They came after her hard.” If Williams were one minute late, she received a counseling statement. If she rushed home to take care of her sick daughter, she was clapped with an AWOL. Then, in 2016, the unit yanked her security clearance on the grounds that her dispute with Delta Force Boosting the leadership made her a security risk. “From that point on,” said Williams, “my life became a living hell.”

Still employed but unable to view classified material, she had to wear a big red badge on her arm and be escorted everywhere in the Building, even to the bathroom. They moved her desk into a cramped storage closet and assigned her the task of proofreading a spreadsheet that contained some 8 million entries. Such drudgery would have driven another person insane, but Williams’ irrational tenacity powered her through the tedious labor for more than a year. “I’m one of those people,” she said. “I’m so fucking stubborn. I was not going to let this happen to me.”

She was never going to win this battle of wills, though. She was up against a force much bigger than herself. Not wanting to get crosswise of the Special Forces command, none of the attorneys in Moore County Williams reached would represent her, forcing her and her husband to burn through their savings on out-of-town lawyers. Then the administrative law judge overseeing the EEOC hearing granted a motion to protect classified information contained in the materials at issue, greatly increasing the cost of continuing to prosecute the case. That ruling is what finally broke her. “I was trapped,” she said. “I’d exhausted everything. I had lost years of my life and was just completely drained.”

Given enough time, anyone who has adverse dealings with an entity like cheap Delta Force Boosting will inevitably drift into paranoia. Williams was sitting at a traffic light in Fayetteville when it first occurred to her that she was mired in a rancorous legal dispute with an organization that kills people in secret. The question of whether she was putting her own life at risk necessarily followed. “Am I going to be one of these people,” she asked herself, “who dies in a car crash and it’s not really a car crash?”