by Jim Heskett
Still, he feels wrong. Wrong for having seen it. Wrong that they wrote it. Wrong that people know about it. Having this document in existence feels wrong. And, they want to kill it, to pretend it never happened.
It’s not right, what they want to do.
Something comes over Harry. He takes his phone out of his pocket and opens the binder again. He opens the camera app and holds it over the first page. While it’s common knowledge in the security industry that you can’t make photocopies or take pictures of A2 paper, there is a secret Harry knows. His friend Danny did contract work for DocuSeal last year and spilled all the juicy details, one night after too many beers. He even broke his NDA telling Harry about this.
If you lower your camera’s brightness all the way down, turn on your flash, and then hold your phone at a forty-five-degree angle to the page, you can take a photograph of a DocuSeal A2 page. Harry’s friend Danny signed an NDA because, if word of this got out, DocuSeal would be ruined as a company. It’s scandalous information.
And, Harry uses it to take pictures of every page of the report.
And, when Avery comes back in a few minutes to shred the report, Harry will spend the next eight years knowing it’s not gone forever.
43
Layne eyed Harry as he stood up, leaning on his cane.
“Where are we going?” Layne asked.
Harry glanced at the corners of the room. “Stairwell.”
“There’s no surveillance here. The whole building is clean. You know how Daphne is.”
Harry frowned. “Still. Come with me. I need to be sure before I show this to you.”
Layne shrugged and allowed Harry to lead him out of the room. Along the hall, each time the cane came down, it clicked. Harry carried his briefcase under his other arm. At the end of the hall, he pushed open the door with his cane and then waved Layne inside.
Layne entered the stairwell and looked around. Concrete, metal piping for handrails up the stairs to the second floor. A single beam from above shined a cone of a spotlight down on them.
Layne looked up the stairs to make sure the second-floor door was closed, then he turned to face his friend. “Tell me what’s going on, K-Books. All this cryptic stuff is very unlike you.”
Grunting, Harry lowered himself to the cold concrete floor and booted up his laptop. Layne watched as Harry connected to a VPN and opened an FTP client. After a few more keystrokes, a list of files appeared.
“What are you doing?” Layne asked.
Harry positioned his cursor over the first file in the list and then hesitated. “I did something bad. I knew it was bad at the time, but I felt like it had to be done. I felt like, no matter how damaging it could be, there had to be a record. I couldn’t let them destroy it forever.”
Layne stared at the filenames. Image001.jpg, Image002.jpg, et cetera. A sinking feeling pulled at the bottom of his stomach. “Okay?”
Harry took a notebook and a pen from his briefcase. He scribbled a string of text on a page, tore it off, and then handed it to Layne. His hand shook, making the slip of paper jitter in the air.
Layne bent down to accept the piece of paper. “What’s that?”
“The password to access the files. I’m removing my own access right after this. I don’t want to know anymore. I don’t want anything to do with it. Every day while Garret kept me prisoner, I kept wondering if I should tell him. Debating with myself. There were so many times I wanted to give up. To give him what he wanted.”
“Okay, man, it’s time to tell me what’s going on here.” But, Layne already knew.
Harry double-tapped on the first file and a picture appeared. The first page of the report he had worked so hard to recover in Texas, eight years ago. The report that Juliana Dewalt and Garret Robinson died trying to find.
How Harry had taken a picture of the supposedly uncopyable document, Layne didn’t know. And, it didn’t matter.
“Daphne said she watched Avery shred the files.”
Harry shook his head. “No, she lied about that. She didn’t watch it happen, because she dropped them off and then disappeared to run an errand. But, he definitely shredded the files. I was there when he did it.”
“You’ve had this the whole time,” Layne said.
“I don’t know if you’ve read it, but it’s bad. It makes the country look bad. But, people died for this. Americans died for this. I couldn’t get rid of it, no matter how wrong it was for me to keep it. I never intended for it to get out or anything like that, but I just couldn’t bring myself to let them destroy it.”
“If you’d told Ronald you had this, he would have killed you after. Probably, your family too.”
“That’s why I kept it a secret. But, I can’t tell you how hard it was.”
“I believe you,” Layne said. A few seconds passed, Layne staring at his friend, not knowing what to say.
“So, what do you expect me to do with it?”
“Have it,” Harry said. “You make the decision. Delete it, put it online, keep it a secret. I don’t know what the right answer is. I just know I can’t keep it anymore. I can’t keep putting myself and my family at risk for this information. You’re good at this stuff, Layne. You’ll know the right thing to do.”
Layne opened the slip of paper and looked at the server password.
“What are you going to do?” Harry asked.
Layne dropped to one knee as he put the slip of paper in his pocket. He reached out and put a reassuring hand on Harry’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, Harry. You don’t have to keep this secret any longer. It’s mine now.”
“But, are you going to keep it? Or will you tell people?”
Layne pursed his lips, opting not to answer the question.
44
Layne sat in the chair overlooking the backyard of his cabin in South Fork, at the base of a mountain not yet covered in snow. It would be white in a month, so he had to enjoy these warm late summer days, as often as possible. He and Cameron played on the snowy days, too, but her outdoor tolerance was much higher in the warm weather.
Twenty feet away, she played in a sandbox. Four railroad ties in a square, with sand piled in the middle. She was using an empty shampoo bottle to pour sand into her bucket. Fill up the bottle, pour it into the bucket. Pour, drain, repeat, over and over for the last fifteen minutes. Sometimes, she would invite Layne to come play with her in the sandbox, and sometimes, she would play alone. That was fine with Layne; if she enjoyed spending time alone, he had no problem with it. Whatever made her happy.
He liked to observe her play style, to see how she handled the logistical problems of moving the sand from one place to another. She would talk to herself and work out problems. Layne could watch this for hours.
She grinned at him, specks of sand all over her face and arms. He lifted a hand to block out the sun and winked at her. This made her giggle. The wink always made her giggle.
When she returned her attention to the sand, Layne lifted his laptop and opened the lid. He started the FTP client app and then took the little slip of paper from his pocket. The numbers and letters scrawled there in Harry’s jerky handwriting. Layne entered the long password to access the server, then the list of files stared back at him. The images Harry had snapped of the documents that would cause chaos if they ever went public.
Layne selected the checkboxes to the left of each of the images, then he clicked the button to batch-delete all of them. The cursor whirled as the photos vanished. The list grew smaller and smaller, eventually showing no files in the current folder.
Then, he crumpled up the server password and stuck it back in his pocket.
“Daddy,” Cameron said. “Come play with me.”
Layne closed his laptop and set it on the table, then he went to play sand bucket games with his daughter.
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Books by Jim Heskett
For a full list of all Jim Heskett’s books, please visit www.RoyalArchBooks.com
If you like thrillers, you’ll want to take a gander at my Micah Reed series. It’s where Layne Parrish got his start, actually. In particular, Micah Reed book #7, Shock Collar, serves as a "prequel" of sorts to the Layne Parrish solo series. See how a dog walk ending in bloodshed sends Micah on a quest for truth, and Layne on a path to reclaim his past and future.
About the Author
Jim Heskett was born in the wilds of Oklahoma and raised by a pack of wolves with a station wagon and a membership card to the local public swimming pool. Just like the man in the John Denver song, he moved to Colorado in the summer of his twenty-seventh year and never looked back. Aside from an extended break traveling the world, he hasn’t let the Flatirons out of his sight.
He fell in love with writing at the age of fourteen with a copy of Stephen King’s The Shining. Poetry became his first outlet for teen angst, then later some terrible screenplays, and eventually short and long fiction. In between, he worked a few careers that never quite tickled his creative toes, and he never forgot about Stephen King. You can find him currently huddled over a laptop in an undisclosed location in Colorado, dreaming up ways to kill beloved characters.
He believes the huckleberry is the king of berries and refuses to be persuaded in any other direction. If you’d like to ask a question or just to say hi, stop by at www.jimheskett.com/about and fill out the contact form.
