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

knob down to sixty degrees. “Gotta be.”

He hears no sound of air conditioning, feels no breeze coming through the vent above him.

Hmm, he thinks. Hillary might be right.

He wiggles it, tries to twist it, screw it off. He pushes down on the top but it won’t budge. He pulls it up from the bottom.

There ya go.

The face of the thermostat opens to reveal a small black pad, oval in shape, with red and yellow bulbs embedded into the plastic around it.

“Here goes nothing.” He takes the oval SSD drive and aligns it with the pad.

A perfect fit.

The bulbs on both the pad and the key brighten and swirl in unison. A click ensues, followed by a thunderous rattling, like the start of a roller coaster. An opening to his left appears, red lasers shooting across the entrance. The light from the hallway shows him the way down.

What the hell am I doing? he thinks. It’s just West. West won’t hurt you. West won’t hurt you.

He shoves the oval key back in his pocket, walks through the doorway, onto the landing, then down the stairs. Indirect lighting makes the cement-block walls to his left and to his right glow dark red. A distant hum buzzes in the background.

Something behind him rattles, closing with a thud. He turns around to make sure it’s the door, and sees a monitor and a small laptop. He runs back up a few steps to get a closer look at the laptop screen.

It’s logging people in and out, he thinks. I knew it.

He sees today’s entries:

2:07pm EMPLOYEE NOT FOUND, ID#00104

1:52pm BILLY DONOVAN, CONSULTANT ID#00109 *metal detected

Shit. Billy Donovan.

He changes his plan. Without making a sound except for the flash drives clanking in his pocket, he continues toward the exit, up a few more stairs, pats his pocket for the SSD. He hears a door creak open from behind him.

“Josh?” a voice says.

The voice is soft, unencumbered, casual.

Is it James West, or is it Billy Donovan?

“I can’t see much, where are you?” Josh asks.

He hears footsteps, but no answer.

Josh tries again. “Who am I speaking to?”

The footsteps are getting louder. He sees a shadow coming around the corner, too tall to be West.

“Who’s there!” Josh yells.

Even though it’s dark, Josh recognizes the man from the other night, the same man he and Tracy saw catching an Uber in front of the building. Billy Donovan.

“Billy Donovan?” Josh says.

“It’s you,” Billy says. “We need to talk.”

Josh scrambles up the stairs, hears Billy racing up behind him. Josh fumbles for the oval SSD in his pocket.

A hand grabs his leg, pulls him down. He twists and lands on his tailbone two steps below, at the same time swinging the USB side of the SSD with all his might, scraping the side of Billy’s face. The force of the blow throws Billy off balance.

Billy tumbles down the stairs, a gun falling out of his jacket halfway down. He lands at the bottom. His gun leapfrogs down the steps and lands beside him, then slides down the hallway, out of Josh’s view. Billy doesn’t move.

His heart racing, Josh trembles, looks at his hands, his fist still clenched around SSD now stained with Billy’s blood. Just as he walks back up the stairs to the exit, he turns to make sense of a grunt.

At the bottom of the stairs, Billy sits up, holds his face in his hand. Billy turns. He looks up the stairs.

Josh locks eyes with him. He jumps up the remainder of the stairs. He holds the oval key to the pad. The wall opens.

Josh turns to check Billy’s status.

He’s not there.

Shit. He’s getting the gun.

Josh holds the key to the pad on the other side. He hopes it will stop and reverse. It does.

Billy emerges from the hallway. He shoots three times. The gun barely makes a sound. The first two bullets hit the interior walls. The next one hits the interior ceiling just above the top stairway landing.

The wall closes. Josh sees drywall pieces fall through red lasers like scarlet snow. The wall clicks shut.

Josh runs through the maze of hallways, up the stairs. He bolts out the front door. He dials 9-1-1.

C h a p t e r   3 1

“YOU’RE WORTHLESS, BILLY.” West closes the door to the Reagan room and starts wiping Billy’s gun with a handkerchief from his suit pocket. “Shooting at Josh Harrison? What the hell were you thinking?”

West glances at the camera to his right. The red light is on.

“I thought he was Micah Breuer.” Billy sits next to him in a folding chair. “Same hair, same build.”

“What makes you think Micah Breuer would have the balls to show up back here? He knows you’ve been watching him.”

“The login. I saw a notification come through on my phone. Josh used Micah’s key to enter, see?” He shows West the login on his phone.

2:07pm EMPLOYEE NOT FOUND, ID#00104

“What the fuck?” West slaps Billy on the shoulder.

“I know. I thought if we decommissioned the employee, it would decommission the key.”

“That’s Micah’s old ID number,” West says.

“Yep. I thought he was snooping around. Josh looks remarkably like the fucker.”

“But you said Josh had Walter’s old key, not Micah’s.”

“I guess I misinterpreted what Josh and Hillary were talking about. We don’t have video surveillance in Walter’s study, just audio.”

“Billy, swear to God if you let this get any more out of control, we are done for.”

“I made a mistake.”

“You shot at my event planner, you idiot.”

“So what,” Billy says. “You said take care of the problem.”

“You know goddamn well this is not what I meant.” West hands Billy’s silencer back to him. He looks at the red blinking light, cocks his head. “I’m taking care of it. Good thing I was in the building. This could have jeopardized everything, Billy.”

“I was just going to talk to him, put some pressure on him. Then he freaked.”

“So you jumped to killing him instead? We need him, Billy.” West stands, pushes his chair underneath the table. “Did you