Five Years After His Helicopter Crash My Father Sent a Warning - Magfeeds.net

“Would you like to speak to a manager?” she asked.

“No,” I said, lifting my suitcase. “A manager cannot change a federal warrant.”

By five o’clock, the rain had turned the bricks of Eighth Street a dark, shining black. I sat in the corner chair of Rachel’s office, my single suitcase resting against my ankle like an unwanted guest.

Rachel was at her desk, her laptop screen throwing a pale blue light across her face. Three empty paper coffee cups were lined up near her phone, each marked with a smudge of lipstick.

“I can file an emergency appeal first thing tomorrow,” Rachel said, without looking up from her typing. “But the judge who signed the order is a close associate of Patricia’s brother.”

“They wanted to isolate me,” I said. “They think if I have no money and no home, I will stop looking at the shipping manifests.”

“It is a standard starvation tactic,” Rachel said. “They make the cost of fighting too high to bear.”

I reached into my coat pocket and felt the hard plastic edges of the backup drive. The Vances believed they had secured every terminal in my office, but they did not know about the direct copies I had pulled before the locks were changed.

“They can take the penthouse, Rachel, but they cannot take the server backups,” I said.

Rachel stopped typing and looked at me, her hands hovering above the keys.

“If we use those files without a formal subpoena, Harrison will have the Justice Department charge you with espionage,” she said.

“The Senate hearing is in nine days,” I said. “By the time they file the charges, the entire committee will have seen the logs.”

Rachel slowly closed her laptop, the screen light fading from her face.

“My spare room is small,” she said, reaching into her desk drawer for a brass key. “But the door has a solid deadbolt.”

I took the key from her hand, its metal cold against my palm.

“That is all I need,” I said.

Rachel stood up and led me down the narrow hallway behind the filing cabinets. The floorboards creaked under our feet, the sound familiar and dry in the quiet office.