The Hand on the Wall(33)

“No one knows?” Janelle said. “What about all those security cameras your dad put in?”

“Ah,” David said, smiling. “I shut those off for a while. I can explain everything but—”

“You just . . . shut them off?”

“Here’s the thing about my dad you need to understand,” David replied. “He seems like the big bad, like he’s scheming all the time and knows exactly what he’s doing, but a lot of his solutions are quick and dirty. The security system isn’t that good. And the installation wasn’t great either.”

Stevie felt his gaze linger on her for a moment, so she looked down to examine her shoes.

“It was a good system,” she said. “He came to our house and showed us the information on it.”

“What information was that?” David said, cocking his head slightly to the side.

“I saw . . . the specs,” Stevie said. She used the word specs because it sounded technical but immediately regretted it. She had not seen specifications. She had no idea why she’d said it. Stick to the truth.

“He had all these . . . shiny folders.”

“Oooh. Shiny folders, huh?”

Stevie’s face flushed.

“To get the system up and running in a week, they used a plug and play,” he said. “It’s not hardwired. The day they brought it in, I lifted a base station when they were unpacking. I stashed it and set it up.”

“Where?” Janelle asked.

“Doesn’t matter for the purposes of this conversation. I hid it. All I had to do then was establish myself as a system admin. Since he bought it, he had user profiles made for himself and his staff. So I set up additional identity on his staff server. My name is Jim Malloy. I’m from the Boston Malloys. Went to Harvard for my MBA. Very impressive. All I have to do is log in and switch the network over to the other base station, which does nothing at all. System goes down. Easy. Easy for me to come and go. I went home because I needed to get these.”

He reached into his pocket and produced a handful of flash drives.

“Behold,” he said. “The keys to the kingdom.”

“What’s on those?” Janelle said.

“No idea. But these drives were in the safe in the floor under our dining room table, the one he thinks no one knows about.”

“You broke into his safe?” Stevie asked.

“What I have on these drives is information regarding my father’s campaign activities. I need help reading it all. Which is why I came to you,” he said to Janelle.

“First of all,” Janelle said. She was the only one who seemed willing and able to steer this conversation. “Whatever you have there has got to be illegal.”

“Illegal how? Is it even stealing if I took it from my house?”

“Yes,” Janelle said. “That’s campaign information. People go to jail for things like that. It’s not a box of cereal or a TV.”

“What, are you a lawyer?” he countered. “And how did you know about the cereal?”

Janelle seemed to rise from the floor a bit.

“Kidding. You think my dad could afford those cereal carbs? That guy lives on hard-boiled eggs and human misery. The legalities of it aside . . . the risk incurred is my own. All I’m asking is for help looking at it. Looking at something is not a crime.”

“Yes, it probably is,” Janelle said. “I’m going—”

“Nell,” Vi said. “Wait.”

“Vi,” Janelle said. “No. We can’t.”

“I just want to hear,” Vi said. “If we have to tell the police, the more information we have, the better.”

“Vi is correct,” David said, waving his hand graciously. “When you narc on me, be in possession of all the facts! Hear me out.”

“You’re suggesting we stick one of those radioactive things in our computer and . . .”

“I would never,” he said, putting his hand to his heart. “What kind of monster do you think I am? I have with me . . .”

He opened the massive backpack, pulled out some rolled, soiled clothes, including some checkered boxers, which Stevie tried not to look at. (God, it was so hard to look away from someone’s underwear when it was stuck unexpectedly in your field of vision. Especially this underwear. Why, brain, why?) He pulled out a small stack of banged-up laptops and two tablets, plus some kind of router or base station.

“All freegan or fifty bucks at most. I’ve disabled their network connectivity. You couldn’t get online with these pieces of junk if you tried. I will put the content onto these devices, and I will set them down roughly in the range of your vision. I’ll even scroll the pages if you want. All you have to do is read, which all of you can do, very fast. I’ll wipe these things down and dump them in Lake Champlain when we’re done. I’ll strip them to parts. They never existed.”

“One problem,” Nate said. “We’re leaving in, like, an hour.”

“Which is why I showed up when I did to present my radical plan. Don’t. Go. When they come to get you, be somewhere else. Shut off your phones. Wait. Eventually, the storm will start and the coaches will go.”

The idea was so simple, Stevie almost laughed. Just don’t go. Stay.