In one of them was Patrick’s Dictaphone.

I held it in my hand for a second, my pulse thumping in my ears, wondering if I’d just made a terrible mistake. There had been dust all over the boxes in the hidden room because they’d gone so long without being looked at. I’d found no itemized list of objects anywhere, no indication that anything in the room had been individually numbered, but that did little to settle my nerves. After what had happened at the cottage, it was obvious that whoever was behind this was on high alert, and that meant, sooner rather than later, they were going to start searching for potential vulnerabilities, ensuring they hadn’t been compromised. They were going to check the room.

And when they did, they were going to find the Dictaphone missing.

That meant I had to work fast.

I looked again at the sequence written on the reverse of it in black felt pen: G76984Z. It had taken me the entire walk back to the car to realize why I recognized the sequence, and in particular the numbers in the middle.

It was in Isaac Mills’s handwriting.

The alarm code for Seiger and Sten had been 459822 and the sequence on the dictaphone was G76984Z, so they shared some of the same digits – 4, 9, 8. Mills’s 4 was distinct: the horizontal tail went up slightly, the vertical line kicked out to the left, and his 8 had a small loop at the top rather than at the bottom. It was definitely him. So had he written on the Dictaphone in anticipation of me finding my way into the room? Even if he did, what did the sequence mean? Was he giving me another access code?

I didn’t know yet, but as much as taking the Dictaphone was a risk, I tried to tell myself that it was less of a risk than leaving it behind. If I had, someone might see what Mills had done, and although I still wasn’t sure what to make of him, still wasn’t sure if I even trusted him, what he’d done for me felt less and less like a trap and, in getting me the key for the room, more like a massive personal gamble.

I grabbed a USB-to-stereo jack from the glove compartment and plugged one end into the car’s Aux slot and the other into the Dictaphone. After that, I swung the car out and headed for the down ramp, pushing Play as I did. The muted sound of birdsong started to fill the car’s speakers.

And then Patrick.