“Give him your screen, Pete,” ordered the tech.
The second tech got up and went over to the coffeemaker. As Kaiser took the warm seat, the first tech said, “I routed the front page to you. I’ll keep looking for any mention of Henry Sexton’s notebooks.”
With his aging eyes, Kaiser had to tilt his head at exactly the right angle to read what was on the screen, and he could barely make out what the tech was saying on his left. Kaiser had lost nearly all the hearing in that ear two years ago, when a drug dealer holding him hostage on Royal Street in New Orleans had fired off a 9 mm pistol only inches from his ear.
From what Kaiser could see on the screen, Caitlin Masters had led off her story with the true events at the Concordia hospital. Kaiser had hoped to lull the Double Eagles into making a mistake by putting out the story that the Eagles had succeeded in killing Henry Sexton rather than merely wounding him, but the appearance of Captain Ozan at the hospital had seriously lowered the odds of success. He couldn’t blame Masters for printing the truth.
“I’ve got a folder!” cried the tech. “‘Henrys Moleskines’ is the name. Jesus, do you think—?”
“She digitized his notebooks!” Kaiser cried, his pulse racing. “Put the folder on my screen.”
“Doing it now.”
“Can we copy the files?”
“Sure.”
“Will they know we did it?”
“If they hire a forensic firm down the road, yes. But not anytime soon. Do you have it?”
A cluster of typical Windows folders appeared on Kaiser’s screen. “Just click on it?” he asked, his right hand tingling as it hung over the mouse.
“Sure. Just like your computer.”
Kaiser clicked on the folder, but no files opened. “I’ve got nothing. Is the folder password protected or something?”
“Not that I could see.”
Kaiser tried twice more, then clicked on Properties. “The folder appears to be empty on this screen. Are you sure I have access to the file from here?”
“You should have access to everything I do. Hang on.”
Kaiser waited, fingers twitching. If he could get immediate access to every note that Henry Sexton had taken over decades of investigation, there was no telling what deductive leaps he might make. Plus, despite Sexton’s apparent candor in the hospital, the reporter might have held back critical information, hoping to follow it up himself after he recovered. Kaiser suspected, for example, that Sexton might have some notion of the location of the Bone Tree, a long-rumored dump site for Double Eagle corpses and a killing ground that dated to the pre-Columbian years of the Natchez Indians.
“Oh, no,” groaned the tech, his voice taut.
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Somebody erased the files in that folder.”
“Just now?”
“Yep. I can see their tracks. Somebody just deleted the file containing what must have been digital scans of Sexton’s notebooks. There was thirty gigabytes of data in that folder. Now it’s empty. And I think they’re still deleting stuff.”
“Who the hell would do that?” Kaiser demanded, a bubble of panic in his chest.
“User 23. That’s all I can tell you.”
“You can’t tell who User 23 is?”
“Nope. Sorry.”
“Shit!”
“What do you want me to do, boss?”
“Can you copy their whole server drives? Everything they have?”
The tech’s eyes went wide. “That’s a lot of data.”
“That’s not an answer, goddamn it.”
“It would take a long time. And it would definitely increase the odds of their IT people in Charleston noticing something.”
“Do it anyway.”
Kaiser was trying to think outside the box when his cell phone rang. He expected it to be his wife, asking where he’d gone, but it was one of the agents guarding Henry Sexton at the Concordia hospital.
“What is it?” he snapped. “Is Sexton still stable?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sexton’s not in his hospital bed. I just walked in and found his seventy-eight-year-old mother lying in his place. She’s hooked up to the heart monitors and everything.”
“What?”
“She used to be a nurse, apparently. When you gave permission for Henry’s mother to visit him, he got hold of a cell phone and asked her to bring him a few things to help him sneak out. She did, and Henry pulled it off. He walked out of here wearing his mother’s coat and hat. Right past our guards.”
Kaiser slammed his hand on the table. “Damn it! What else does she know?”
“We’re trying to find out. But I’ve already learned one thing that’s not good.”
“What’s that?”
“One of the things Sexton asked for was a shotgun. And she brought him one.”
Kaiser thought fast. “Could Henry even drive? He was heavily sedated when I saw him earlier today.”
“He probably skipped his last doses of meds, except the pain pump.”
“Did Mrs. Sexton know where he was going with the shotgun?”
“She claims she doesn’t.”
“Do you believe her?”
The agent paused. “Yeah.”
“Keep her there! You hear me? I’m coming straight over. And put out an APB on her vehicle. The vehicle and Sexton both. Wait—don’t do that. If the state police hear that, they’ll find Henry and kill him before we get close. He’ll just disappear. Tell our guys to hit the streets. Everybody but you. I’ll wake up the troops here.”
“Got it.”
Kaiser clicked END and started to get up, but at that moment his wife touched his shoulder. Jordan Glass was wearing a LEICA T-shirt and sweatpants, but her eyes were glued to the screen in front of Kaiser.
“Has Caitlin already posted tomorrow’s edition?” she asked. “I figured she’d be writing right up to the last possible deadline.”
For a moment Kaiser considered lying, but experience had taught him that would come back later and bite him on the ass.
“No,” he said. “We went into their intranet.”