Chapter 9: Behind the Wall

I had not been inside that room since the night I left it.

The steel door stood at the end of the Cellar, scarred and dented, with a cut hasp hanging off the frame.

Beto had kept it shut for five years and stacked folding chairs in front of it.

I moved the chairs myself.

Beto brought a sledgehammer.

"Are you sure?" he asked.

"No," I said. "Open it."

The door swung in on a smell of old iron and cold.

The room was smaller than I remembered.

The floor was concrete, the walls were white steel panels, and the back one had a lumpy, sloppy patch of plaster across it.

Nothing in it had changed.

In the corner stood the steel crate I had used as a chair for two days.

I looked at it, and my mouth went dry.

"Dalia," Beto said gently.

"I'm fine."

I picked up the sledgehammer and swung.

The plaster burst in a gray cloud.

Behind it was a steel box the size of a toaster oven, bolted to the wall, with cables running into the ceiling.

A faded label on the front read SECURITY RECORDER, ALDECOA FREIGHT, BAY 9.

Beto laughed once, short and unbelieving.

"I plastered over it with a trowel and a bucket," he said. "I thought it was a fuse panel."

I pried the front panel off with a screwdriver.

Inside were two slots, side by side.

One held a black hard drive about the size of a paperback book.

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