Chapter 11 - The Secret Compartment
The federal raid on Viktor Vance's empire was just the tip of the iceberg, or so the lead investigator, Agent Sarah Sterling, told me as she sat at our kitchen table three days after the cannery shootout. The children were outside playing tag, their laughter echoing through the open window, sounding lighter and happier than they had since the crash.
"Vance was merely the regional front man, Mrs. Miller," Agent Sterling said, sliding a thick file across the laminate tabletop. "The ledger Darla copied contained names of international actors—people who treat human lives like disposable currency. And according to our decryption team, there’s a second data node. One Darla locked away with a physical component we haven't found yet."
I stared at the file. My mind flashed back to the enormous crate Darla had shipped to me. "The birthday boxes."
"Pardon?" Sterling raised an eyebrow.
"The delivery wasn't just a time capsule," I said, standing up and walking toward the hall closet where we had stored the remaining wooden boxes. "Darla knew they would tear apart her house. She knew they would search every inch of her property. So she hid the real payload inside the gifts meant for my grandchildren."
Sterling followed me into the living room as I pulled down the box labeled for Lily’s fourteenth birthday—a year away.
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"We have to open it," I said.
With a heavy heart, I used a butter knife to pry open the glued wooden base of the box. Nestled beneath a hand-knitted sweater and a framed photograph of Darla was a small, lead-lined microcassette and a handwritten note: “Mom, if they survived the first wave, play this for the people wearing badges you can actually trust.”
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