“It’s a storage wafer,” he said. “Military prototype. Early 2000s. Rugged, encrypted.”
“Can you open it?” Jessica asked.
“No. But I know someone who can.”
I shook my head. “No more strangers.”
Henderson looked at me. “Then we sit here until Voss finds us.”
Jessica took the wafer from him. “My father hid this for me. Not for the Army. Not for you.”
Henderson nodded slowly. “Then it’s yours.”
That surprised me.
For the first time that day, Jessica looked at him not as a general, but as a man.
“Why help us?” she asked.
Henderson’s answer was quiet.
“Because Daniel Burton saved my life, and I built a career on a report that buried his.”
Later, while Henderson checked the perimeter, Jessica and I sat beside the cold fireplace.
“I’m angry at you,” she said.
“I know.”
“I might be angry for a long time.”
“I know that too.”
She turned the photograph of Burton over in her hands. “But when Voss called me Miss Burton, I hated it.”
I looked at her.
“Not because of him,” she said. “Because for one second, I thought it meant losing you.”
I could not speak.
She leaned her head against my shoulder, just as she had when she was small.
“You lied,” she whispered. “But you stayed.”
I closed my eyes. “Every day.”
Near dawn, Henderson returned with a satellite phone and an old laptop sealed in a hard case. He said the laptop had belonged to a signals officer who died before he could testify about missing convoy records.
Jessica inserted the wafer with careful hands.
The screen remained black.
Then a line of text appeared.
ENTER NAME.
Jessica typed: JESSICA ANNE BURTON.
The screen flickered.