Clearing her throat, she focused on the files, running her finger down the screen without looking at the wonderful, intelligent, gorgeous woman beside her who could never be hers. “Do any of these names sound familiar?”
“No,” Bec answered immediately, as though she’d already been reading through them.
“They aren’t abbreviations for diseases or anything?”
“I guess they could be, but I wouldn’t know what without opening them all. If I saw H1N1 or HEV, I would know they were viruses, but that’s not what these are.”
“Then we open them,” she said, clicking the first one. However, the file was empty, as were the next six.
“How can they all be empty?” Bec asked, leaning in close enough that her floral scent tickled Iris’s senses, adding to the sadness already engulfing her.
“Red herrings?” Iris asked, clicking out of the file and hitting the start button before clicking all apps.
“What are you looking for?”
“An app that fronts as something else but is a vault for files and photos. Something tells me Walter wasn’t as bad at technology as he led you all to believe.”
“That’s becoming apparent,” she agreed while shaking her head. “He had me fooled, though.”
“No, he kept you busy. There’s a difference. He could say whatever he wanted, but you were too busy to see what he was doing.” She paused for a moment and then grinned. “There you are.”
“What?”
Iris clicked on an app, which brought up a password box. “Folder Hider. A classic app for hiding and encrypting files.”
“Do you think the password is the same?”
“The hint for this one is Ignis plus Cerebri,” Iris said, pointing at the words under the empty password box. “I doubt he’d make it the same.”
“Brain burning,” Bec said instantly.
With a tip of her head, Iris typed in the two words but was told it was the wrong password.
“Add a hyphen. He always added a hyphen to the two words when he wrote it out.”
Iris added the hyphen. This time, the box opened, revealing files and pictures that weren’t encrypted. She opened the first file and clicked through pictures taken of Walter and his setup in the basement.
“It looks new in these pictures,” Iris pointed out, and Bec nodded.
“Maybe he took them to prove he had a system set up?” Bec asked as Iris kept scanning through them. At the end, there was a video, and Iris clicked Play.
“As you can see, I’m more than prepared to meet your organization’s needs. The lab is complete, and I’ll await your specifications and go ahead.” Walter spoke to the camera as though he was addressing a specific person or place.
“It’s dated one year ago,” Iris said, pointing to the date of the video.
“This explains why the other scientist didn’t know what Mina was talking about when she mentioned Ignis. He hadn’t made it yet. I was the sucker he brought in to make the vaccine for it.”
“Why would they need a vaccine for it if they’re terrorists?” Iris asked. “That part confuses me.”
“Simple. They don’t want to die. They’ll take the vaccine and protect themselves and those they love while sentencing everyone else to death.”
A shudder racked Iris at the thought. “We know that Walter set the lab up at someone else’s request, so now we need to find out who that was. If I were Walter, I’d want a contract, right? Let’s see if we can find one.”
She clicked open several more files, but Bec shook her head each time, telling her they were information about the base viruses she had seen in the freezer at Walter’s house. None of it told them why he was mutating a new virus or for whom. After ten minutes of searching, Bec blew out a frustrated breath.
“Maybe he didn’t have a contract or never uploaded it.”
“There had to be a contract, but maybe it’s smarter to follow the money trail. Mina said he went from being deeply in debt to being debt-free almost overnight. Unless she discovers a rich dead relative, it’s a bit suspicious.”
