Chapter 24
I walked down the short hallway to my office, my boots making no sound on the thick rug.
I opened the bottom drawer of my desk and pulled out the dusty yellow notepad I had found in the cedar chest, its edges frayed and the top page covered in my father’s old handwritten cyphers.
I brought it back to the dining room and laid it flat on the table next to Maya’s slip of paper.
“Is this the cypher he used?” I asked, my finger tracing the pencil marks my father had made more than a decade ago.
Maya leaned forward, her eyes scanning the columns of numbers and letters.
“That is the exact key,” she said. “The verification sequence matched that third line.”
The room seemed to tilt slightly, the hum of the air conditioning unit overhead suddenly sounding very far away.
My father had died in a burning helicopter over the Chesapeake eleven years ago, his recovery service attended by eighty men in dark suits who spoke of his service in hushed tones.
“He is alive,” I said, the words feeling heavy and foreign in my mouth.
“He is the one who directed me to your building,” Maya said, looking down at the table. “He told me you would know what to do with the logs once Harrison lost his security clearance.”
Rachel reached out, her hand resting on my forearm.
“Claire,” she said.
I did not answer her, my mind spinning back through the last five years of my marriage, through every network anomaly I had dismissed as a system glitch.
The warning on my terminal had not been an attack.
I picked up the yellow notepad, holding it tight against my chest as the rain began to beat harder against the floor-to-ceiling glass of the living room behind us.
May you like
The legal folders lay flat on Rachel’s mahogany desk, their edges worn soft from years of handling. Outside, the morning traffic on Eighth Street hummed through the double-paned glass, a low, constant vibration that rattled the brass paperweight near my elbow.
Rachel turned to the third page of the metallurgical analysis, her finger resting on a column of red figures. I adjusted my glasses to study the stress tolerance curves.
