Page 88 of Fight or Flight
“Anything?” I ask as he flips through it.
“Negative.” He pushes the drawer closed and tugs open the bottom one. “Did you start copying his files?”
I glance at the screen to check the programs again. “I did, and the download is about eighty percent done.”
The bottom drawer yields nothing, so he tries to open the long, skinny one on the underside of the desk. It doesn’t budge.
He kneels to take a better look at it. “Interesting,” he mutters.
“What?”
He taps on the lock with a gloved hand and leans closer so I can see it through his body cam. “This.”
“What in the Kentucky Fried fuck?” There’s something clear and viscous in the lock. “Is that glue?”
“It looks like it.” He bends down, presumably to take a closer look, and I get a view of the wall under Ben’s desk.
“Why would someone glue the lock?”
“Probably so people think there’s something wrong with the mechanism.” He pulls his lockpicking kit out of a hidden pocket sewn into his sweater and takes out the ones he needs. “And to make it look like there’s nothing important in it if someone is snooping around.”
“Did Ben look up the dumbest ways to try and trick people when hiding important information and just do all of them?” I ask as Jax gently taps the fine point of his pick around the glued lock. “Like, what did he think he was accomplishing here? This is basically the same thing as pointing a giant neon sign at it that says ‘Look in here for secret stuff.’”
“Literally couldn’t be more obvious if he tried,” Jax agrees and carefully fits one of his lock picks into the space where the edges of the lock and drawer meet.
I watch as he gently uses the pick to twist and wiggle the lock until it pops free from the cabinet like a button being released.
“Well, fuck me sideways,” I say quietly as he gingerly pulls the lock free. Underneath it is another lock, but this one is built into the drawer instead of being a separate unit like the one he just removed.
Jax slips his picks into the lock just as a notification flashes on my screen. “The copy program is done,” I tell him and type out the commands to disengage the drive from the system and erase any traces that it was there.
“And so am I,” he says, giving his picks a little twist.
There’s a loud click and the scrape of metal on metal. Then Jax pulls the drawer open.
“These morons have zero imagination,” I say as he moves the piles of office supplies and random objects aside. “Let me guess, it has a false bottom, and not even a hidden one?”
“Ding ding ding.” Jax uses the little half-moon-shaped opening tucked up against the front of the drawer to pop the false bottom.
Under it is the key we’re looking for.
“So uninspired,” I comment as Jax pulls the key out of the drawer. “But at least it makes our lives easier.”
“Is the drive done?” he asks.
“Yup.”
He tugs the flash drive out of the computer tower and takes the key over to the far wall where the hidden door should be. I watch as he feels around, his gloved hands skimming over the stones until one of them moves under his palm. Carefully, he pulls the stone out of the wall to reveal the keypad.
“Got the code?” he asks, putting the stone on the floor.
“Yup.” I pull it up on my screen. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
I rattle off the thirty-digit code, and Jax types it into the keypad.
The light on the pad goes from red to green, and another door-shaped section of the wall pops open.
