Page 79

79

The silver thumb drive labeled “Фантом” was still in his pocket. Tatyana had gone to bed. He waited until he was fairly sure she’d fallen asleep. Then he inserted the device into his laptop. A little icon popped up on the desktop. He clicked on it, and a window opened, filled with what looked like junk.

Zmo_7_^UqV/Vj[:_9Mp_;K\K!+?_’W9@%y_g{s~|w’$I~IO?__va+~ D_@2_q__b__rbh_ o@ 8_q”B!Gw?N.?}_ V;V_U_ *5[?]_Y_IΨT__.`4_p&)?i G.:

He stared at the characters for a while, trying to discern a pattern, but he didn’t see one. Maybe the thing was just unreadable. Too many years sitting in storage, the flash drive had decayed. He was about to eject it when he had an idea.

Perhaps he was being overly cautious, or just paranoid, but he wanted to save a copy of whatever was on this device before he handed it over to Special Agent Addison. Even if it was garbage. He went to the music-sharing website SoundCloud and logged in. There he found his old collection of mixtapes and music tracks from his college singing group and his garage band. The band wasn’t very good, he now realized, but playing together had been fun, and they always got an audience. A small audience. Mostly, they played for themselves.

He uploaded the thumb drive’s contents, renamed the file “Stairwaytoheaven.mp4,” and then burned the file onto a new thumb drive. Then he went into the bathroom to find a place to hide it. In the kitchen junk drawer, he found a screwdriver. Back in the bathroom, he unscrewed the backplate to one of the wall sconces, put the USB drive in there, and screwed the plate back on.

Then he texted Addison on Signal.