Page 54

The lamp and the laptop are the only lights in the room, Volkov asleep behind me with one arm thrown across where I was lying, and I’m reading my father’s handwriting translated into encrypted text, and I keep coming back to one entry because it rewrites everything.

I found the third layer two days ago, and I’ve been sitting with it unopened since then, which isn’t something I tend to do. I pull threads, I don’t avoid them. But I knew what was in here was going to hurt. I wasn’t ready for that.

The layer cracked before Volkov took me to the boat. Once I woke up, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I got up to finish it.

My father knew. That’s the first thing, the thing I have to get through before I can get through anything else. He knew he was being used, knew the anonymous contact wasn’t a business arrangement but a leash, knew the money he’d been moving had bodies underneath it, knew the ambush venue wasn’t a logistics job. He didn’t stumble into any of it blind. He walked in with his eyes open, confirmed the venue, spent the three weeks after that trying to find an exit that didn’t end with me in a body bag.

They threatened me. That’s in the early entries, written in my father’s compressed shorthand that I’ve spent weeks learning to read like a second language. The contact gave him a name, a date, enough detail to prove it wasn’t a bluff. My father confirmed the venue because they put me on the table instead.

I put the laptop down and look at the wall.

Volkov was supposed to die in that room. My father knew that and said yes anyway. I pick the laptop back up.

The documentation starts three weeks before the ambush. My father was a lawyer before he was anything else, and it shows. What he built in those three weeks is a record I would’ve been proud to put in front of a judge. Transfer records, communication logs, timestamps, a column cross-referencing the contact’s instruction dates against Crown gathering schedules he reconstructed from scratch, tracking when the contact went silent and when orders arrived, building the pattern by hand because he didn’t have access to the actual records. No help, no resources, running out of time, and he still built something waterproof. I recognize the method because he taught it to me over a chessboard.

He was building a case.

Not for himself. He writes about me seventeen times in this layer. My name, my old address, a note about my bar exam results tucked into a parenthetical that serves no evidentiary purpose whatsoever. It’s just there. He just wrote it down. Once, in a margin annotation in smaller text than everything else, he writes that he should have gotten out years ago, that he should have told me the truth, that he’s sorry he didn’t.

I read that line four times.

He was building a case to expose whoever was behind it, to leave me something if he didn’t make it out, to make sure the record survived him. A lawyer’s instinct, even at the end. Maybe especially at the end.

He found the name. He doesn’t write it directly, it’s referenced by a code I haven’t cracked yet, two letters and a number that appear three times across the final entries. But the entry after it says he made contact, told them he had the documentation, gave them forty-eight hours to stand down.

They didn’t stand down. They moved faster than he expected, which is the mistake my father made, the one a better lawyer wouldn’t have made. He telegraphed his hand. The moment he threatened to expose them, he handed them everything they needed to aim Volkov at his name, and they used a grieving man’s rage before my father could use his evidence. He should have gone straight to whoever he was going to expose it to. He warned them first, and that’s what killed him.

He wasn’t discarded because he outlived his usefulness. He was silenced because he was two days away from talking.

Volkov’s breathing is even behind me, deep and untroubled in a way mine isn’t. I reach up to push my hair back, and my fingers come away damp. I wipe my face with the back of my hand and look at the ceiling.

My father printed out my bar exam results and kept them in his desk while he was dismantling a criminal conspiracy. That’s the man he was. He used to leave voicemails that were too long because he could never figure out when to stop talking, and he kept a running list of restaurants he wanted to take me to, cities he wanted to show me, things he was saving for when I had more time. He had a drawer full of articles he’d clipped from newspapers because he thought I’d find them interesting, and he never remembered to give them to me, so they just accumulated. He was trying to protect me his whole life, and at the end he spent what was left of it trying to make sure that if he failed, I’d have something left to fight with. I’ve been carrying his drive for weeks and calling it leverage, but it was never leverage. It was a letter he didn’t know how to send.

The version of him I’ve been grieving, and the version in these files, are the same man. I think I knew that before I opened this layer. That’s why I waited.

He made bad choices, stayed in them too long, and was afraid, but in the end he tried to do the right thing, the only way he could see. He ran out of time. That’s the whole of it, not a villain, not a martyr, just my father, who loved me, miscalculated, and died for it.

I go back to the final entries.

The code appears three times.

First, six days before the ambush, saying, Confirmed, it’s OB6, exactly as I suspected, been in the room the whole time.

Second, in the entry where he makes contact.

Third, as the last line he ever wrote in this file, two words after OB6: they know.

He figured out who they were, threatened them, then understood they’d already moved on him. The last thing my father wrote was two words, and then nothing.

I close the laptop and hold the drive in both hands.

OB6. I’ve been turning it over since I first found it. OB could be initials, an abbreviation, a location code, or nothing more than a sequence my father pulled from thin air to keep it unreadable. But my father was a lawyer, and lawyers don’t pull things from thin air. OB6 means something, and he chose it for a reason, and if OB are initials, then there’s a name underneath them, a name that’s been related to the Crown. I don’t have enough yet to know whose.

I’ve been treating this drive as currency since before I walked into Volkov’s compound. Every choice about what to share has been a move, keep the leverage, protect the hand, give nothing away for free. My father’s daughter, trained at his chessboard. I walked in here with a plan, and I ran it: fed the informant two tracks, shared just enough to keep the collaboration going, held the third layer back because it was the last card I had, and a lawyer without a last card is just a person in a bad situation.

Volkov has been trying to find the person behind the ambush for months. I’ve been sitting here with the closest thing to an answer either of us has, and I’ve been protecting it because protecting things is my default when I don’t know what else to do.

I look at him, asleep in the bed. His jaw doesn’t go soft even unconscious, but the vigilance goes out of his face, the constant readiness he carries every waking hour, and without it he looks younger, just a man with a scarred jaw, a wolf tattooed over his heart.