All was good.
She held on to the feeling as long as she could, not opening the box until the sensation passed. When she lifted the lid she found four items inside: a tattered newspaper clipping, a key, a worn 5x8 manila envelope…and a ring.
Her mother’s ring.
Alex’s throat constricted and tears filled her eyes. She remembered this ring vividly. Her mother had always worn it on her right forefinger, an ornate silver band with a polished turquoise stone from Nishapur. A gift from Alex’s great-grandmother.
But why was it here? Her mother, an anthropologist, had been killed by a terrorist’s bomb in Lebanon during a research trip. Wrong place, wrong time. She would’ve had this ring with her. Would never have left it behind.
Had it been recovered from the rubble? From the body itself?
Apparently so. But why hadn’t Alex known about it?
She stared at the ring, unable to choke back the tears, remembering the many times she’d sat on her mother’s lap, running her fingers over the smooth stone, wishing it could be hers. Remembering Mom’s promise that one day it would be.
“It is family tradition, Alexandra. My grandmother had only sons, so she passed it on to me right before she died. And one day it will be your turn to wear it.”
“I don’t want you to die, Mommy.”
Her mother had smiled. “Don’t you worry, child. I’m not going anywhere for a long, long time.”
But only a few years later, she was gone.
Alex took the ring from the box, held it up for a moment, then slipped it on her right forefinger. The fit was a little snug, but she had no intention of ever taking it off again. The promise had been fulfilled, a thought that brought a whole new wave of tears.
Wiping them away, she reached into the box again and took out the clipping. It was from a Lebanese newspaper, written in Arabic, the photo showing what was left of the cafe where her mother and two others had been slaughtered.
Alex studied it a moment, wondering if any of the victims had felt anything, remembering the friends she and Cooper had lost to IEDs in Iraq. She briefly closed her eyes, then set the clipping on the workbench and returned her attention to the treasure box.
The next item was the key. She took it out, studied it, and saw a series of numbers etched into the head, along with the letters S&G.
The key to a locker of some kind?
A safe deposit box?
Maybe whatever was inside the manila envelope would give her the answer. She took it from the box and opened it, dumping its contents onto the workbench.
A stack of photographs. Small, square snapshots, some black and white, some color, all faded by time. Photos of a baby, a young girl, a teenager. All with the face of Alex’s mother, many with an Iranian backdrop — a mosque, an open fruit market, a street in Tehran.
Her mother had rarely talked about her childhood, but here was a glimpse of it. One Alex had never seen before.
Looking into the eyes of that beautiful young girl got Alex’s heart thumping. What was her mother thinking all those years ago? Did she know she’d one day wind up living in the United States, married to an American soldier? Did she dream of having children?
All at once, Alex felt cheated, thinking it should be her mother sharing these photographs with her. She wanted to reach into the past and warn her not to go to Lebanon. To stay away from that fucking cafe.
Yet despite the pain, no tears came this time. She was the stoic Alexandra now. The soldier. A trait she’d inherited from her father. And she knew that wallowing in what-ifs was a waste of time. She couldn’t change what had happened to her family.
Nobody could.
But as she came to the last photo in the stack, that stoicism wavered. What she saw was her mother at twenty years of age, or maybe a bit younger, standing on the steps of a large house that looked very Persian. The word “palace” came to mind. And she was wearing an elaborate white wedding dress and veil.
What the hell?
This wouldn’t normally be anything earth shattering, except for the fact that Alex had seen photos of her parents’ wedding, and this was not one of them. They were married at Baltimore City Hall, and her mother had worn a simple yellow sundress that hung in her closet years after she was killed.
Alex flipped the photograph over, hoping to find a date on the back, but there wasn’t one.
What she found instead was an odd series of letters and numbers that looked like a website link, truncated by Google’s URL shortener:
goo.gl/ALUAfk
Alex didn’t move. The presence of her mother’s ring had indicated that the box could have been hidden away for a over a decade. But what about this web link? Google’s URL shortener had only been available for a few years, which meant the box had been left here more recently.
Maybe within the last few months.
Or even days.
Did the person who had broken into the house leave it here for Alex to find? Was the interloper someone she knew?
Could the owner of that sleeping bag be…
No.
That was ridiculous. He wouldn’t risk coming here. He wouldn’t step foot on US soil, not while he was still running from the DHS, the CIA, and every other acronym in the intelligence community, both public and private.
So who had put this here?
And more importantly — why?
Alex took her computer tablet from her backpack in the rental car and carried it upstairs to the living room, her hands trembling as she brought the tablet to life. She set the wedding-dress photo face down on the coffee table, pulled up the Web browser, and carefully keyed in the truncated URL written on the back of the photo.
She paused, sucked in a breath, then touched the GO icon and waited as the browser took her to a site called DataLock, one of the many file-sharing repositories on the web. The page held a download link for a video file, several megabytes in size, called SHADI.mp4.
Shadi?
A Persian name, but Alex didn’t recognize it. Her mother’s name was Mitra.
Still, it had to mean something.
She tapped the download link and a pop-up screen told her to enter a password.
Shit. Now what?
She thought for a moment, but she was no computer hacker and had no clue what the password might be. In a fit of inspiration, she tried typing in Mitra and a message in red came up on the screen:
ERROR: Incorrect password. 2 attempts remaining.
Dammit.
She was convinced now that whoever had left this link had wanted her to find it and download the file, so the clue to the password had to be in that treasure box. She thought about the items she’d found — the photographs, the key, her mother’s turquoise ring — but nothing sparked any ideas.
Was there something in the photo itself?
She picked it up and studied it again. Her mother standing on the steps of some kind of Persian palace. A smile on her face, but a bit forced, as if she wished the camera wasn’t pointed at her. Her hands clasped a bouquet, and she was wearing the ring.
Could that be it?
Alex started to type Mitra’s Ring into the password field, but reconsidered halfway through and erased it. The choice seemed unlikely and she didn’t want to waste an attempt.
So, what else could it be?
The photographs, the key, the ring…
The key, the photographs, the ring…
The ring, the photographs—
And then it hit her.
The key. It had to be the key. It was meant to open a lock, but maybe not a physical one.