“Good idea,” I said, searching and finding the two previous nights’ footage as well. We watched, and found that at around the same time each night, a cleaning person entered and engaged in a similar activity. But the trash can they brought was smaller, and it was obviously a different person. Female, yes, and with a similar build—but with lighter hair.
“So,” Audrey said, “they replaced first the priest and then the cleaning lady.”
“This should have been impossible,” J.C. said. “Protocol should have made it so.”
“And what protocol is that?” Audrey said. “This isn’t a high-security facility, J.C. You spend year after year without any kind of incident, and of course you’re going to grow lax. Besides, the people who pulled this off were capable. Fake ID, knowledge of the times the cleaning lady entered and left. The uniform is the same, and they even cleaned the entire set of offices so nobody would be suspicious.”
I replayed the footage of the thief, wondering if it was Zen herself. The build was right. What was it Audrey had said before? People are usually far less secure than the encryption strategies—or, in this case, security devices—they employ. This could have all been stopped if the guard had glanced at the cleaning lady. But he didn’t, and why would he have? What was there really in these offices that someone would want to steal?
Just a corpse carrying a doomsday weapon.
I stifled a yawn as we eventually pulled into a residential area. Blast. I’d been hoping to find a chance to squeeze in a nap while we were driving. Even thirty minutes would do me some good. No chance for that now. Instead, I replied to Yol’s return email, telling him that yes, I did want to make Exeltec more frantic and yes, I did know what I was doing. My next set of instructions seemed to placate him.
We pulled up to a quaint white suburban house, rambler style, with a neatly mowed lawn and vines growing up the walls. A careful air of cultivation helped offset the fact that this house—with its siding, its small windows, and its lack of an enclosed garage—was probably a decade or four past its prime.
“You’re not going to hurt my family, are you?” Dion asked from the front seat.
“No,” I said, “but I might embarrass you a little.”
Dion grunted.
“Come introduce me,” I said, shoving open the door. “We’re on the same side. I promise that when I recover your brother’s body, I won’t let I3 do anything nefarious with it. In fact, I’ll let you watch the cremation—with I3 getting no chance to lay hands on the body—if you want.”
Dion sighed, but joined me in climbing from the car and walking toward the house.
14
“Keep watch,” I said to J.C. as we approached the house. “I haven’t forgotten that Zen is out there.”
“We might want to call in some backup,” J.C. said.
“More Rescue Rangers?” Ivy asked.
“Time Rangers,” J.C. snapped. “And no, we don’t have temporal substance here. I was talking about real bodyguards. If Skinny hired a few of those, I’d feel a whole lot safer.”
I shook my head. “No time, unfortunately.”
“Perhaps you should have explained the truth to Zen,” Tobias said, jogging up. “Was it wise to let her think we have the information she wants?”
Behind us, Wilson pulled the SUV away—I’d given him instructions to keep driving until I called him for a pickup. I didn’t want Zen deciding to apply a little interrogation to my servant. Unfortunately, if she was determined, simply driving away wouldn’t be enough to protect him. Perhaps I should have told Zen we didn’t have her information. Yet my instincts said that the less she knew about what I’d discovered, the better off I’d be. I just needed to have a plan in place to deal with her.
Dion led us up to the house, glanced over his shoulder at me, then sighed and pushed open the door. I grabbed it and held it for my aspects, then slipped in last.
The house smelled old. Of furniture that had been polished over and over, of stale potpourri, and of burned wood from an old hearth. The careful clutter offered a new oddity on each wall and surface—a line of photos in novelty frames down one hallway, a collection of ceramic cats in a shadow box near the door, a sequence of colorful candles on the mantel with a religious tone to them. The house didn’t look lived in, it looked decorated. This was a museum for a family’s life, and they’d done a lot of living.
Dion hung his coat beside the door. The only coat there; the rest were stored neatly inside an open coat closet. He walked down the hallway, calling for his mother.
I lingered, stepping into the living room, with its rug on top of carpet and its easy chair with worn armrests. My aspects fanned out. I stepped up beside the hearth, inspecting a beautiful wall cross made from glass.
“Catholic?” I asked, noticing Ivy’s reverence.
“Close,” she said. “Greek Orthodox. That’s a depiction of Emperor Constantine.”
“Very religious,” I said, noting the candles, the paintings, the cross.
“Or just very fond of decoration,” she said. “What are we looking for?”
“The decryption code,” I said, turning. “Audrey? Any idea what it might look like.”
“It’s digital,” she said. “For a one-time pad, the key is going to be as long as the data being stored. That’s why Zen was after the flash drive.”
I looked around the room. With all of this stuff, a flash drive could be hidden practically anywhere. Tobias, Audrey, and J.C. started looking. Ivy remained beside me.
“Needle in a haystack?” I asked her softly.
“Possibly,” she said, folding her arms, tapping one finger against the opposite forearm. “Let’s go look at pictures of the family. Maybe we can determine something from them.”
I nodded, walking over to the hallway that led to the kitchen, where I’d spotted pictures of the family. Four in a row were formal photos of each member of the family. The picture of the father was old, from the seventies; he’d died when the boys were children. The mother’s picture and Dion’s picture had what appeared to be pictures of saints hanging beneath them.
No saint beneath Panos. “A symbol that he’d given up on his faith?” I asked, pointing to the empty spot.
“Nothing so dramatic,” Ivy said. “When a member of the Greek Orthodox Church is buried, a picture of Christ or their patron saint is buried with them. That picture would have been taken down in preparation for his funeral.”