Page 24 of A Man of Prestige

I want to smirk. The admiral is secretive, but he’s also an idiot about certain things, so it’s no shock that he’d have Marcia, who is an IT whiz, fixing an issue for him, so he wouldn’t have to wait on IT.

“Thanks,” I say. I head in as she leaves. I find my file and quickly pull it up. It looks fine. Then, I click on another folder and another. I don’t see a single thing out of place. Until I double-click on a white space on the screen. It shouldn’t do anything, so I’m surprised when a folder opens.

“What in the…” I trail off as I stare at the screen. He had a hidden folder on his computer. I quickly pull out a thumb drive and download the contents. Then, I backtrack through my moves on his computer, carefully removing any sign that I was there.

I hear Marcia return to her desk, and I walk out of the office.

“All good?” she asks.

“Yep. All good. Thanks,” I say.

She holds a finger to her lips. “Don’t tell him I let you in there. He’ll be pissed.”

I pretend to zip my mouth closed. “Your secret is safe with me.”

She smiles as I leave.

I hurry back to my office. I need to get this home to my personal laptop that’s offline. I hurry through my tasks, attempting to wrap them up an hour early.

“I’m out of here,” I say to Andy and Kyle our other tech.

They wave. Kyle barely looks up from his microscope. It’s a normal day to them, but my mind is fixated on two things, what the hell happened to Michelle and what’s on this drive.

I walk by Michelle’s workstation and notice something odd. The samples she had set aside for me with the printout from our machine. It’s all at her station.

“Fuck,” I mutter to myself.

“What’s up?” Andy asks as he rolls his chair over to me. Kyle is still obliviously looking through his microscope with his earbuds in.

“Oh, I think Michelle may have mixed up some samples,” I state as I hold up the vials.

“Oh, uh, nope. She was concerned they would get put away wrong, so she had them with her stuff. But they are logged correctly into your data. She just hadn’t had time to relabel them. You were busy and she didn’t want to bother you, so those are just temp labels.”

“Oh?” I say with a frown.

“Yeah. Remember that one time you were running stuff that fit in with her samples, so you had her just label with hers but add that zero-two to the end?”

I look at the vials again and see she did the same thing. She didn’t know. Shit. Did someone see this? Is that why she was followed?

“Andy? Did anyone else come by this morning?” I ask.

He frowns. “No, I don’t think so. I did have to go pick up the mail earlier though.” He turns and taps Kyle’s shoulder. Kyle pulls his earbud out.

“Did anyone stop by earlier?” he asks.

“Oh, uh, yeah. Some guy…uh…shit, I can’t remember his name. He was looking for you,” Kyle says and points to me.

I point to myself. “Me?”

“Yeah, but he left before I could get his name. Actually, it was kind of weird. I think he said he was a new assistant to the admiral. But he was like old. And obviously, the admiral was here earlier. Anyhow, I gotta finish this,” Kyle says, putting his earbuds back in and pointing to the slide in his microscope.

I groan. Kyle is most definitely the weakest link in our group. Occasionally, we have deliveries that come straight to the lab, but it’s unusual. And Kyle most definitely should have let me know.

I leave and go straight to my apartment, pulling out my laptop that I keep offline. I click on the drive and wait for it to load. I groan when I see that it’s encrypted. I try a simple encryption software first, while I text Michelle to check on her. She claims to be fine, just a little shaken. I can’t help feeling like she was targeted.

I look back at the computer. No dice. The software didn’t work. I pick up my burner phone and call Aiden.

“Hey. You alright?” he answers.

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