"Already done. " he said. Outside, through the now closed metal door, the desert heat was building to its midday peak and the city moved through its Tuesday with no particular interest in a workshop on an industrial strip where a mechanic had just lowered his door against a threat he couldn't entirely see yet. But could feel clearly. The 72 hours passed without Cole calling Far back and on the fourth day the calls started coming in clusters. Three from the same unknown number.
One from a different number with a London area code that Cole let go to voicemail. The message was a man identifying himself as a representative of something called Meridian Asset Recovery, which was a name so on the nose that it almost seemed like a bad joke except that it wasn't. One from a number that didn't leave a message at all twice in the same afternoon 20 minutes apart. Cole changed the lock combination on the workshop. He moved the printed documentation home and put it in a fireproof box he'd bought at a hardware store and stored it under his bed.
He backed up all digital files to two separate encrypted drives and gave one to Victoria on her next visit sealed in a plain envelope. He didn't tell Emma anything specific, but Emma was not a child who missed atmosphere. And on Wednesday evening she looked at him across the dinner table with her soup spoon suspended and said, "Are we in trouble? " "No. " He said. "Are you sure? " "I'm careful. That's different from trouble. " She considered this.
"You lowered the workshop door in the middle of the morning. " "I was cold. " "It was 81°. " Cole looked at his soup. "Eat your dinner. " She ate her dinner, but she watched him with the particular vigilance that children develop when adults around them are managing something they haven't been told about. And Cole felt the weight of it across the table and thought, not for the first time, that Emma was going to be either a very good doctor or a very effective interrogator, and either way the world had better be ready. Um The break-in happened on a Thursday night. Cole found it Friday morning.
The side door of the workshop had been opened, not forced, which meant either a copied key or someone with a bump kit who knew what they were doing. Nothing dramatic, nothing destroyed. But the arrangement of things on his main workbench was subtly wrong. Tools returned to positions that weren't quite where Cole kept them. A particular organized chaos that was his organizational system and his alone slightly disrupted.
Someone had looked through the bench systematically and tried to put it back. The documentation was gone. Not all of it. The documentation he'd left on the bench in visible folders. The early photographs he'd printed before he'd developed the habit of keeping everything at home.
The first two weeks of written notes gone. Taken cleanly. Cole stood in the middle of his shop and did not move for 3 minutes. Then he called Victoria. "They came in last night. " he said.
"Took the printed documentation from the bench. " Her response was immediate and flat. "The originals? " "Copies. Everything original is at home or with you. " A breath. Not quite relief. Something more controlled than that.