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She pushed her glasses up her nose and rapped a pen against her desk. She was obviously at the IPF office. “You need to come see me. Now.”
Knowing she had to have finally gotten somewhere with the drive, I simply nodded. “I’ll be there in ten.”
I rushed impatiently into headquarters and up to Paige’s temporary office located on the technical support level. I went straight to it, even ignoring Abbott when he greeted me.
Paige waved for me to shut the door. I obliged and then leaned over her shoulder to look at her screen. “Please tell me you found something.”
She nodded. “After a very painstaking process of testing what sections were damaged or not damaged, and then taking the time to bypass the damaged areas, I’ve got something. Most of the information I can’t retrieve, and what I can get isn’t complete. I’ve scrubbed up what I could and had to piece a lot of the information back together.”
Impatience warred against politeness. “Okay, okay, I get it. This was hard. What did you find?”
She started typing on her keyboard. “After sorting through some of the data, I came across a file labeled Barrows. I’ve spent most of the day trying to recover and properly organize all the information in the file that I could, but there isn’t much I could salvage.” She pulled up a page filled with code.
“What I managed to retrieve was some details about when the high chancellor was kidnapped. There is a timestamp and coordinates of his abduction site, but the rest of the details are missing. The details we do have match, so it’s definitely his file.”
My heart sank a little. “But that doesn’t help us, does it? None of that is new information, right?”
“Right, we knew all of this stuff.” Paige picked up her pen and rapped it against the desk. “But I looked at the file’s coding and realized it was a file within a file. I thought maybe the parent file might have more information about the high chancellor.”
“And? Did it?”
She made a face. “Not exactly. There’s only one other file contained within the parent file, and it has nothing that looks like it crosses with the high chancellor’s case.”
I rubbed the back of my neck and straightened up, realizing I wasn’t going to be able to understand anything written on her screen. “What was in that file?”
“Honestly, I haven’t figured it out yet. It looks like a code of some kind. There are a bunch of numbers and letters strung together, but I don’t know what it means. I can’t be sure it’s complete, either.”
She pulled up a page that, just like she said, had a bunch of numbers and letters on it, but none of it made sense. I leaned over and squinted at it.
AAPOBL4C22040010083493
CorOD15000FLD
ANVTR18N215007/80W463966
I made an aggravated noise. “That means nothing. We’re screwed. This doesn’t help us at all. We don’t even know if it’s related to our case.”
Paige wagged her hand back and forth in the air. “Not quite. I’d say it’s safe to assume they’re peripherally related.”
I blinked at her. “How? How do you know that?”
“There is a separate part of the drive that was completely undamaged. There I found another file named Marco. Inside that file are five files, all with different names, and inside each file are descriptions for different jobs Santiago pulled. Some are written in code, but some aren’t. One file is about a competitor Santiago killed. Another file is about some artwork he recovered for him. There’s no real information on who Marco is, but I think every job Santiago did for him is stored in those files.”
Things were starting to make sense now. “You think that the files within the parent files are all work done for the same person? Whoever hired Santiago to kidnap Ben also hired him to do whatever this code means from the second file?”
“Exactly.”
“What’s the name on the second file?”
“Strayer.” Paige pulled it up on the screen to show me the two files side by side. “Barrows and Strayer. Both files are far too damaged for me to pull anything else from them. But I think we’re looking for another case.”
“And the parent file? Does it have a name? That would tell us who hired Santiago.”
“Unfortunately, no. I tried everything, but I couldn’t retrieve the name of the file. This is all I have.”
Part of me was excited and part of me was frustrated. We were so close and yet so far. I nodded and ran a hand through my hair. “Send me a copy of this and then keep working on the rest of the drive just in case there’s something else that can help us. I’m going to have Barrows look at this code and see if anything seems familiar to him. Maybe we’ll get lucky. Keep this under wraps though.”
She nodded. “You got it, boss.”
