Noah’s eyes widened, then went kind of soft. “No. I need to do this.”
Adam got that. He did. But he also didn’t want to see Noah break under the weight of what he learned. There was already a strange hollow look in his eyes, a kind of misery that came from years of struggle and disappointment, like an animal that had been beaten enough to never trust another human. Adam didn’t want one more thing to disappoint Noah, but he also knew this crusade was going to be a burden he carried for life.
Noah was already learning that he’d endured the worst kind of abuse at a young age. No matter how much he thought he could shut down any memories from surfacing in the future, it just wasn’t possible. The more he poked at his past, the more likely he was going to remember the minute details. And that was going to hurt more than he knew.
They’d dressed in civilian clothes, jeans and t-shirts, making sure to look like two regular guys with every right to be in this surprisingly upper class suburban neighborhood. The only precautions they’d taken in advance were the thin medical grade gloves they’d donned in the car, but they’d be undetected at a distance.
They used the keys to enter the house, closing the door and locking it behind them. There were two open rooms off the foyer, one which held a pool table, the other office equipment.
Adam pointed to the desktop computer and then his backpack. “I’m going to get this started. I’ll come find you in a few minutes. I know you said we have all night, but the faster we’re in and out the better.”
Noah nodded, moving deeper into the darkened recesses of the house.
Once Adam began cloning the hard drive of Gary’s desktop computer, a window popped up telling him it would take approximately fifteen minutes, standard for an average home computer. He spent those fifteen minutes rifling through Gary’s desk drawers, finding little of interest in the top two. The bottom drawer was locked. Interesting. Adam opened the top drawer, searching for something to pick the lock, rolling his eyes when he saw the key under a desk organizer tray. The man really was stupid. Adam unlocked the drawer, heart rate accelerating as he saw the laptop inside.
He pulled it free just as the other hard drive finished. He then repeated the process with the newly found laptop, but, this time, when the window popped up, the wait time for cloning was three hours. Three hours? Adam’s jaw set in a hard line as he did the math. That kind of time meant there was about one terabyte of data on that encrypted server. He shook his head. He wasn’t surprised. These men were all the same, slaves to their impulses.
While Adam lacked the empathy necessary to feel the pain and horror for what these children endured—a blessing given what he’d seen—he did have a disgust for people who preyed on the population’s most vulnerable. It was weakness. Pure and simple. Wolves feasting off the sick and the lame.
But when these predators were cornered, Adam was the wolf and he was indifferent to their cries, their screams, their hollow apologies. He had no problem putting them down with extreme prejudice. For the greater good.
Adam left the laptop to do its thing and wandered the house, opening drawers and cabinets, looking for anything unusual, anything that might give them some idea of who Gary’s friends were.
In the kitchen, under some random mail, Adam found a strangely shaped key. It looked like it belonged to a storage unit or a bus locker. He pocketed the key, certain it wasn’t something Gary used frequently enough to notice it was missing.
He found Noah crouched in a spare room closet, rifling through a file box filled to the brim with papers. When he dropped beside him, he saw it was bank statements and other important documents. “Find anything good?”
Noah shook his head. “No, it's all just the same boring paperwork everybody else seems to have,” he muttered, shoving the lid back on the box with a grunt of frustration.
Adam nodded. “Yeah, it's not like in the movies. Sometimes, there’s not going to be a magical paper trail. I did find a hidden laptop that seems promising. I don’t know what’s on it, but chances are, it's nothing good. We just have to hope Calliope can crack the encryption.”
With the encryption software blowing their quick in and out timeline, they took their time, searching Gary’s house room by room. While he wasn’t a hoarder by any means, he kept boxes of meaningless papers, each more disappointing than the last. Adam was certain there would be something there. A picture, a video, something. All these creeps kept souvenirs. The laptop had to be the key.
They ended their search in the office, scouring the credenza behind the desk, again finding nothing of interest. Adam checked the hard drive. They still had ninety minutes. Shit. Adam opened his mouth to give Noah a time update when he saw him staring at a picture on the wall.
He was visibly shaking, his hand reaching up to touch the photo and pull it from the wall. Adam came to stand beside him. It was a picture of Gary and Noah’s father standing outside a cabin in the woods, arms around each other’s shoulders and big smiles on their faces.
“I know that cabin,” he said, voice dull.
“Know it how?” Adam gently prompted.
“My dad and Gary used to take me there.” He closed his eyes and swayed on his feet. “I can smell the pine needles.” He shuddered. “They built a campfire. I can still smell it and the oil in the lamps from when the power went out. And sweat.” A sharp gasp ripped from him, head turning like he could somehow look away from whatever memory was playing out in his head, the photo slipping from his fingers. They both watched as the frame hit the floor, the sound of the cracking glass loud in the silence.
Noah looked to Adam with wild eyes. “Shit. Shit.”