Chapter 10: The Walk Out

The boardroom on the fortieth floor had a table made from a single piece of black walnut.

Evan was given the chair at the foot of it.

Nine people sat along the sides.

Ethan sat at the head, in his father's seat, with his hands flat on the wood.

Maya sat at his right with a leather folder and a very sad face.

Two staff members stood by the wall.

The older board member cleared his throat.

"This is not a trial, Mr. Green," he said. "It's a conversation."

"Then I'm ready to talk," Evan said.

Maya opened her folder.

"I'll keep this short, because I hate it," she said.

"Last Thursday at 5:04 a.m. someone logged into our primary file servers from a Director account with no clearance.

"The address was inside Harbor Crest."

She put a page in front of each board member.

"The account belongs to Evan. The wiper began two minutes later."

Papers rustled.

Evan took the page they handed him and read it.

It was good.

It was a very good forgery, with the right timestamps and the right server names.

A string of digits in the corner was invented, and he could prove it in under a minute.

He could have asked for the real logs, and read the real record out loud.

The real record would show the quiet room he had built, the false server he had fed to the wiper, and the hand behind them.

It would show a man the whole world had been hunting for four years.

And every person at this table would stare at him and ask why Thorn had been sleeping in Harbor Crest.

He kept his hands in his lap.

"I did log in that morning," he said. "From my own laptop, in my own room.

"I read the news about the company I work for. I did not touch the file servers."

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