* * *
Chapter 22: After
The drive was on the kitchen table.
I had put it there when they came in, taken it from my pocket and set it down in the middle of the table the way you set down something that needs to be looked at directly before anything else. Dominic had put his keys beside it. They had stood on opposite sides of the table for a moment, looking at the thing, and then he had gone to make coffee and I had sat down.
It was eleven forty-three at night.
I texted Cleo: I'm back. All good.
Cleo responded: call me tomorrow.
I put the phone face-down.
* * *
Dominic put two cups on the table, not beside me, across from me, which was how they had arranged themselves since the beginning. I had noticed, at some point in the past three weeks, that the arrangement had shifted slightly: the distance across the table was the same, but the quality of it was different. Less tactical. More like two people who had run out of reasons to maintain formal geometry and hadn't yet replaced it with anything else.
"We need to know what's on it," I said.
"Yes."
"Tonight, or tomorrow?"
He considered that. "Tonight. If there's something time-sensitive, if Salas has any indication we were at the building, we need to know the scope before morning."
I nodded. I had already been thinking the same thing. I had been thinking it since they left Tchoupitoulas, had been running the calculation in the background while the rest of my mind processed other things: how long before someone noticed the padlock had been opened, whether the building had cameras I hadn't seen, whether Fosse had any remaining connection to Salas's operation that would generate a notification.
I pulled the laptop toward me. Dominic went to the office and came back with his, and an adapter for the drive's older connector.
"It might be encrypted," I said.
"It might." He plugged in the adapter. "We'll find out."
I held out my hand for the drive.
He gave it to me.
I plugged it in.
* * *
It was not encrypted.
That was the first surprise, and then immediately not a surprise, because Reyes had been building this for a specific recipient, someone who would understand the context without a key, and adding encryption added variables that could prevent the right person from accessing it at the critical moment. He had trusted the physical security of the hiding place instead.
He had not been wrong, for seventeen years.
The drive contained four folders. I opened them in order.
The first: financial documentation. Transaction records, company registrations, bank transfers, all of it painstakingly organized and cross-referenced. Ramón Salas's operation laid out in the kind of detail that took years to assemble, not justthe money but the mechanics, the human nodes, the people who had processed and moved and concealed. I scrolled through it for eight minutes, reading selectively, understanding the architecture.
"This is enough," I said. "For prosecution. Easily."
"For Victor too?"
"Victor appears in here as of 2000." I found the entry, turned the laptop so he could see. "He was managing the financial reconciliation for two of the shell companies by the time he was nineteen."