“You found something?” Jackson slammed the third drawer closed and opened his final one.

“I’ll tell you in a minute.”

Thankfully, Hamberly didn’t have his laptop password protected, so I shoved in a USB and opened it up. Inside was a series of Word files—most of them at least five years old. I picked one at random and double-clicked it. What it revealed were research notes. Not the ones we were looking for, but research notes nonetheless.

“Looks like I was wrong again, and you were right,” I said. “I think we might have just found the missing notes. And if we have, that means Wilson wasn’t only involved in this little blackmail scheme; he was also storing the backup copies of his research here.”

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

“No.”

I ejected that USB and inserted another one. More Word files, more research notes. Jackson came up behind me, watching as I continued searching through each of the USBs. We didn’t hit anything useful until the eighth one, and while it wasn’t about the virus, it certainly was about the telepathy inversion device.

I glanced at Jackson. “Was Wilson working on that before he was given the virus project?”

“I have no idea. Try the next one.”

I did, but it was back to older notes. The tenth one, however, very much reminded me of the earlier notes I’d taken for Baltimore, Wilson’s counterpart over at the Chase Medical Research Institute. The remaining USBs were more up-to-date; we’d definitely found our pot of research gold.

“The question that now has to be answered,” Jackson said grimly, “is what the fuck do we do with them?”

I frowned. “We give them to PIT—”

“The minute we do that, all bets are off with the sindicati, and we don’t really need to be dealing with their shit when Rinaldo is still on the loose.”

“But we can’t leave them here—given the amount of time we’ve been in this place, anyone following us is going to suspect we may have found something.” I waved a hand around the room. “This space isn’t exactly hard to find.”

“No, but it won’t matter if we hide them out in the open. I doubt Rinaldo or even Paretti will suspect USBs placed in the various folders hold anything more than backup naked pictures.”

“Probably not, but it’s still a hell of a risk.”

“But less of a risk than taking them with us and getting stopped again.”

I hesitated, then nodded. He was right; they probably were a whole lot safer here than they were with us right now. Especially given the possible leak at PIT.

We proceeded to randomly scatter the USBs through the various folders and also placed a couple in the chemical storage unit inside the photo lab. All we had to do now was try to remember all the different locations.