Page 25 of Velvet Vaughn

“Take your time. I’m isolating a sandbox on my end.”

Anja tapped twice on the trackpad, and the window rearranged itself. Leo came into the frame beside her.

Tyler’s eyes flicked up and then brightened. “Hey, Leo. Good to see you, bud. I didn’t know you were the client.”

“Yeah, lucky me.”

“Buckle in, because for the next several hours, I’m going to be the most paranoid man in your life.”

Leo glanced at Anja. “You’ve got competition for the title.”

Tyler nodded. “Fair.” He set his mug down off-screen. “Anja, walk me through what you’ve got.”

“A cheap, generic encrypted thumb drive, a burner flip phone powered off with a single contact saved as answer, and a handwritten note on hotel stationery that instructs Leo, quote, ‘not to trust his own people.’ All three arrived at Leo’s office via courier this afternoon. The return address is a sports agent named Victor Shaw, who was found dead in a Kansas City hotel room. The story that’s being pushed is suicide. We don’t believe it.”

“Why is that?”

“Because the note was written by a man who expected to die, and because Leo saw Shaw three nights ago at a steakhouse and Shaw was being hunted.”

Tyler absorbed that. “Understood. First things first. Before you plug that drive into anything, I need you to build an isolated environment. Is your field laptop the Hardened Three or the Hardened Four?”

“Four.”

“Good. Pull up your tool menu, go to Quarantine Mode, and select Level Three. That’ll partition the hell out of your storage, kill every network adapter except the one talking to me, and route all drive activity through a virtual container I can see from my side. Anything on that thumb drive that tries to phone home hits a wall I built three weeks ago. You’ll never know it happened, and neither will they.”

Anja’s fingers moved. A menu cascaded, selections clicked through, and a thin red border appeared around the edge of her screen.

“I’m in Quarantine Three.”

“Container’s up on my side. I can see your sandbox. Plug the drive in.”

She did.

Leo watched everything happening in awe. The vernacular flew right over his head, but damn, it was impressive. It was obvious they knew what they were doing.

A folder appeared on Anja’s desktop inside the red border. A single encrypted archive sat inside it, the file icon mocking them with a gold padlock.

“There it is. Beautiful. Okay. Standard encrypted archive, probably AES-256, which means the password is the only thing between us and whatever Shaw wanted you to see. Brute force isn’t happening tonight on a file this size. We need the password.”

“Leo tried the obvious ones at his office. Shaw’s name, birthday, the hotel name, and the postmark date.”

“Of course he did. Amateurs always try the obvious ones first.” Tyler’s eyes shifted to Leo on the split screen. “No offense, Leo. It’s a compliment. Lawyers are usually smart enough to try and dumb enough to keep trying.”

He wasn’t sure, but he thought that might’ve been a double slam. “Uh, thanks?”

Tyler chuckled. “Here’s what I need from you. Shaw probably wouldn’t have picked a password you could guess cold. He’d have selected one you had to think about. Something that belonged to the world you both lived in, that nobody outside would recognize. It could be a reference, a code phrase, or even a joke. Take a breath, close your eyes, and think about the two of you in the same room at the same time. Where were you? What were you talking about? What did Shaw used to say?”

Leo closed his eyes.

He saw Vic Shaw at Tony’s and at industry events with a beer in one hand and a grievance in the other. He recalled him at a bar in Indianapolis during the Super Bowl, thirty feet away, catching Leo’s eye across the room and lifting his glass in a mock salute he’d meant as sarcasm, which Leo had chosen to interpret as a truce.

Hmm, maybe the password was alcohol-related since he always seemed to have a drink nearby.

He went further back to when they were both junior agents brand new to the industry. They had sat in a windowless conference room in Columbus, Ohio. The moderator had been a retired college football coach named Roy Banister, and he had opened every single session with the same five words. It had reminded Leo of a priest bestowing a blessing, and every new agent in that room had learned to chant it back. The phrase had shown up on the inside cover of the packet materials in all capitals and on merchandise handed out to attendees. They’d been Vic’s running joke for years afterward.

Leo opened his eyes.

“Try ‘The client eats first, always.’”