Masters (Man Down #2)

Chapter 10

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E lizabeth did as Masters had asked and considered what she could possibly know that would point him in the direction he needed to go, to narrow down the suspects. When dinner was over, Masters again asked her for suspects, and she shrugged. “I’ve got nothing. As far as I’m concerned, it’s got to be connected to that USB key.”

“It does make the most sense,” he noted, “but we’re still very short of information on it.”

“But you see something on it, right?”

“Yes, we’ve got people digging into the USB file. So far we found information on a case, a case that was not investigated by his office.”

She frowned, as she stared at him. “Was there any information on it?” she asked. “Did Nicholas even have the clearance or whatever to be looking into that case?” she asked.

“Not necessarily. We don’t know that yet. I haven’t been able to access the individual files, as Nicholas encrypted them. So we’ve got people working on recovering whatever information is on it.”

She nodded. “Do you think it was a case my brother was looking into privately?”

“That’s possible,” Masters replied. “Again I don’t have that information yet.”

“And would you tell me if you did?”

He nodded. “If I can, yes. I don’t have a problem sharing that information, unless it’s classified at a level that would make that inappropriate, such as, top secret,” he added, with an eye roll.

“Isn’t it all top secret? Aren’t you guys all crazy about the status of information such as that?”

“To a certain extent, sure,” he agreed, “but you should be kept in the loop to a certain extent as well.”

“I don’t think your coworkers believe in that,” she muttered.

He smiled. “Right now, my boss is Jasper, and Jasper has a very different outlook on how we treat the family of the victims.” She winced at the term, and he nodded. “The thing is, that’s exactly what you are, and whether Nicholas is alive or not doesn’t change the fact that he’s a victim of a crime and that you are his family.”

“Do you think anybody but you will move on this case now?”

“They are certainly taking a hard look, at least Jasper is,” he said, correcting himself.

She stared at him. “Why do I get the feeling a big cover-up is involved?” He gave her a flat stare, and she groaned. “So, sharing the truth with the family will only go so far.”

“Exactly. Those conversations only go so far. I don’t have tangible information, so you’ll have to leave that part of it until I do.”

She hesitated, wondering if it was safe to trust him, when his phone rang.

He answered it and held up a finger to her and whispered, “Hang on a minute.” He put a hand over the mouthpiece and said, “I need to take this call privately. I’ll be right outside.” And, with that, he quickly walked out the front door, talking on his phone.

As she sat here and waited, the waitress came around and asked her if she wanted coffee. She hesitated, not sure what Masters would want, then decided what the hell. She could use a cup regardless. She ordered coffee for them both. When he returned to the table a few minutes later, his expression was a lot less approachable than before. She groaned. “So, that doesn’t look like good news.”

He gave her a quick glance. “Did your brother ever say anything about a Gary Trojan?”

Her eyebrows shot up, and she frowned. “I’ve heard that name, something to do with his work, I think. I’m pretty sure. Why?”

“Something was in the Evidence file. I’m to ask you whether Nicholas ever talked to you about it.”

She slowly shook her head. “If he did, it wasn’t much. It wouldn’t have been a Sit down, this is important, and we need to discuss this conversation or I would remember it,” she explained, looking at him. Then she rubbed her forehead, closing her eyes.

“What is it?” he asked, as she was obviously getting something.

“I think maybe that Gary Trojan had some connection to somebody who worked at the bank.” She stared off into space, then pulled out her phone and brought up the directory on the bank’s website. She turned her phone so he could see. “This guy, Larry Trojan,” she said, tapping the picture on the screen. “According to this, he still works there, but this directory hasn’t been updated in a while, and I don’t think he’s there anymore.”

“Do you know what happened?” he asked, staring at the name and the face in the photo on the bank’s website.

“I’m pretty sure he was let go for some reason,” she replied.

He sat back, his fingers rapping on the tabletop in front of her. “That’s pretty interesting.”

“It’s a connection that I hadn’t considered,” she shared, staring down at the phone.

“Did you have anything to do with him?”

She shook her head. “No, I didn’t, but the new owner”—she frowned—“Fred might be friends with him.”

“Might be? Define friends?”

“I don’t know for sure,” she noted. “I just remember seeing them together at one point in time, laughing, like they were old friends, but I guess in a work scenario you don’t ever know what that means.”

“True enough,” he muttered. “Okay, so leave that to me. I’ll do a history on both and see what we can come up with.”

“Does this come back down to me again, then?”

“I don’t know that it comes back to anybody,” he noted, “but information about Gary Trojan was on the USB key.”

“Right. So, there’s a chance my brother might have found out something about somebody who works with me.”

“It’s possible, yes.”

“But then, why not use that information to get me to do something?”

He hesitated, then said, “This is a good time for me to ask you point-blank if anybody has asked you to do something because of Gary or Nicholas. Has that happened in any way?”

She stared at him in shock, then glared at him. “No,” she snapped, “and if anybody had pressured me to do something illegal or unethical, I would have gone to the police.” His smile was one of the gentlest she had ever seen on a man’s face.

He nodded. “You love your brother, and you would do anything to save him.”

Tears came to her eyes, as she covered her face and nodded. “Yes, that is true. I would have theoretically done anything I could to save him. But I haven’t had any such request or any communication with Gary or Larry Trojan or about Gary or Larry Trojan.”

“Would anybody else at work have access to your emails or have access to anything in your office area that could have compromised your emails?”

“Sure,” she said. “I don’t even answer most of my own emails. We have a computer system that sends certain emails regarding certain topics or certain clients to various designated people at the bank. Then we have a person at the end of the day who sorts through the ones that don’t go anywhere else. Obviously I use my email for my private clients, and when I say private , I don’t mean outside of the bank, but private as in clients I’ve worked with exclusively for a very long time.”

He pondered that. “So, to the best of your knowledge, no way could any email directed to you have been ignored or deleted or diverted elsewhere, like outside of the bank’s personnel?”

“No,” she replied. “To the best of my knowledge, that’s true. And if you are telling me now that somebody has been waiting for a response, that makes no sense, not after so many months.”

He nodded absentmindedly, as he stared out the window.

She studied his face, wondering what new horror was emerging. “It would help if you could tell me what else is going on.”

Jolted out of his thoughts, he turned to her. “The thing is, I don’t know what else is going on. After I take you home, I need to meet up with Jasper,” he reminded her. “Hopefully, by then, they will have gone through more documentation on that USB, and we may have a better idea of what is happening.”

“Will you even be allowed to tell me?”

“I don’t know. I will talk to them and see.”

The waitress brought the coffee just then, and Elizabeth looked down at it and muttered, “Somehow I don’t even want this anymore.”

“We ordered it, so let’s sit and enjoy it,” he suggested. “I didn’t want to upset you, but these are questions that have to be asked.”

“And yet you asked a variation of them already.”

“I did, and this case just got a little more convoluted, I guess.”

She groaned. “It still doesn’t explain why Nicholas has been held captive as long as it’s been. If somebody did have my brother and if they planned to utilize him to blackmail me into doing something, that would have nothing to do with Mason’s case. That would have been a blackmail scenario addressed to me some four months ago. And I can’t see a way to explain why they held off all this time.”

“It’s the holding off that I don’t understand either,” he muttered. “It’s got to be some timing issue.”

“So, that would imply that something threw off their timing because there’s no need to kidnap Nicholas months ago only to hold off doing anything with that leverage.”

“Unless he was about to do something, and, by kidnapping him, they prevented it.”

“But not killing him?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.

“I don’t know,” he muttered. “We still lack some critical information.”

She smiled. “Maybe. But I have to say that whatever intel you do have, I am not at all upset to hear that people are considering that Nicholas might still be alive.”

He gazed at her intently and nodded. “You do realize that if he is alive, he—”

“It doesn’t matter. We’ll get through it. Whatever it is that he’s been through, we’ll figure it out. We need him home so he can heal,” she explained. “He’s strong. He’s capable, and I know that whatever has gone wrong in his world happened because he found out something that other people didn’t like.”

“You have that much faith in him?” Masters asked.

“Absolutely. I know him inside and out,” she declared. “Nicholas is one of the good guys in the world.”

“We need to get him home,… if he’s still alive. And I sincerely hope that he is.”

*

Masters waited until Elizabeth finished her coffee, then to see if she was ready to go. She stood up and nodded. “Are you okay to go home alone?” he murmured.

She nodded again. “Absolutely. You go figure out whatever the hell is going on. That’s more important.”

“No, it’s not. It’s also important for you to stay safe because, no matter what’s going on, somebody was at your brother’s place.”

She winced that. “And it was a professional-looking deal,” she murmured.

“Meaning that they rented a van and had uniforms.”

She nodded and winced again. “Of course that’s pretty easy to imitate, isn’t it?”

“Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to imitate. Two guys, overalls, toolboxes, heading into an empty house. Yeah, way too easy.”

As they got into the car, she asked, “Any chance they put bugs in his house?”

“I’ve been considering that,” he replied. “I know where there’s a bug finder. I might borrow it and take a run by Nicholas’s house.”

“Let me know if you do, please.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I’ll be coming to check out your place as well.”

She stared at him, shocked, and then sagged back into the seat and closed her eyes. “God, going down this pathway is not what I expected.”

“It never is,” he stated. “But the farther down this pathway we get, the more we find out, and it’s likely to get uglier before it gets better.”

She rolled her eyes at that. “You could have at least told me that it would all be fine and that we would get all the information and that I would be having Sunday brunch with my brother before I knew it.”

“Considering the fact that he’s been gone for four months and that you haven’t heard a word from him in all that time, it would be incredibly wrong of me to even imply such a thing. We don’t know whether he’s alive or dead. All we know is that somebody is playing games. I know that you believe he’s alive, and we will hope for that. If they call you back, please contact me. Don’t give them any information, and don’t let them know that you’re alone or that you contacted the police or anything else.”

“No, I won’t,” she murmured. “At the same time, that’s not exactly an easy thing to do.”

“You could just not answer your phone,” he suggested. “Just let it ring and see if they leave a message. For all they know, you’re in the shower.”

“Oh, that’s a good point,” she muttered. “As much as I want them to call, now you’ve made it so I don’t want that call at all.”

He smiled. “I’m not trying to set you off here. All I’m doing is asking you to keep all avenues open and to not get anybody into such a panic that they do something stupid.”

She winced. “Ouch, that felt like it was directed at me.”

“It’s not,” he declared. “Kidnappers, if they’ve opened the door to communication, can be extremely unstable.”

“ Great ,” she whispered under her breath. She got out at her house and added, “So, you need to be careful too.”

He flashed her a bright smile and nodded. “Not an issue. I’ll call you when I’m out of my meeting.”

She hesitated, then he raised one eyebrow. “That’s fine,” she noted, with a shrug, then turned and resolutely strode up her front walk.

He frowned, knowing that coming back here wasn’t the smartest idea. Yet something about that stiff back of Elizabeth’s and the firmness of her attitude kept her spine upright. He called out to her and asked, “Is it okay if I come by afterward instead of calling?”

She flashed a bright smile as she nodded. “That would be great.” And, with that, she ran up to her front porch.

He waited until she was locked inside, then headed down to his meetup with Jasper. As he walked into Jasper’s office, he found Jasper angrily ending a phone call, glaring at the phone. “Looks like that went well,” Masters said, as he turned to close the office door.

“No, it sure didn’t,” Jasper confirmed. “At the moment, my lovely boss doesn’t want me to step on any toes, until we have more information.”

“Which could make sense, depending on what a headache we’re facing.”

“So, this Trojan person,” Jasper began, “was on the base and was convicted of smuggling on his way back from overseas. He always protested his innocence and declared it wasn’t him, how it had nothing to do with him. He was eventually jailed and got quite badly beaten in prison. When he went to the prison infirmary, he somehow had a medical emergency and died. The USB key appears to have information that shows he was basically stonewalled into this.”

Masters frowned. “So, Nicholas found information that another case had been fixed, so that this guy was charged and went to jail, and now that Nicholas came up with that evidence, it looks possible that somebody might have done the same to him?”

“That’s one avenue of thought, and another one is here,” he stated. “His office was told to park the case and to put it to bed. That it was a done deal and they needed to move on because they had other open cases to work.”

“Moving on because you have other cases isn’t necessarily a foreign thing, assuming the Trojan case was solved.”

“And it was solved,” Jasper replied. “Solved as much as anybody could deal with at the time. He’d already been in prison, and he’d applied for an appeal. This office was never asked to get any more information or to deal with it in any other way.”

“Okay, so in that scenario, it’s got nothing to do with this initial team then?” He had to smile at the amount of potential relief he was anticipating.

“But there are also signs that some of the documentation in this case had been presented earlier, giving him a full alibi. That alibi apparently went missing, and, according to the prosecutor, that documentation was never received on his side, and he’s blaming this office.”

“And does the information Nicholas had change that?”

Jasper rubbed his face, clearly frustrated. “The files on that USB key include the document giving Gary Trojan a full alibi.”

“Okay, so I don’t understand.”

“Nobody does at this point, which is why I’m not allowed to bring it up any further. But it appears that Nicholas was investigating a case where Gary Trojan died in prison, after being convicted of a crime he didn’t commit. Nicholas had found proof, some proof anyway, that the accused couldn’t have done the job because he wasn’t even in the country.”

“That’s a pretty big alibi to not have released,” Masters muttered, exhaling.

“Exactly. Apparently some of his travel documents couldn’t be produced at the time. Anyway let’s just say that, for reasons we don’t yet know the details of, everything went sideways, and this Gary Trojan guy ended up being convicted and then died in prison, never having had the chance to get anybody to believe his story.”

“I wonder if he approached Nicholas directly.”

“I don’t know,” Jasper replied.

As Masters sat down, he added, “So, here is another twist for you. This person who died while wrongly convicted… had a brother, Larry Trojan, who worked at the same bank as Elizabeth.”

At that, Jasper sat back and stared at him. “What? You’re kidding.”

“She didn’t remember where she knew the name from, when I asked her if Gary Trojan was familiar to her, but it wasn’t long before she’d connected this Larry Trojan guy to her work, who has since been let go. And speaking of work, she also thought that something was weighing on Nicholas related to his work, though she didn’t know any details. Anyway, back to the Trojan last name, she did recognize the name and brought up an employee directory from the bank’s website.” He quickly tapped on his phone and waited for the website to come up. “She was sure he’d been let go, but the website apparently hasn’t been updated in some time, so his name and photo are still here on the bank employee roster.”

He handed his phone to Jasper, who then opened the file on the desk in front of him, and brought up a photo of the other man’s face. He showed both, side by side, to Masters.

“Definitely brothers,” Masters muttered, as he compared the two photos.

“The question is, does that affect anything?” Jasper asked.

“I don’t know,” Masters admitted, “but it could be why the original investigation team was suspicious of Elizabeth’s involvement in Nicholas’s disappearance.”

“Or worried about Elizabeth’s connection to both Trojan and Nicholas.” Jasper frowned at that and then nodded. “We obviously have some overlaps here.”

“And we know that, in this business, overlaps are dangerous.”

“Yeah, they sure are,” he muttered.

“Also Elizabeth got a very short Private Number call from who she swears is her brother, which gives her hope he is still alive and seemingly nudges his case to be reopened.” He looked over at Jasper. “But none of this so far applies to what happened to Mason.”

“No, it doesn’t. I did talk to Tesla, and she is looking into the lives of the four men who work here on this original investigation team. Technically, one of them, Steve, already on medical leave, was on his last active day the very first day I got here. He doesn’t work here anymore.”

“Convenient timing.”

“I did wonder about that, and I do have Tesla finding out just why he’s no longer working here.”

“And, so far, nothing’s come up on the others?”

“No, not so far. Tesla will do a bang-up job of finding their background info, but she’ll also be slightly limited because she can only check records and search for any information that might tag somebody as being in a compromised position. We must be careful about going too far and getting into a scenario where either they or the brass gets tipped off. Which, if anybody knows that they’re being watched…”

“Exactly,” Masters interrupted. “Which reminds me of two more things. I texted you that Elizabeth and I were followed on our way to dinner. I’ve got one of Mason’s team searching for that. We only got four letters of the license plate, but it’s a start. And I want to borrow your bug finder and take a look at both Nicholas’ house and Elizabeth’s.”

Jasper got up, pulled it out of the closet, and handed it to him. “Let me know what you find on both those issues.”

“Oh, I will. I’m still quite perturbed about this other case, the Trojan guy, because it seems we have somebody in this office potentially compromising cases.”

“And that’s possible, but it could also be somebody in the Records Office or somebody in the DA’s office,” Jasper noted. “We can’t necessarily land any of that blame on this office.”

“But the fact that Nicholas himself has potentially been resurrected as a kidnapping case, instead of a missing person’s case, surely brings the point into further focus.”

“Which is why the conversation I just had now has me so frustrated,” Jasper stated, glaring at the phone. “The boss here is the same boss who the initial investigation team had talked to about making sure these cases were minimized. And not only minimized,” he added, “but that the files are more or less hidden to the point that we had to ask for Morgan to get us access to the rest of the file.”

They both nodded at that.

Masters noted, “It’s still not getting us anywhere though. We have a dead, possibly wrongly convicted Gary Trojan, and we possibly have a missing investigator in Nicholas, and none of this currently connects to Elizabeth’s job, to Elizabeth herself, or to Mason.”

“I know,” Jasper muttered in frustration. “And, of course, every time I talk to the brass, all they’re concerned about is Mason.”

“Of course, because the rest of this stuff has been in play for a long time, and nobody gives a crap.”

“Maybe they do care, but it’s all been in play for a long time, so, in their minds, a little bit longer isn’t going make any difference because nobody has managed to break open any useful information yet. When there’s no break in the case, you move on to the next one, and, of course, the next case right now is Mason.”

“Any change in his condition?” Masters asked.

Jasper looked up and smiled. “The doctors seem positive. They reduced the sedation and brought him back out for some tests, then sent him back under again. I don’t understand why or how, but apparently they’re feeling positive, so we’re going with that.”

“That’s great news,” Masters murmured.

“It is, but it’s not good enough because, as soon as he’s awake, there will be holy hell to pay if we haven’t caught whoever is behind this.”

Masters laughed at that. “And that’s something you’ll be taking a direct hit on.”

“Yeah, I sure will,” Jasper conceded, with a grin. “Yet I can’t wait because it will mean Mason’s back to the world as we all know him. In the meantime, he’s in a medically induced coma, healing enough to make his way back.”

“So, where do we go from here?” he asked.

Jasper looked at the bug finder in Masters’s hand. “Go deal with that first, and let’s see if there’s any reason to be concerned. If somebody is bugging Nicholas’s house or Elizabeth’s, that means they expect something to happen. One more thing. There is a rumor about drugs. And Gary Trojan.”

With that, Masters raised one eyebrow.

“Yes, I did say drugs,” Jasper confirmed, “and the only reason that would become an issue now—”

Masters nodded. “Is if the drugs might have surfaced or if somebody is making a move to get them. But why keep Nicholas all this time?”

“I’m not sure,” Jasper shared. “Did you come up with any theories as to this four-month time frame?”

“The only thing I could come up with is that something changed in the time line. Maybe Nicolas decided to come forward with his suspicions, maybe somebody else was pushing him, or maybe… When was the death of Gary Trojan, this innocent man who died in prison?”

Jasper opened the file again. “He died a week before Nicholas went missing.”

Masters nodded at that. “I bet that was the trigger. Whatever Nicholas was working on, maybe it became a moot point when the innocent guy died in prison, or maybe that’s what made Nicholas angry enough to take the evidence he had and to push it forward. Maybe he pushed it to the wrong person.”

“All of this is just conjecture,” Jasper pointed out.

“Sure, but that time frame of the week Gary died and Nicholas went missing gives credence to that conjecture.”

“In a way it does,” Jasper admitted. “If Nicholas was pushing forward with this found alibi, angry that this young man had lost his life before Nicholas had the chance to do something to save him, somebody must have found out. So, they could have just taken him out with one kill shot. Why keep Nicholas for four months? Maybe they weren’t ready for whatever they still needed to do, and they might still need Nicholas to make it happen, so they kept him as a backup plan.”

“Four months is a long time for a backup plan.”

They looked at each other, both knowing how rough being held prisoner for an extended time could be.

Jasper nodded. “It’s a very long time. And it makes no sense, unless it ends up in a big payout, and the only reason in this case that we have so far would be the drug angle.”

“And that would also imply that these drugs are connected to the military,” Masters pointed out.

Jasper winced at that. “Which is bad news on its own, especially if it’s connected to Mason’s shooting.”

“How would it be connected to Mason?” Masters asked.

“I don’t know, but a part of me says it is connected somehow.”

“Only if Mason found out something or if somebody had accidentally told him something. Could it involve that Arctic mission he’d just come back from?” Masters asked, sitting back and staring at Jasper. “Didn’t the base up there have a drug problem?”

Jasper grimaced, as he sighed. “Among other things.”

Masters nodded. “Then maybe they’re worried that Mason had info while he was up there that would have jeopardized everything here. So, if they take out Mason and put Nicholas on ice, securing the mission yet again, who would care? Who would know?”

“That’s a little bit beyond anything we would have considered normally,” Jasper noted.

“These cases do appear to be completely unrelated, don’t they?” Masters agreed. “And, if they are unrelated, we have absolutely no way to connect them because there won’t be a connection. However, if there is a connection…”

Jasper nodded. “We have to consider the options. So, if there is a connection, we’ll find it, and we’ll make sure whoever did this pays. But we also must confirm that whatever is going on stops here at Coronado. It stops here. We can’t let it go on and lead to more nightmarishly connected cases that nobody even knows about.”

“If we’re on the right track,” Masters began, “one of the clever aspects of this whole mess is the fact that nobody suspected any of this was connected, until—”

“Until we found that USB key that Nicholas stashed,” Jasper replied.

“What are the chances that the two workmen seen a couple weeks ago at Nicholas’s house were looking for the USB?”

“It’s possible. It’s very possible, but why didn’t they find it?” Jasper asked.

“I don’t know. Elizabeth found it at the very bottom of Nicholas’s closet, under a slab of plywood put on the carpet to hold his shoes. That seems like it would have been a reasonable place to stash it, and yet easily found too.”

Jasper looked at the key and frowned. “But look at this. It doesn’t look like the usual USB key.”

They both stared at what seemed to be a decorative keychain fob, shaped like a pi?ata.

“And is that something that Elizabeth might have given Nicholas?” Jasper asked.

“I thought she mentioned how she was the homebody, with Nicholas doing a lot of traveling. So seems he would have bought it for her, yet he kept it so maybe he wanted it for himself?” Masters shrugged. “I could ask her. She didn’t seem surprised when she saw it, but it could just as easily be something he thought she might recognize.”

“And that makes perfect sense,” Jasper noted. “He could be leaving clues for his sister. So, ask her, take a photo of it just so that she has it to jog her memory, and maybe ask her that question when you see her tonight.”

“How did you know I was seeing her tonight?” Masters asked, his eyebrows lifting.

Jasper smirked. “Who’s the investigator here?”

“Both of us,” Masters said, with a laugh. “However, you’re right. I am going back up there tonight. Particularly after she got the phone call, supposedly from her brother. And I still want to check both houses,” he added, pointing to the bug detector Jasper had given him.

“That phone call is another issue entirely,” Jasper stated. “We could quite possibly be dealing with a hostage situation, and that means they want something and seem to think we have it.”

“We found encrypted data on the USB. Any chance any of the material on that key is otherwise embedded? Like with steganography?”

“Pictures within pictures? Or words hidden within pixels?” Jasper asked, as he looked down at it and shrugged. “I have no idea. That would be one reason that they’re still after it. Who would be our best bet in getting help with this on the sly?” They looked at each other, both realizing the irony of that question. Jasper nodded, with a sigh. “Tesla. Okay, don’t worry. I’ll bring Tesla into this too.” He gave Masters a hard look. “Until we know more about what’s going on, you best keep a close eye on Elizabeth.”

“Oh, I plan on it.” Masters checked his watch, then hopped up. “Matter of fact, I think I’ll head back over there right now.”

“Good. Stay close, at least until we know for sure what we’re dealing with.”

“I’m on it.” And, with that, he walked out to his vehicle and headed to Elizabeth’s house.

When he arrived, no lights were on. Frowning, he pulled out his phone and quickly sent her a text, asking if she was still up. When no answer came, his instincts kicked in, and he shut off the headlights and slipped around to the back of the house, worried that something was seriously wrong. As he approached from the back, still no lights were on. Going to the back door, he pressed his ear close against it and heard voices.

“If we don’t take him out now, this will never end.”

“This will never end anyway,” Elizabeth snapped. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, but this? This is past being a game.”

“You’re damn right it’s past being a game,” the man roared. “If it wasn’t for bitches like you, it would have been over a long time ago.”

Then came a sound that sent icy shivers down his spine—the sound of a single gunshot.