“The black box,” she concluded.
John smiled. “Exactly. We needed to know what you took that was making Thorn so reckless. He had his head of security torturing people to find you, so we knew you’d stolen something else from him besides a diamond. We didn’t know what the box was at the time, but if Thorn wanted it so badly, that was a good enough reason to make sure he didn’t get it.”
“Okay, that makes sense. You don’t have to tell me twice that the man’s a douche,” she said. “But why was a team from the DCO brought in to help Thorn? What does he have to do with the DCO?”
The director sighed, his brow furrowing. “Sometime, I’ll tell you the entire history of the DCO, but for now, Thomas Thorn is my boss. He and several other very powerful individuals pull the strings of the DCO from behind the scenes. Some of them are good people, but others—like Thorn—are corrupt, violent, and evil. When you stole his property, he tried to use DCO assets to track you down so he could get it back.”
Dreya shook her head. “What the hell is so important about that box that it’s worth killing over?”
“My tech people could do a better job of explaining to you exactly what it is, but in layman’s terms, it’s a hard drive. A very large and very secure digital storage device.”
Dreya had thought it was something like that when she’d first seen it. “I hope you looked at what was on it before you gave it to him,” she muttered.
Rory was dead because of Thorn. She hated the idea that he’d gotten what he wanted after he hurt so many people.
John gave her a smile. “We never gave it back to him. Ivy and her partner Landon were able to trick Thorn into believing the black box was destroyed in the explosion that collapsed the building on the so-called thief. We gave him remnants that looked right, but we kept the real one.”
That was a relief.
“What’s on it?” she asked, even though she was sure John would say the information was too classified for her to hear.
“I wish we knew,” he admitted. “Thorn has been doing illegal crap for decades, and we think evidence of it is all on that hard drive. Unfortunately, the box requires a special hardware key to access the data on it as well as some kind of long complex code to decrypt the data after you get to it. We don’t have either of those things. Ivy broke into Thorn’s mansion a little while after we convinced Thorn the storage device had been destroyed, but she couldn’t find the key or the code. Which isn’t surprising. I doubt he’s going to keep anything of value there now.”
“Or he got rid of the key after he thought the storage drive had been destroyed,” Dreya pointed out.
“We thought of that, too,” John said. “That’s why I’ve had people digging through his garbage for weeks, both from his home and his Chadwick-Thorn offices. So far, they haven’t found anything.”
Dreya cringed at the thought of digging through the mountains of garbage a place like Thorn’s defense company would produce. She hoped John never asked her to look through someone’s trash. She’d have to wear a biohazard suit.
“We’ve also been thinking that the black box you stole was Thorn’s backup drive and that he might have another matching drive at Chadwick-Thorn,” John added.
“What makes you think that?”
“Because within weeks of your break-in at his home, Thorn started a major security upgrade at Chadwick-Thorn. We haven’t been able to get in to look around yet, but we’re working on it.”
Dreya thought back to the night she’d broken into Thorn’s home. She’d searched his desk in his study to see if there was anything interesting in it, and while she hadn’t seen anything that looked like a hard drive key, she’d found a long, complex series of letters and numbers written in a little black book in his desk. It had been way too long to be a normal password, and all the letters and special characters meant it wasn’t an account number for some offshore account.
“I think I might know the decryption code,” she said.
He looked at her surprise. “You do?”
She told him about finding the book in Thorn’s mansion when she’d broken in two months ago. “Except there weren’t any booty call numbers listed. It was all user IDs and passwords.”
“And you think the password could be our decryption code?”
She shrugged. “It was twenty-four characters long and a completely random mix of letters, numbers, and special characters. I can’t imagine what else it could be.”
“Did you write it down somewhere?”
Dreya shook her head. “No. Remember, I told you a couple of days ago that I memorize stuff like that? I committed every user ID and password in the book to memory in case I ever needed them.”
John stared at her, clearly stunned. “You memorized a book full of numbers two months ago and still remember them?”
She almost blushed. “It’s not that big of a deal.”
“Trust me when I say it is.” He took out a small spiral notepad and pen from the inner pocket of his suit jacket and handed them to her. “Write down the code and anything else you remember from that book.”
Ten minutes and five pages later, Dreya handed the book to her boss. “That’s everything, including some info on overseas accounts. If you want to go in and transfer a few of those into my bank, I won’t complain.”
