Page 117 of In Case You Didn't Know

thirty-two

ASHER

I stare at the large screen in the monitor room at my office, watching the same blurry video for the third time. There’s complete silence in the room, despite seven of us being here.

Brad stands with his arms crossed beside me, his jaw locked tight. Sanjay, our analyst, sits at the console, his fingers poised over the keyboard like he’s bracing for impact.

The footage plays in slow motion. It’s grainy and colorless, captured by one of the cameras that had been corrupted during the breach. It was deleted, but a trace remained, and once Brad and his team knew what they were looking for, they managed to recover enough for us to see exactly who was involved in the break in.

The date stamp is from a week before the office was ransacked. The rooms are quiet, save for the on duty guard making his regular patrol. He stands from his position at the monitor – the same monitor we’re all huddled around – and moves toward the hallway. The image switches, as Shaun moves with confidence, swiping his badge to access the high security server alone.

He shows no hesitation at all. Like he’s a man on a mission.

“There,” Sanjay murmurs, tapping a key to freeze the frame. He zooms in on the monitor beside him, his fingers flying across the keyboard. A script window opens, lines of code flashing for a brief moment before the camera blacks out completely.

“That’s the trojan,” Brad says, like he still can’t believe it himself. “Shaun installed the backdoor himself.”

My stomach twists. Of all the people I expected to be involved in this, the man lying in a hospital bed with a head injury –on my dime– is the last person I thought would be the mole.

I try to push the feeling of betrayal down, as Sanjay brings up another clip.

It’s of the outside of the building. The date stamp shows the night of the break in.

“Where did you get this?” I ask. When we went through all the security videos the night of, they’d been deleted.

“We hacked into our own servers,” Kelly murmurs. “The trojan was supposed to stop us, but we managed to recover this from an old backup. Once we realized what the trojan was, it made it simpler.”

The screen shows the hallway outside the office suite. The door opens and Shaun walks out, then stops. Two men approach him, their faces obscured with balaclavas. For a moment the three of them talk. Then he lets them into the office, into the security room. Shaun points at something, the server room maybe?

And then one of the men punches Shaun.Hard.

Another takes what looks like a piece of piping out and slams it against Shaun’s head.

Shaun doesn’t fight back. He doesn’t even flinch. He submits. Like taking the beating is part of the plan.

Probably because it was.

Nausea rises inside me as blood drips from his temple and he slides to the ground, one of the attackers crouching beside him like he’s checking for a pulse.

Then the screen goes dark.

“We think that’s when they started breaking things in the room,” Brad says. “After that we can’t recover anything else.”

I pinch the bridge of my nose, the image of Shaun’s bleeding head in my memory. For a moment, all I can think of is my dad’s beating that day I was locked in the closet.

The way he screamed. The way he bled.

“He staged it,” I finally say, my voice hoarse. “The break-in. The injuries. All of it.”

Brad nods. “It was a cover. So he wouldn’t be suspected. It was only a matter of time before we discovered the breach. This way, they could stop us from finding the trojan, or at least from blaming him.”

“The beating he took was pretty brutal,” I murmur, my stomach churning at the sight.

“Yeah, I suspect he wasn’t expecting them to cause that level of damage,” Brad agrees. “It’s kind of poetic justice at least.”

“Has anybody called the hospital?” I ask him.

“He was discharged two days ago,” Brad says, his eyes meeting mine. “But the good news is, he’s at home. I sent a guard over as soon as we found the footage. He’s not going anywhere.”