Chapter 4: Hello, King

"Try something," I said. "Try anything."

"I don't know the password."

"You don't know your name, either, and you fixed Oz's router."

John wiped his palms on his jeans.

He pulled the old laptop toward him with his good hand, and his cast clunked on the table.

For a second his fingers hovered over the keys.

Then they dropped.

He typed twenty-six characters without looking at the screen.

His eyes were on the window, on the gray afternoon, and his hands knew something his head didn't.

"What did I just type?" he asked.

Oz leaned over his shoulder.

"A password that starts with a zero and has a dollar sign. You didn't even pause."

The black screen blinked.

Then it brought up a folder called FILE_ZERO.

My mouth went dry.

There were forty-one documents inside it, and every one was a scanned page.

Contracts, memos and a stack of transfer records.

On each page half the text was covered by a black bar, and under every bar was a small padlock.

"Redacted," Oz muttered.

"No." John tapped the screen. "Locked."

"Someone wanted these hidden from anybody who got the drive, including me."

"The names are encrypted, and the key isn't on this machine."

"Where is it?"

"In my head, probably."

He laughed, a short ugly sound.

"Which is a hell of a place to keep a key when you're about to be pushed off a building."

I sat on the arm of the couch and read what I could.

The visible lines mentioned the words EMERGENCY NETWORK, ACCESS, FEDERAL LIAISON and a phrase that kept returning: AEGIS.

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