Chapter 8
The handle turned.
I shoved the notes inside my jacket and grabbed Nora’s sleeve. She clutched the recorder against her chest. The locker’s rear wall had a service hatch barely wide enough for a person to squeeze through. Someone had painted over its latch.
“Can you get it open?” she whispered.
“I can make it open.”
The door outside shuddered under another blow. My left leg throbbed hard enough to blur the edges of the room. I braced my shoulder against the hatch and pushed. Rust gave way with a shriek.
Nora flinched.
“Quiet exit,” I said.
“You’re hilarious.”
A voice outside called, “Check the back.”
I shoved again. The hatch sprang inward, revealing a narrow passage that smelled of dust and old oil. Nora slipped through first. I followed, catching my injured leg on the metal frame. Pain flashed white. I swallowed the sound and kept moving.
Behind us, the locker door crashed open.
A beam of light swept across the concrete.
We reached a loading bay and spilled into the cold night. Nora pulled the hatch shut behind us. Somewhere inside, a man shouted that the room was empty.
My phone vibrated.
Jake: Service lane. Now.
We limped and ran, which is a poor combination but the one available. At the lane’s far end, Jake stood beside a dark sedan, coat open, scanning the building. His gaze went straight to my leg.
“Still attached,” I said.
“Your standards are inspiring.”
Nora climbed into the back seat. I lowered myself beside her, careful not to let the notes fall out of my jacket. Jake took the driver’s seat and pulled away before the door had fully shut.
“They had the entrance covered,” Nora said.
“Then they knew where you were going,” Jake replied. “Not necessarily how you got there.”
She looked down at the recorder. “That distinction is supposed to comfort me?”
“No,” he said. “It’s supposed to keep us from guessing.”
The road shone under the streetlights. I pressed a hand over my bandaged leg and felt fresh warmth beneath the gauze.
Jake glanced at me in the mirror. “I checked the route code.”
“R-17?”
“It isn’t a route on any map I can access. It’s a Meridian archive designation. Old index, new storage. The second archive Gabriel mentioned.”
“Where?”
“Acquisition vault. That’s all I’ve got.”
Nora leaned forward. “You found it in the notes?”
“I found a reference to it in the badge history and cross-checked the code against a procurement directory. The vault itself is behind a due-diligence portal.”
“Which means a buyer can see it,” I said.
“Or thinks he can.”
My phone rang. An unfamiliar number.
Jake met my eyes in the mirror. “Could be Cross.”
I answered without speaking.
“Commander Mercer?” A man’s voice, tight and controlled. “Charles Whitman. We sat beside each other on the flight.”
“I remember.”
“Jake Morrison gave me your number. I told him I had something that might matter, and he told me to stop protecting the deal.”
Jake kept his eyes on the road.
“What deal?” I asked.
“My company is negotiating to acquire Meridian. I’m in our Washington office. There’s a suppressed audit inside the due-diligence portal, and it’s tied to the operation you were on.”
Nora turned toward me. She’d heard every word.
“Why call us?” I asked.
“Because I can either help you find out what’s in that audit, or pretend I never saw it. And if I pretend, whatever happened to your team gets buried in the purchase price.”
The sedan turned beneath a parking structure and stopped beside a service elevator. Jake killed the engine.
“Is your office secure?” I asked.
“It was an hour ago.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the honest one.”
Nora’s face had gone still. “You knew about the audit before tonight?”
“No,” Charles said. His voice sharpened. “I knew Meridian had legal exposure. I thought it was ordinary acquisition risk—contract disputes, cost overruns, the usual expensive language. This is different.”
“You want us to believe you didn’t know,” I said.
“No. I want you to come look at what I found and decide for yourselves.”
The elevator doors opened on the twelfth floor. Charles stood in the lobby, tie loosened, laptop open under one arm. He looked less like the man who’d filled a plane with his business calls and more like someone who had just discovered the room he was standing in belonged to somebody else.
He nodded at me, then at Nora.
“I’m sorry about the flight,” he said.
“Which part?”
“The part where I decided who you were before you said more than three words.”
I let that sit. We had bigger problems than his first impression, but he seemed to know that.
His office was all glass, steel, and lights left burning after midnight. On one wall, a presentation displayed Meridian’s logo beneath the words STRATEGIC ACQUISITION REVIEW. Charles shut the door and turned off the display.
“You’re still buying them?” Nora asked.
“Until tonight, I thought we were buying a company. Now I’m not sure what we’re buying—or what they’re trying to sell us.”
He opened the due-diligence portal. A list of folders appeared, most marked routine: payroll, facilities, contracts. One line sat beneath them, gray and restricted.
“Targeting audit,” I said.
Charles entered his credentials. The portal rejected them.
He tried again, then glanced at me. “This file’s under a separate permission set.”
“Can you request access?”
“I did. My company’s counsel denied it before I reached the end of the sentence.”
“And you kept going.”
“I’m not proud of how long it took me to get there.”
He opened another panel and typed a phrase from the field notes. The phrase had been buried in the margin beside R-17, not labeled as a password. A warning flashed: ACCESS WILL BE LOGGED.
Nora’s hand tightened around the recorder.
“Gabriel said not to use a networked device,” she said.
“I know,” I replied.
The warning pulsed on the screen. Behind us, the building’s ventilation hummed steadily, indifferent to the choice in front of us.
Charles rested his fingers above the keyboard. “If I stop now, they can erase whatever’s here.”
“If you continue, they’ll know,” Jake said.
Charles looked at the acquisition logo still faintly glowing on the wall. Then he pressed enter.
A folder opened. Three files appeared, each marked with a date and a red classification banner. Before Charles could click one, the display flickered.
ACCESS REVOKED.
He swore and tried the back arrow. The portal froze.
The glass-walled conference room beyond his office filled with movement. Two security guards in dark suits came off the elevator, speaking into their sleeves.
“They’re early,” Charles said.
“Were you expecting them?” I asked.
“No.”
A message appeared across the locked screen.
UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS DETECTED. SECURITY RESPONSE DISPATCHED.
Then a file window opened by itself.
Charles stepped back. “That shouldn’t be possible.”
The document’s header identified an operation I recognized but couldn’t discuss. Beneath it, the approval record showed a route change authorized by Daniel Thomas Mercer.
The timestamp was six hours after my medical evacuation.
Nora stared at the screen. Jake reached for the laptop, but the file remained open, bright as a flare.
May you like
I had been strapped to a stretcher, my leg torn open, watching the ceiling lights pass overhead.
On the glass beyond the door, one of the guards raised a hand and pointed directly at me.
