Jessica Knight looked up from her notes. "Snack cakes. Two crates of vintage Hostess snacks and a pallet of energy drinks. But while they were in there, they tripped a silent alarm on a secondary locker—one that wasn't supposed to be on the manifest."

Maya’s bravado flickered. She looked at her friends through the glass, then back at Parker. "We thought it was just a dead-drop for high-end gear. We didn't know it was… that." "What is 'that'?" Parker asked.

As the clock ticked down on the 720p monitor in the lab, the Brat Pack realized that their weekend of "harmless" hacking had just put them in the center of a federal war zone.

Down in the conference room, the leader of the pack—a sixteen-year-old girl named Maya with neon-streaked hair—wasn't talking. She knew her rights, and she knew the NCIS agents couldn't prove she had the "package."

Alden Parker leaned against his desk, sipping a Thai iced tea. "And yet, they didn't take the encrypted drives or the prototype hardware. They took… what, Knight?"