My mother-in-law dumped scalding water on me, called me a useless beggar, and threw me out of my own house. She thought I'd come crawling back in tears. Instead, when she opened the front door the next morning, she found a military convoy waiting outside—and I was standing at the front in my U.S. Army dress uniform.

The drive back to Oakridge Estate was tense. Lauren had called Ethan and instructed him to lock all the doors and windows and wait for her in the basement. She didn't want to panic him, but the threat of a foreign intelligence group targeting their home was very real.

When she arrived, two black unmarked vans from her cyber-intelligence unit were already parked in her driveway. Technicians in civilian clothes were sweeping the yard with signal-detection equipment.

"Colonel," Captain Ross, her lead analyst, said, stepping out of the house. "We found the device. It was a physical keylogger and network bridge hidden inside a standard wall-outlet extender in the guest wing. It’s been transmitting data to a server in Eastern Europe for the last month."

"Did they get my command codes?" Lauren asked, her hand resting on the holster of her service weapon.

"No, ma'am," Ross replied. "Your personal terminal requires biometric verification. But they got your daily schedule. They know when you're home alone. And they know Ethan’s schedule too."

Ethan emerged from the basement, his face filled with anxiety. He looked at the technicians, the equipment, and then at his wife, who was issuing orders like a seasoned battlefield commander.

"Lauren, what's going on?" he asked, his voice trembling.

"Ethan, your mother was used," Lauren said, taking him aside. "The 'technician' she brought in to fix the Wi-Fi was actually a corporate spy hired by a foreign competitor of Vanguard Biologics, who was then bought out by a hostile state actor. They used Margaret’s greed and stupidity to plant a listening device in our home."

"Oh my god," Ethan gasped, leaning against the wall. "She... she didn't just try to hurt you. She compromised national security."

"She didn't know what she was doing," Lauren said. "They offered her fifty thousand dollars to 'help monitor' my computer because they told her I was running an illegal offshore gambling site. She believed them because she wanted to believe I was a criminal."

Suddenly, Captain Ross's tablet beeped loudly.

"Colonel! We have a signal match! The foreign operative’s transceiver just activated. They're within five hundred yards of this house. They’re coming to retrieve the data bridge before we can wipe it."