Chapter 36
Will
The holding room was unlike any other I’d ever seen.
It was clearly a Mnemis space, with a surprisingly comfortable heavy wood chair at a solid wood table.
The walls were painted a calm light blue, and there were plants in huge pots at the corners.
A large screen television affixed to one wall could easily be smashed if I threw my chair.
If I weren’t zip tied to the chair.
Perhaps Mnemis had never used these rooms for interrogations. More likely, they were for meetings with VIPs who weren’t secretly attempting to steal things like Scarlett had been while she was here.
A Mnemis security guard stood on one side of the door.
After nearly crushing my windpipe, Percival had elected to join us, while one of his team members finished bagging our electronics.
Neither of them had said a word since securing me to my chair, but their message was crystal clear: try something stupid and see what happens.
The door opened, and a woman in tactical gear strode in. She dropped her helmet onto the table, then yanked off her face mask and gloves.
Dark hair fell loose to her shoulders, wet where it hadn’t been covered. Despite the gear and her bearing, she wasn’t military; otherwise, her hair would have been secured. But she also wasn’t playing dress-up. She was clearly comfortable in the heavy layers.
She had sharp cheekbones and bright green eyes that scanned everything in the room before she sank into the chair across from me.
“I endured a horrible ride on a little boat from Grand Bahama in a fucking hurricane to speak with you. I am wet, I am cold, and I am ready to be done with this. The sooner you tell me what I need to know, the sooner we can all get out of here.”
Straight to the point. I respected that, even if I had no idea what she was talking about.
She fixed me with her sharp green gaze. “Let’s start with something simple. Who do you work for?”
Simple? “Mnemis Digital Preservation.”
“Try again.” She didn’t blink. “We spent considerable time trying to verify your employment history at Redoubt Systems.”
They’d done their homework. “I worked at Redoubt after I graduated, then was hired here.”
“We looked for Redoubt. Phone calls got us nothing but the runaround. When we dug deeper into the company’s ownership structure, all we found was a maze of shell companies.
Layers upon layers of corporate entities that led nowhere.
” She leaned forward slightly. “And when we visited the site? All we found was an empty office space.”
Shit. They’d actually gone to the address? This was serious. “I don’t know anything about their corporate structure. I was just a remote employee.”
“A remote employee.” Her tone suggested she found the idea amusing. “And your wife? Also, a remote employee at the mysterious company that doesn’t seem to exist?”
“What’s going on here?” I asked, trying to shift the conversation. “Why did you separate me from my wife?”
An hour ago, Brie had whispered “I love you” against my chest, and now she was hidden somewhere in this facility. How had things gone from such an incredible high to this nightmare so quickly?
The woman ignored my questions entirely. “Your credentials at Redoubt Systems are fabricated. Your employment history is a lie. And yet somehow, you and your wife both managed to get hired at Mnemis within days of each other.” She tapped the tablet. “That takes planning. Resources. Support.”
I kept my mouth shut. Until she revealed what she was looking for, my protests wouldn’t accomplish anything.
“So I’ll ask again, and I’d recommend you think carefully before you answer.” She settled back in her chair, studying me as if I were a specimen under a microscope. “Who do you really work for?”
“I’ve told you—”
“The truth,” she said, cutting me off. “Not another cover story.”
The door opened before I could respond. Claire walked in, and the friendly act she’d been playing all week was gone, replaced by something cold and predatory.
The woman gestured her over without taking her eyes off me. “Show him.”
Claire moved to stand beside her, holding her own tablet. She tapped the screen and turned it toward me.
Security footage filled the display, featuring four different camera feeds arranged in a grid. High-def video of Brie moving through the Atlantic section appeared in the top left feed.
“Your wife was recorded loitering in the Atlantic section around clusters fifty-seven and fifty-eight.” The timestamp read 19:13. Three of the four feeds went black, leaving only running time counters where the video should have been. “And then, several cameras in the area went out.”
My heart sank—they’d discovered us sooner than I’d expected.
Claire continued, her voice cold. “We don’t have proof you disabled those cameras directly, but Ronnie’s maintenance override code was used.
Ronnie was speaking with me at that time.
And we have footage of you in that area both before and after the incident.
” She tilted her head as though challenging me to deny it. “It’s clear you cut the cameras.”
Think fast, Will. “We snuck off to make out, that’s all it was. You can ask Ronnie—he caught us.”
“Oh, we will,” said Claire. “However, the curious part is what happened after you disabled the cameras. Your wife logged into one of the KVM terminals at quarter past seven.”
Goddamnit! Brie had been so careful about wiping the server logs. They must have stored the KVM session logs somewhere else.
The dark-haired woman leaned forward again.
“Let me make sure I understand your story. You disabled the security cameras in order to ‘make out’ in a server room. And while you were doing that, your co-worker was distracting Claire, and your wife happened to log into a KVM terminal?” Her eyebrow arched. “Does that sound accurate to you?”
I grasped at anything that might get us out of this mess. “She doesn’t have access to open the rack doors, let alone to log in to one of the KVMs. And before you accuse me of doing that for her, I don’t have access either.”
Claire looked at the woman across from me, and something passed between them that felt like checkmate.
“At least,” Claire said, “not before Tremblay created her new ID card.”
The woman with the dark hair glanced at the tactical guard by the door—Percival—and something like pain flickered across her face.
Claire swiped to new footage. The security office from yesterday was shown, with Rav at the computer terminal, his back strategically positioned to block the camera’s view of his screen.
Scarlett argued with the guard, while Malcolm prompted Brie to accidentally-on-purpose collide with Scarlett as she waited for her turn.
“Your friend was very careful about his positioning,” the dark-haired woman said, her jaw tightening. “Almost like he was intentionally blocking the cameras while your other two accomplices were distracting the guard.”
She let the question hang for a moment, then began raising fingers as she listed my crimes.
“Fake employment history. Shell company that doesn’t exist. Coordinated insertion into Mnemis.
Camera bypass using stolen credentials. Fraudulent ID card creation with a sophisticated distraction operation.
Unauthorized server access. This is not a series of coincidences.
This is a planned infiltration operation. ”
I ran through the situation, searching for weak points in their arguments or excuses I could possibly make. But every angle led to the same conclusion: we were fucked.
Completely and thoroughly fucked.
“Now.” She pulled out a clear plastic pouch from her tactical vest and withdrew a photograph, sliding it across the table toward me. “Tell me about your work with Dr. Haddad.”
The face staring back at me was familiar—a middle-aged man with warm brown skin, graying hair, and dark eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses.
I’d seen him before. Possibly at the lab at Dalhousie, but after so many years, I wasn’t sure. “I’ve never worked with anyone named Dr. Haddad.”
“He gave several talks at Dalhousie. His research assistant worked there while you did.” She tapped the photograph. “Your molecular lab work. The same field as his research. The same university. The same time period. And now you’re here, accessing the exact server where his research is stored.”
That wasn’t even on my resume. How did she—
Claire kept asking about your time at the lab. She’d been tying me to this from my first morning.
“There’s been some confusion,” I said carefully. “I did some tech support at a lab during college—maintaining their computer systems, modifying equipment for their research team. But I never worked directly with any research scientists.”
“Tell me about Greek Fire.”
Where the hell did that question come from? “The incendiary weapon used by the Byzantine Empire?”
“Dr. Haddad’s research.” She said it as if she were correcting a student who’d given a deliberately obtuse answer. “What do you know about it?”
“Nothing. I hate to sound repetitive, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Her gaze hardened. “Why did your team infiltrate Mnemis? Why did your wife access the server containing his research?” One of her hands clenched into a fist. “Are you planning to sell it? Black market? Foreign government? Or did someone pay you to retrieve it?”
Think about this logically, Will.
Dr. Haddad, Greek Fire, research hidden in Mnemis. None of it connected to why we were actually here, but they thought it did.
“I’m telling you, I don’t—”
“Everything you’ve done tells me you’re after his research.
” She slid the tablet toward Claire and stood.
“So let’s stop wasting time. This research is too dangerous to let slide because you have a cute cover story and good operational security.
” Her voice took on an edge. “If you can’t tell me who’s paying you and what they’re after, this conversation moves to a different level entirely. ”
Claire leaned forward. “Black site level.”
“Black site?” I blurted.
Holy shit. They weren’t accusing us of a random corporate security breach. This was international intelligence. The kind of thing that made people disappear without a trace.
“Unless I can break Brie first,” said Claire. “She was about to spill everything to me before Tremblay intercepted her.”
There were only so many ways I could tell them I didn’t have the answers. And they obviously weren’t going to believe anything I said.
But admitting our real purpose would end our opportunity to free Joseph. Would Gideon have any other options? Would he agree to hand over data from one of his clients, potentially damaging his reputation in the process?
Will, you should have let Brie download everything when she had the chance.