“We need to turn this on.”
Sam switched it on as he said, “It’s not as if we haven’t tried, but it’s password protected.”
Finn noticed Hailey, staring across the room and yet into space, her thoughts elsewhere, and he needed her to hold it together for the time being, so he said, “Hailey, do you have any idea what his password might have been?”
She jumped a little, her attention focused again. “He changed it all the time . . . random things, the kind of stuff I’d never remember.”
Sam had taken a step back and was looking at the screen, which was already asking for a password. Finn sat down in the chair in front of the desk and looked up at the monitor, and at a yellow Post-it note stuck to the side of it:
DISREGARD
Sam saw him looking and said, “We’ve tried that, and been through the thesaurus—nothing.”
Finn studied the note, understanding immediately that Jonas hadn’t written it to himself. It was in block capitals, and Finn felt a slight chill as he realized it had perhaps been written specifically for him. A word came to mind, the thing that Gibson had been told to disregard, and he typed Albigensian into the box, hoping for some reason that it proved incorrect.
The password was accepted, the computer completing its boot-up, and Sam Frost said, “I don’t get it, what did you type?”
“Albigensian. It’s just something the note brought to mind.”
Sam’s voice was a dangerous mix of hope and confusion as he said, “So he wrote that note for you—he knew you’d look at it.”
“Clearly he hoped I would.”
Hailey said, “Albigensian? That was something we found on Gibson’s network. Something about a crusade.”
Sam looked from Finn to Hailey, and with a hint of dread, Finn realized before he spoke what he was about to say.
“Whose network? Gibson? Who’s Gibson?”
“We hacked my neighbor’s network, or at least Jonas did, on my computer, just to prove to me that it could be done.” She stopped there, for which Finn was grateful.
Finn opened the Internet browser and clicked to look at the history, hoping that Jonas hadn’t deleted it, a hope based on the fact that Jonas wouldn’t have given him a clue to the password if there was nothing of interest on here.
At the same time, he hoped there would be nothing in that history that the boy’s father or the girl Jonas had loved wouldn’t want to see. He needn’t have worried, and nor should he have feared that Jonas might have spent the last day of his life looking at Hailey’s Facebook page.
His browsing history still didn’t provide any comfort, though. There were pages on Cayman Island government websites, company searches, links to news sites, and others on varying subjects, including Karasek and Helsinki. Most disturbingly, he’d searched on incidents in Estonia and Kaliningrad, suggesting he’d dug further in twenty-four hours than Finn could ever have imagined. A smart intelligence organization would have recruited him, not killed him.
Not that Finn believed his old outfit could have been involved in something like this. Part of it might have been, in the way that parts of it had always operated outside the rules and without official sanction. Louisa Whitman would never have been part of something like this, but there were plenty of others who would.
He turned to Hailey and said, “Which word-processing software did he use?”
“Word—it was about the only Microsoft program he could tolerate.”
Finn nodded and searched for documents, but found none. He looked around the desk and opened a drawer, hoping to find disks or memory sticks, then stopped, remembering in a startling moment of clarity that Jonas liked to write things down.
Sam was looking over Finn’s shoulder at the history still visible on the browser, and said, “I don’t understand—what is all this?”
“He was researching.” Finn pushed the chair back and stood up. “The network Hailey mentioned, it belonged to a guy called Gibson who was spying on me.”
Hailey looked uneasy and said, “I’ll go see Alice.”
Finn turned to look at her, but she was already heading out of the door.
He turned back to Sam and said, “When he found out, he seemed keen to find out more. I tried to warn him off. It goes without saying that I didn’t think it would lead to this, and I certainly didn’t think he’d dig as far as he seems to have done.”
“What are you talking about? Someone was spying on you? Why? Who are you?” He didn’t leave time for Finn to answer, saying, “And you let Jonas get involved? Why would you do that?”