“There,” the kid said. He paused on an image through the open door of Shay Lambert’s office. She was standing at her desk and sliding some papers into the shabby canvas bag she called her briefcase.

Barrett squinted at the screen. Those had to be the papers she wanted back, the ones that were supposedly valuable to her. He couldn’t tell what they were. “Can you blow this up?”

“Let’s see.” The kid hummed. He switched screens, hit some buttons, then switched back to the first screen. “There.”

Barrett leaned in again. In a freeze-frame on the screen was a close-up of the stack of documents in Lambert’s hand. The top page looked like a printed or typewritten form, but the text was too blurred to read.

“See? It’s no use,” Culligan said.

Barrett pushed the kid out of the way and put his face close to the screen. There was a Post-it stuck to the top page, and he just could make out the handwritten notation there: All male employees. “What the—?” He cut himself off as the logo at the top of the printed form came into focus. At first glance he thought it was the company’s white dove. But no, it was a different bird, and with a jolt, he realized it was a Siamese fireback, the national bird of Thailand. “Oh, fuck,” he hissed.

“What?”

“Look.”

Culligan leaned in. “The bird?”

“It’s the logo of APU Transport.”

Culligan turned to stare at Barrett. “She has the charter contracts?”

“She knows.”

“MAYBE SHE DOESN’T know,” Culligan said when they were back in Barrett’s office. “I mean, these flights could’ve been anything.”

“Of course she knows,” Barrett snarled. This was his own fucking fault for hiring someone with her smarts. It wasn’t even like the job required it. A good paralegal could have handled that document production. It was his own form of self-aggrandizement to always have the best and the brightest reporting to him. A stupid habit, and potentially self-destructive. “Why else would she have smuggled the documents out of the goddamn building?” That reminded him: this was actually Culligan’s fault. “How the fuck did you let this happen? You were supposed to have a system in place. She wasn’t supposed to take any documents out of the room.”

“She didn’t! These documents were never in the room!”

Barrett got up into the man’s face. The smell of Scotch was now mixed with the stink of nervous sweat. “Well, she didn’t get them out of thin air!”

Culligan’s glistening brow furrowed. “She could’ve seen a reference to APU in the accounts payable. Then—I don’t know—she did some digging on her own.”

“I don’t know,” Barrett jeered. “I fucking pay you to know!”

“I’ll go and see her. I’ll find out what she knows.”

“You do that, Jack.” He stabbed a finger into Culligan’s chest. “And you better hope the answer is nothing.”

The man swallowed hard. “And if it isn’t?”

“Then we’ll have no choice. We’ll have to bail her out.”