Transparency by Charles Royce (children's books read aloud txt) 📕

“It was the first of the three towers they completed. I’ve been there. Am I missing something?”

Hillary points to a section of blank space. “This.”

Josh correlates the space where Hillary is pointing on the blueprint to the same space on the elevation. By looking at both, he can tell there’s an entire half floor divided in between the sublevel two and sublevel three, from midway between the storage rooms all the way to the far-right foundation wall. The area is unmarked, with no direct elevator access.

“What is this? Some sort of workaround to an existing subterranean feature?” Again, he compares the elevation to the blueprint. The areas around the vacant space are somewhat of a maze, with hallways looping around it to access other rooms. “No, this is something else.”

“Here.” Her finger points to a wall at the end of a hallway. “This is the entrance. Walter told me you can access a stairway that leads down into the secret floor.”

“I’ve seen that hallway many times. I have a storage room around the corner, where I keep our event prep. There’s nothing at the end of that hallway, just a wall with a thermostat and a security camera in the corner.”

She laughs.

“What’s so funny?” he asks.

“You think a state-of-the-art building is going to have floors run by a thermostat?”

“You think the thermostat is fake?”

“I think it’s how you enter the space. Some sort of key system.”

“Or maybe it’s a real thermostat. This entire space is simply storage, maybe they need a thermostat to regulate the temperature.” Josh points to the blueprint. “See, here’s my storage room. Right here around that corner.”

“Don’t believe me?” She reaches into the safe, pulls out what looks like an inhaler. She hands it to him.

He takes the white, oval-shaped, flat piece of plastic with red and yellow bulbs embedded on top, rubs it in his hands. It’s thinner than his, with no USB port. “What is this?”

“The key.”

“To the secret floor?” His eyes light up.

The key is in the details, he thinks.

“Yes. Walter said he had a few meetings on the missing floor. Some group he was a part of.”

“What kind of group?”

“That’s what he was trying to figure out. He said he got mixed up with a group that West brought in to help with mergers and acquisitions. Walter didn’t talk about it much. But whenever he did, it made him angry.”

“I’ve never heard of such a group.” Josh looks at the key, pats his pants to make sure his is still there. “May I keep this? I want to compare it to something I already have.”

He pulls out the SSD, shows it to her.

She takes it, turns it around. “Definitely similar. Looks like somebody had it fashioned into something else.”

“May I take yours, have somebody compare them? Jenna’s lawyer says he has a guy who knows about this kind of—”

Hillary shakes her head. She places Walter’s oval key back in the safe, then she rolls up the plans and places them back in the tube. She hands it to Josh. “I can’t have them link anything back to me.”

“I wasn’t going to try to use it, I just want to figure out what it is.”

“Josh, how long have you been coming by now?” she asks.

“I don’t know, maybe four, five months?”

“And how many times have you talked about Jack Ryan, or The Americans?”

“That doesn’t mean I want to—”

“If you want to break into the secret room, you’ll have to use your own key.” She hands him the plans. “Here, you can take these. There were plenty of these floating around.”

“No problem.” As Josh takes the plans, his face lights up.

Hillary notices. “See?”

“A secret group. That meets on a missing floor. I can hardly believe it.”

“Be safe, sweet Josh.” Hillary pats him on the shoulder. “Just remember, they’re the ones who killed my Walter.”

C h a p t e r   2 2

“I COULD KILL them. They are still breathing down our necks about the goddamn hard drive.”

James West places his oval key back in his pocket as his guest walks down the stairs in front of him. In a thundering crawl, the wall closes behind them.

They descend into the secret floor.

On the wall to the left of them hangs a computer monitor, with a view of the hallway outside. A wire extends from the monitor down to a small laptop resting on a vintage school desk. The computer has logged them in:

7:40pm JAMES WEST, ÉLAN CEO ID#00101

7:40pm BILLY DONOVAN, CONSULTANT ID#00109

“Who?” Billy asks.

“Penance and the other detective from Union Square.” West follows his guest down the stairs. “Pricks won’t let it go.”

The two men proceed down a long narrow hallway, the swathe of cement blocks broken only by three metal doors. On each door is a full-bleed presidential photo etched in steel with a burgundy fill—George Washington on the left, Ronald Reagan and Herbert Hoover on the right. West uses his key to enter Reagan and flips the light switch.

Can lights from the ceiling struggle to clarify the room—a dark metal conference table surrounded by twelve folding chairs, a stand-alone storage unit made of ebony-stained particle board, a black wine fridge resting in the corner. West grabs a bottle of Chardonnay and two plastic cups.

As Billy Donovan takes his usual seat at the conference room table, West paces back and forth on the cement floor. The sound of his shoes reverberates through the chamber in a muted clip clap, a drumbeat in harmony with a strange hum in the background.

“And now we have another problem.” West sips his wine, slides the second cup to Billy.

“We?” As usual, Billy Donovan is too tall for the folding chair. He shifts his torso side to side to settle in. “No thanks, I’m more of a brown liquor kind of guy.”

“Yes, we. You’ve still got the hard drive, right?”

“Which problem are we talking about first? I’m confused, because you just said we have another problem, and now you wanna talk about why the detectives are breathing