It wasn’t quite garbage, but Quinn understood her frustration. Peter must’ve had some other reason for leading them here. Perhaps whatever he’d wanted them to find was already gone. Or maybe, because of the dim light, they were missing something.
He pulled out his phone and called Howard.
“Everything all right?” Howard asked.
“Do you have a flashlight in your car?”
“Sure.”
“Can you meet Daeng at the door with it?”
“On my way.”
Ninety seconds later, Quinn had the flashlight in his hand. He took a quick look through each of the boxes again before panning the light slowly around the rest of the space.
At first, he thought the line on the floor had been created in the dust as they’d moved the boxes around. But it was a little too perfect and a little too long. He knelt down and pushed a box of plastic cups out of the way.
Not dust at all.
A cut in the concrete.
“Help me with these,” he said.
Once the boxes were out of the way, there was no missing the perfectly cut square in the floor. He noticed a small divot at one end and slipped a finger inside. Grabbing on to a lip, he pulled, but the square didn’t move.
Quinn leaned back and thought for a moment. If this was the opening to a secret storage place, then Peter would probably have been concerned about someone walking down the hallway and seeing it open.
“Daeng, get in here,” he said. “And shut the door.”
Two things happened the moment the door clicked shut. First, Quinn could feel that the hatch was suddenly free to move. And second, the light came on.
“Would have been nice if that little bit of information had been included in the instructions,” Daeng said, glancing up at the bulb.
“No kidding,” Quinn agreed as he pulled up the hatch.
Daeng moved through the rearranged boxes to join them. As soon as he saw the hole, he said, “Whoa.”
Quinn pointed the flashlight into the opening. This was no mere extra storage space. This was some kind of tunnel. The vertical shaft went down fifteen feet, then appeared to run off to the left, out of sight. To get there, a metal ladder had been built into the side of the shaft.
“I’ll go first,” he said. “If everything’s all right, you guys follow me.”
He lowered himself into the hole. As soon as his feet touched the ground, a row of lights came on, revealing a tunnel extending to the side.
“So?” Daeng called down.
“Passageway. High enough to stand.”
“Where’s it go?”
“Not sure yet. Can’t see the end. I’ll be right back.”
The arching tunnel was six and a half feet tall at its apex, and no more than four feet wide. Even sticking to the center, Quinn couldn’t help feeling the urge to duck as he made his way along. At what he guessed was about seventy-five feet in, the tunnel took a hard turn to the left. Another fifty feet ahead, he came to a door.
This one had no lock, which wasn’t particularly surprising given all the security before this point. On the other side of the door was a room outfitted with monitors, a large desk, computer keyboard and trackpad, half-sized refrigerator, and a couch. There were two other doors. One led into a bathroom, and the other into a space just large enough for the mattress that filled it.
Quite a little hideaway.
He returned to the other end of the tunnel and called up, “Come on down.”
“I don’t know,” Misty said. “I could wait here.”
“Trust me. You’re going to want to see this.”
With obvious reluctance, she crawled down the ladder. Once she reached the tunnel floor, Daeng followed, and Quinn led them back to the room. Misty was barely past the threshold when she gasped in surprise.
“Damn, Peter,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me about this place?”
“Nice,” Daeng said as he entered. “An evil lair.”
Misty whipped around. “Peter was not evil.”
“Just a joke,” Daeng said.
“Not a very good one.” She paused, gathering herself. “I’m sorry. I know that’s not what you meant.”
In typical Daeng fashion, he shrugged and said, “No problem.”
The desk ran the length of the wall opposite the door. Underneath were cabinets, and an open space in the middle for whoever sat in the chair in front of the keyboard. On the wall in front of the desk were six, identically sized monitors broken up into two rows of three.
Quinn reached out and touched the space bar on the wireless keyboard. Immediately he could hear the whir of a computer somewhere under the desk. After a short delay, the center screen on the bottom row turned on. It remained gray for several seconds, an animated dial in the middle twirling as the computer woke itself up. Finally, the dial was replaced by a rectangular text box. At the left end of the box was a blinking cursor.
“One guess what we should type in there,” Daeng said.
Quinn pulled out the chair. “Misty?”
After she was seated, Quinn placed the index card from Peter next to the keyboard. Misty took a deep breath and began to type. The text box, however, remained empty.
“Try it again,” Quinn said.
Misty input the password. “It’s not working,” she said. “Why isn’t it working?”
Quinn looked at the keyboard. It had been working fine just moments ago when he’d woken the computer. He picked it up and turned it over — and revealed a small glass square inset in the desk. Another scanner, he realized.
“Try your thumb on the glass,” he instructed Misty.
The instant she pressed her thumb down, the scanner lit up.
When the light dimmed again, Quinn said, “Now try the password again.”
This time each keystroke appeared in the text box. When she finished, the screen went black for a moment before an image of Peter appeared, staring out at them.
“Hello, Misty,” Peter said. “If you’re here we both know what that means. But let’s face it — it was bound to happen at some point. There is no one I trust more than you. That’s why I had to bring you here. I need you to do one last thing for me. Clean up what I’ve left behind and destroy any physical information that I’ve kept here. Knowing you, you grabbed the files from my safe at the apartment when you found the note with the code I left you.”
Note he left? Quinn thought. He hadn’t left the note — he’d mailed it. Maybe he’d decided to change the procedure.
“If you did, great,” Peter went on. “You can add them to the stuff here. If not, you’ll need to go back and destroy them. The townhouse is another matter. I may or may not have left sensitive information there. If I did, it’ll be in the safe, so once you finish the other tasks, please go there and check. I also have several other safe houses spread around the district. You’ll find a list in the townhouse safe. At the time of this recording, none of them contains anything important, and I don’t foresee that changing. But, as time permits, I would appreciate it if you would check each. You needn’t worry about any of my digital information. That’s already being taken care of.”
Quinn unconsciously leaned forward, tensing.
“The archive at the Library of Congress began its wipe procedure the moment you logged off after entering the code I gave you. The computers at the townhouse began their purge when this video started. And the computer here, well, we’ll get to that in a minute.”
Something wasn’t right, Quinn thought. Peter shouldn’t be instructing them on a personal erase job, he should be telling them why he thought someone was going to kill him, right? That’s what Quinn had been expecting.
“Okay, this is how I’d like you to destroy the items here. There’s a safe located along the back wall behind the refrigerator. The wall there is a false panel. Push once on the top, twice on the bottom, and it will pop out. The combination is simple this time. It’s your birthday. Gather everything from inside and put them on the desk. That’s all you need to do.”