sabotage was surgical, intimate, threaded through people who wore the building's trust like paper thin armor.
She cleared the attackers from the hallway, moved their bodies into positions that looked like a break-in, a petty robbery gone violent. Her breaths came even, her hands steady as she picked up a fallen glove, smelling the cheap tobacco on it, a back-tattooed flash on a wrist, too small to be useful now, but a touchstone for later.
She cleared the office for anyone who might come in after, locked the door, and sat slowly at her desk, the world around her tilting back into ordinary shape as if nothing had happened, as if five men had not met their match in the quiet communicator in the corner office.
The adrenaline ebbed, leaving a raw clarity. She copied the incriminating file again, hid it in three separate drives, encrypted each with keys only she knew. Then she opened the safe drive and watched the grainy footage of the safehouse play one more time. The camera angle, the timestamp, nothing in the frame should have been there. The safehouse was meant to be a fortress against leaks. Someone had placed a camera inside before them, someone with clearance or with audacity.
Her lips moved, barely, a vow or maybe a calculation. The name the attacker had stuttered circled like a vulture, Villaflor, but the glove and the tattoo and the gaps in the security feed suggested something worse, something closer to the pulse of their own office.
Her phone buzzed again. Ralph.
Are you all right? His message read.
She typed back, fingers steady though tired, Yes, I'm fine, I handled it. Then her thumb hovered over send, and she added, They were in the office. They said Villaflor. But someone from inside gave them the door.
She watched the three small blue dots appear, saw his reply come quickly, a mix of fury and protection that she had come to expect but could never quite prepare for.
Save everything, then leave it forensics. Don't touch anything else. I'm coming.
She closed her laptop, stood, and walked to the window. Below, the city glowed, ignorant. The office smelled faintly of copper and oranges and something like victory.
The man on the floor made a sound, a loose, fearful sound that might have been a beseeching prayer, or a coward's curse. Sarah pressed her palm to the glass and watched the skyline, tense as the strings that pulled it all. She let the weight settle in her bones. This had been an attempt to silence her, but it had done the opposite. It had made everything clearer.
Someone inside had turned their access against them, and they had sent men to make sure Sarah never spoke again. She had proven them wrong. Her body bore the small marks, bruises forming like inked maps, but her hands were clean, and her mind was sharp.
She looked back down at the man and, without theatrics, she whispered, "You tell them we don't bend, not for money and not for fear. We break the machine from the inside out, starting tonight."
He glared at her, words useless. She left him where he lay, and in the darkness of the corridor she could almost hear the rest of the city hurrying down its quiet paths, unaware she had just rewritten part of its story.
A notification blinked again, anonymous and patient.
Careful, Ms. Cruz, you're getting close to the core.
She smiled, a thin, dangerous thing.
Then she sent Ralph one final line.
I'm not the woman behind the congressman anymore, Ralph. I'm the one he should be afraid to lose.