Page 102 of Knocked Up by my Best Friend's Brothers

“I’m thrilled by the prospect of having a child with you,” Nathan says, and I believe him. “Not that long ago, I wasn’t even sure if a family was in the books for us. Not in our current formula, anyway.”

“Well, none of this was really planned.”

“No, but I love how it’s turning out,” he says, then leans in to whisper. “Between you and me, I think I’m rooting for a girl. I know she would grow up to be as strong and as wonderful and as brilliant as you.”

I smile softly, cradling my growing bump. It will be visible through my clothes soon enough, but I already feel it. “I’m just happy she’ll have three amazing dads to guide her. Or he will have three amazing dads to guide him. Either way, lucky kid.”

“Couldn’t agree more.”

“I’m having Teagan and Tony over for dinner tonight. You guys don’t mind, do you?”

“We’ll join you,” he says. “In the meantime, talk to me, what’s up?”

“What’s up? Nothing’s up. I’m just trying to catch up here,” I giggle as I point at my many computer screens with multiple algorithms running at the same time.

Nathan points to a minimized window on one of the screens. “And what’s that?”

“Oh, that,” I mumble and open the window to reveal Spike’s last message. “I keep going over this, trying to figure out what it means.”

“Is it anything?” he asks. “Maybe he fumbled the keys while trying to… you know, reach out for help that night.”

I shudder, just imagining how that went down. “No, it’s a passkey of some kind. I’m trying to match it to a particular type of account or software he might’ve built. Spike wouldn’t have left it behind if it didn’t mean something.”

“Are you getting anywhere?”

“Almost,” I nod slowly. “I’ve tried several avenues thus far, but only these three make sense,” I add, pointing at another screen. “It could be a passkey to open something in his computer, so I passed it along to the Feds currently working on it, but they haven’t found anything yet. It could be a cryptocurrency key. Spike had money hidden somewhere, for sure, and I know he wanted it donated to several organizations if he died. We had that conversation a while back.

“Or… it could be a password to a cloud storage, something heavily encrypted and out of anyone’s reach. If you think I’m paranoid with security measures, then Spike was the ultimate maniac on the matter,” I say.

Nathan thinks about this for a moment. “You know, while I was copying everything before handing it over to the Feds, I remember the autofill suggestions in his browser. One of them was The Iron Bank of Nowhere. I thought it was a weird search term.”

“It is,” I say and take a deep breath. “But I think I know what that is.”

Immediately, I snap back into action and open a dark-web browser on another screen.

Nathan smiles. “That is all kinds of illegal, Miss Campbell.”

“I know but bear with me. I’m using three different VPNs for this. Hold on,” I say and open a dark web–specific search engine, where I put in the terms ‘The… Iron… Bank… of… Nowhere,’ and hit enter… You see, Spike told me about building a super-secure cloud storage on the dark net, something nobody would ever find. He had some insanely sensitive information, and he wanted to keep it safe, away from anyone with nefarious purposes, even within the FBI. Like I said, super-duper paranoid, my friend.”

The search returns one relevant result.

“Iron Bank of Nowhere,” he mutters.

I click on the link, and it leads straight to the promised land. “Holy smokes, he did it. He said he’d name it The Iron Bank of Nowhere. It’s a reference to one of his favorite TV shows. Amazing…”

“It requires a username and a password to log in,” Nathan replies, his eyes on the screen.

“Oh, I have everything I need. His username is the same everywhere on the dark web: SpikeWuzHere,” I chuckle lightly. “And the passkey is the message he left.”

We’re in. And as soon as we’re in, it becomes obvious why this was the last thing Spike ever said to me. It pains me and fills me with incredible relief at the same time.

“Christa,” Nathan says, also realizing what we’re looking at, “this is unbelievable.”

“The mother lode of evidence against the Mancini crime family. His malware is still dumping data into these folders and subfolders in real time. What we did that night worked!” I look at him, grinning. “Nate, it worked. He must’ve altered the malware’s design before sending the final version to me. It worked, and he linked it to this cloud storage. Wow.”

“I didn’t think that endeavor of yours would succeed. Once Alexandra was arrested, I guess I put it out of my mind. We were just so relieved to have you back.”

“I felt the same why. I’ve been wondering lately, though, what happened to the malware. Well, we have our answer now. We did it.”

---