Chapter 9: Midnight Data Transfer
I slipped inside the dark study and pulled the heavy door shut behind me, clicking the latch just enough to stay hidden without locking myself in. The computer monitor on the mahogany desk hummed softly in the quiet room, its screensaver cycling through high-resolution photographs of Marcus shaking hands with politicians and smiling beside foundation banners. I stepped up to the desk, pulled the small black flash drive from my pocket, and knelt down to plug it into the USB port tucked beneath the heavy wooden desktop.
Almost instantly, a small dialogue box popped up on the screen, indicating that an external storage device had been detected. My heart leaped into my throat as a progress bar began to crawl across the display. I didn't waste a second; I reached out and pulled the brass handle of the wall panel behind the bookshelf, revealing the hidden steel safe. Using the combination Elena had given me—woven from old family dates and reversed sequences—I spun the dial left and right until the heavy iron mechanism gave a satisfying clunk and swung open.
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Inside sat neat stacks of paper documents, offshore banking ledgers, and a secondary backup drive bearing the logo of a foreign financial institution. I pulled my phone from my apron and began rapidly photographing every page of the primary ledger, the camera shutter clicking silently in the quiet room. Beside me, the computer screen flashed a yellow warning notification: Data Sync in Progress - 74% Complete. The system was backing up Marcus's local files to his cloud server simultaneously, which meant an administrator alert was currently pinging his phone downstairs in the ballroom.
Footsteps echoed sharply in the hallway outside, heavy and fast. Someone was marching up the grand staircase, bypassing the elevator. I shoved the physical ledger back into the safe, slammed the heavy steel door shut, and spun the dial blindly. Grabbing the flash drive from the port just as the progress bar hit 100%, I scrambled across the carpeted floor and slipped behind the heavy velvet drapes covering the study’s tall bay window just as the doorknob turned and the door swung open wide.
