Page 136 of Knights Game

She continues to walk around my office taking everything in, occasionally reaching out to touch things. “I’d be lying if this wasn’t the perfect opportunity.”

Before I even register it, Kara Snow has a gun pointing at my forehead.

46

Layla

The penthouse is ahive of activity, or at least I think it is. I wouldn’t know because he’s shut me out. Which hurts more than I care to admit. He left me standing in the foyer of his plush, crisp penthouse as my world falls apart.

Trust me, he had whispered before he walked away.

I do trust him.

I’m curled up on the sofa staring at the handwritten letter from my parents, the safety deposit box information beside me.

“What was the last code on that piece of paper?” Katy asks, tapping away on her laptop. She’s on the floor, her back against the sofa. She balances the laptop in her hand and shows me the screen where a single box flashes. A cable running from her MacBook to the hard drive.

I pass her the piece of paper and sit forward as she taps in the long digits.

We watch mesmerised as the screen goes black. “What the—”

“No, wait, something’s happening,” she says as a loading bar comes up. “Look, it’s decrypting.” We watch in silence as the barcounts to 100% and it’s like watching cement dry. Time stands still.

A window pops up with a single folder, Katy double clicks on it, opening more folders, along with documents, PDFs, spreadsheets. Hundreds upon hundreds of electronic documents all stored neatly in different named files.

“What the hell is this,” Katy asks looking over to me.

“Click one?” I suggest.

“Any one in particular.”

“Not a clue.”

She moves her mouse to a subfolder, then double-clicks a random excel document, opening what looks to be a balance sheet of some sort.

She closes it down, then opens another one, followed by another one, as she quickly scans the contents.

“What the fuck?”

We sit in silence as we read one, two, three of the documents, me peering over her shoulder as we both take words in that we can’t quite comprehend. She pushes the laptop away. “Holy fucking shit.”

Katy jumps up.

I rub my eyes. “This is…this is huge.” anxiety building in my stomach, making me queasy. “This is bigger than just the Covenant. This is—”

“This is evidence of how corrupt the fucking government is.”

“Fuck.”

“What?”

I puff out a breath. “Grandad.” I throw off the blanket, lean forward and unhook the hard drive, pocketing it. “This is what they were after, the evidence.” I state the obvious. “It’s been sitting in a box gathering dust at the care home of the father of two British agents that were murdered.”

“Yeah,” Katy says, nodding.

“Don’t you see?” I grab the newspaper cuttings and Katy just sits shaking her head. “His fall. What if someone went to the village on Sunday. They searched his room, looking for all of this, and covered up their tracks with Grandad’s fall. But I’d already asked Sylvia to get the boxes out of storage. Katy, what if what they wanted was the hard drive?”

“What are you going to do with it?”

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