Page 67 of Twisted Empire

I leaned forward and rooted around in the safe, rifling through files and loose papers and photographs. Right at the back lay a black portable hard drive, nestled beneath a thick blue folder. Bingo.

I pulled out the hard drive and connected it to the little USB cord Elias had attached to the cell phone. Then I connected the phone to the Wi-Fi using the password Elias gave me and began uploading all the data from the hard drive to a cloud storage folder which could be accessed via email. There were thousands of photos, documents, voice recordings and videos on the drive, comprising over a hundred gigabytes of data.

I tried to keep my breathing steady as I waited for the upload to finish, but it wasn’t easy. There was a huge clock on one side of the study, and every loud tick reminded me that time was running out. Elias would only be able to keep his father distracted for so long. Eventually, he’d return to his study, and if I wasn’t finished by then, I was screwed.

Tick tock.

Tick tock.

Tick tock.

Twenty minutes later, the phone vibrated in my hand. The upload was complete.

I created an email with a link to the online folder and put Greer’s new burner email address into the bar at the top. As soon as I pressed send, my shoulders sagged with relief and a giddy feeling spread through my body. I was close now. So close.

My pulse quickened as I turned my head and eyed a dark wooden cabinet which stood by the far wall with a large tray of crystal decanters and glasses set on top of it. I slipped a hand under my dress and into the band of my bra.

There was just one thing left to do.

---