Chapter 4 - The Wrong Kind of Approval
By Friday, Martin Vale had made a formal complaint about me. It alleged that I'd harassed a base visitor, mishandled private information, and damaged the reputation of a company approved to participate in transition workshops.
Major Brooks called me in before morning formation.
"You will not contact PAX on official business," she said. "And you will not use your father's experience as proof of what happened to the unit roster. Understood?"
"Understood."
"You can report your personal concerns through the appropriate civilian channels. Here, we need to answer a narrower question: who released information, under whose authority, and when?"
Staff Sergeant Ward stood by the filing cabinet. She had the expression she wore before telling a Marine to redo a week's worth of careless inventory entries.
"I found something," she said. "Not evidence of fraud. Evidence that I made an error."
Last summer, PAX had offered to staff a table at a voluntary transition-resource fair. Ward had assembled an attendee-interest list so the command could estimate how many chairs and information packets to arrange. She'd saved two versions. The first included names and contact details taken from internal scheduling records; the second removed those fields and contained only totals.
"I sent the totals to the event coordinator," Ward said. "But I also left the first draft in a shared folder that an outside administrative contractor could access."
I stared at her. "You never told me."
"I didn't realize the access was broader until the review began."
Brooks held up a hand. "That mistake matters. It doesn't prove PAX opened the file or that Corporal Ross authorized anything. Information security is checking access logs. We have also begun notifying the proper privacy officials."
Ward looked at me. "I should have caught it."
A week earlier I would have wanted to tell her that I had caught it, that everything would be all right. But Teresa's unopened letters and my father's lowered eyes had changed the meaning of carelessness for me.
"We both should've been more careful," I said.
After the meeting, Ward found me near the mailboxes. "If the logs show that an outside contractor downloaded it, people could lose faith in this office."
"Maybe they should lose faith until we prove we deserve it."
She flinched. I regretted how sharp it sounded, but didn't take it back.
At noon, Teresa sent me her billing summary. I told her I could help sort it only with her explicit permission and on my own time. She typed back: I WANT A REFUND, BUT MOSTLY I WANT SOMEBODY TO STOP LYING.
I called the county veterans service office, with Teresa beside me on speakerphone, to ask how she could arrange an appointment with an accredited representative. The clerk offered an opening the following week. There was no guarantee about the outcome of her claim; someone would finally review her documents with her.
That afternoon Brooks received a preliminary access report. The version with contact details had been downloaded from the shared folder four times. Three downloads belonged to internal administrative users. The fourth came from a temporary outside-contractor account associated with a facilities vendor that had supported event registration.
"Does that mean PAX got it?" I asked.
"It means we have a lead to examine," Brooks replied. "We do not jump over the steps in between."
At the bottom of the log printout sat the time of the fourth access: 5:42 p.m. on a Monday. I knew that Monday. I'd gone home early to take Dad to an appointment, and Ward had stayed late to finish event paperwork.
"I was there," Ward said softly.
She pointed to the workstation identifier. It was the old desk in the unoccupied room beside ours. Someone had used that terminal after visitor hours.
"Who had the key?" I asked.
Ward looked toward the hall where Vale had confronted me.
May you like
"The event contractors," she said. "And everyone who escorted them."
