Chương 11
“Dad?”
“I saw him yesterday.”
“Condition?”
“Tired. Angry. He complained about the coffee.”
Harper closed her eyes for half a second.
That sounded like him.
Nora continued, “He wasn’t restrained when I saw him.”
“Why?”
“Sloane was trying to persuade him.”
“To do what?”
“Authenticate a sanitized archive.”
Harper understood. Sloane did not merely want to destroy the records. Destruction would leave uncertainty and copies. He wanted Thomas to certify a version that shifted blame downward—to dead employees, foreign partners, and subcontractors without the resources to fight back.
“Did Dad agree?”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“He threw the coffee at Sloane.”
Harper almost smiled.
Nora reached for her with swollen fingers.
“Don’t hand the archive to anybody whole.”
“That includes federal investigators?”
“That includes everyone. There are names in it that would get innocent people killed.”
“Then why preserve it?”
“Because there are names of the guilty too.”
The ambulance doors closed.
Maddox found a county emergency blanket and draped it around his shoulders. He had left his rain jacket in the rental when Hollis used the car as a barrier.
“Marina?” he asked.
“Hollis won’t allow it.”
“Since when has that settled anything?”
Harper looked at him. “You have a wife.”
“Yes.”
“Children?”
“Son. Eight.”
“Go home.”
“No.”
“You don’t owe Iron Ten anything.”
His right hand closed slowly, scar whitening.
“You remember that door?”
“Yes.”
“I had six Marines behind me and a civilian woman holding a baby. The upper hinge tore out. I knew the lower one would go. I kept thinking somebody would come from the hall and help.”
Harper said nothing.
“Then you appeared,” Maddox continued. “No helmet. Blood on your shirt. You told me to move my left foot three inches because the threshold was shifting.”
“It was.”
“You held the door with a steel pipe and got everyone through. I asked your name. You said Iron Ten. I spent nine years wondering whether I imagined you because no report admitted you existed.”
“You didn’t.”
“I know.”
“That doesn’t make this your responsibility.”
“No. But the fact that I’m here does.”
Hollis approached with car keys.
“You have one hour,” he said.
Harper looked at him.
“The marina is within county jurisdiction. I’m sending an unmarked vehicle. You open the unit with deputies present. Anything found becomes evidence.”
“And the river compound?”
“I’m requesting a state tactical team and notifying federal contacts through restricted channels.”
“That will take too long.”
“It will take as long as it takes.”
“Sloane moves Dad when he detects the request.”
“How would he detect it?”
“The same way he found your daughters.”
Hollis’s face tightened.
“Then tell me your alternative,” he said.
Harper looked toward the ambulance taillights disappearing through the pines.
“We give him what he thinks he wants.”
New River Marina sat behind a convenience store that sold bait, propane, boiled peanuts, and phone chargers beneath the same leaking roof. At two in the morning, the store was closed, but white security lights glared across rows of covered boats.
Storage unit twelve was a narrow corrugated-metal shed near the water.
The brass key from the coffee cup fit.
Hollis insisted on opening the door himself.
Inside stood a fourteen-foot fishing boat on a trailer.
Mason had not been joking.
The hull was faded blue. Dust covered the seats. A red bow had been tied around the steering wheel years earlier and left until the ribbon bleached pink.
On the side, someone had painted the name MARY ELLEN.
Their mother’s name.
Harper stood in the doorway.
For a while, nobody entered.
Maddox rubbed rain from his face. “You said they never bought a boat.”
“They didn’t.”
Hollis shone a flashlight over the registration sticker. It had expired eight years earlier.
Harper walked around the trailer.
The boat had no engine.
A cooler sat beneath the center bench. Inside were two cans of orange soda, swollen with age, and a folded grocery receipt from 2017.
Nothing else.
Maddox opened the forward storage compartment. Life jackets. Rope. A cracked plastic tackle box containing weights, hooks, and a single rusted spoon lure.
Hollis said, “Could be under the deck.”
Harper looked at the trailer tires. The front left tire was cleaner than the others, as if it had been removed recently.
She knelt and inspected the hub.
Graphite grease darkened the metal.
The same substance she had found on Thomas’s fallen slipper.
“Mason said they searched here last month,” she said. “Dad came home with grease on his shoe.”
Hollis crouched beside her.
She removed the dust cap from the wheel hub.
Inside, instead of a bearing cover, was a sealed plastic cylinder.
Hollis photographed it before Harper touched it.
The cylinder contained a flash drive and a note written in Thomas’s blocky handwriting.
HARPER—THE INDEX IS NOT THE KEY. YOU ARE.
Beneath that:
MASON KNOWS WHERE HOME IS.
Maddox read over her shoulder. “Helpful man.”
“He thinks he is.”
Hollis placed the flash drive in an evidence pouch. “This goes to a lab.”
Harper held out her hand.
“No.”
“Sloane expects a key.”
“You have the strip.”
“The strip organizes the archive. This drive may be a locator.”
“Or malware. Or evidence. Or both.”
“We need to know before sunrise.”
Hollis looked at the note. “What does ‘you are the key’ mean?”
Harper did not know.
Maddox walked to the boat’s stern, where the missing engine should have been. A metal identification plate remained bolted to the transom.
He wiped it clean.
The serial number had been scratched out.
Beneath it, Thomas had carved ten digits by hand.
Harper recognized them as coordinates.
Hollis entered them into his phone.
The location appeared four miles upriver from the Vantage compound.
A residential address.
Maddox read the road name.
“Reed Landing.”
May you like
Harper’s father had grown up there.
The original house was gone, destroyed by Hurricane Florence. The land had remained in the family because Thomas refused every offer to sell it. He said the property was mostly mud, mosquitoes, and bad memories, which was apparently enough to make it valuable to him.
