Page 45 of Insidious Threats
“Oh, so she told you that much. Did she mention that while I was identifying Landon’s body, she sneaked into an active police scene and snooped through his office?”
Maisy gasped. “No.”
But Jordana snorted. “That’s so on brand.”
“In any case, she knew not to touch anything and risk leaving fingerprints, but she wanted to read the back of the note on his desk, so she used his letter opener to flip it over. Then, of course, her prints were on the letter opener, so ….” He trailed off.
“Shestoleit?”
“Stole is a strong word.” It wasn’t the wrong word, but he wasn’t about to say so.
“The note was his fake suicide note, right?” Jordana asked.
“We have this theory whoever killed him forced him to write the note first.”
“A decent theory, but wrong,” he informed them.
Maisy bristled. “How could you possibly know that?”
“Because that note was a draft of the note in the package he sent me. The version I got was addressed to me, more detailed, and gave me some indecipherable marching orders.”
Her eyes widened. “Can we see it?”
“It’s in my safe, but I have a picture of it on my phone.” He pulled up the photo and handed his device over the table to Maisy. As they huddled together over it, Maisy’s mess of blonde curls nearly touching Jordana’s half-black/half-red dyed hair, he returned to the stack of Landon’s journals that he’d been about to tackle when the pair had come into the room.
Maisy had started to go through the diaries the week after Christmas, but she’d set them aside for the more exciting pursuit of tracking down a dirty police officer. As he paged through them, he understood why. Landon’s writing was dry and his subject was drier still.
Maisy slid his phone back across the table to him. “Wow. Okay. So what—or who—is Mjölnir? What are you supposed to stop it or them from doing?”
“If I knew the answers to those two questions, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be stopping Mjölnir.”
“It’s been six months. It might be too late,” Jordana, ever the beam of sunshine, pointed out.
“Well, the world hasn’t turned into a dystopian hellscape yet, so I’m operating under the assumption there’s still time.”
“That’s fair,“ she allowed. Then she twitched her nose like a rabbit. “Isn’t Mjölnir the name of Thor’s hammer in Norse mythology.”
“Yes. But I assume Landon hasn’t literally tasked me with stopping a god from using his mighty hammer. I’d hope to go into battle with Thor armed with more than a thumb drive.”
“He sent you a thumb drive?”
“Yeah. I imagine the program to stop Mjölnir is on it, which makes me think it’s a thing, not a person.”
“You imagine? You mean you haven’t looked at the drive yet?” Jordana’s eyes bulged in disbelief.
Leo removed the drive in question from his pocket. “This thing is serious business. It’s protected by a PIN, the data on it is encrypted, and the case is coated with epoxy. I don’t have the PIN, so I can’t open it to access the stick. Even if I could—which I can’t—I don’t have the correct password or whatever I’ll need to decode the information, and I’m pretty sure the data will self-destruct without that key. Finally, the physical defenses mean that if I try to physically remove the data chips, a destruction process will initiate and wipe out that data. So, no, I haven’t looked at it.”
He placed the aluminum rectangle on the table, and they stared at it with an inexplicable air of expectation. Like they were expecting an alarm to go off or a small explosion to detonate. He knew the feeling. For such a small item, it had an outsized impact.
Suddenly, Jordana jerked her head up. “I’ll be right back.”
She pushed back her chair and ran out of the room. He turned to Maisy, who shrugged.
“How is it that this never came up with Sasha?”
He shrugged. “To be fair, it was a hectic time. You two ambushed the DA and Cinco in the morning, the package came in the afternoon, and then you went off on your rant about Delone on live television and got yourself fired. Plus, it was slime camp week for the kids. Look, we were busy. And then, as time wore on, I decided to handle it myself. After all, Landon sent the package to me, not Sasha. There was no reason to involve her.”
“Not even when I started investigating his death last month, and we found out he’d been murdered? That didn’t seem like the time to say, oh, by the way, Landon’s last request on this earth was for me to prevent Armageddon?”
