All of this was routine work in preparing documents for production to a litigation adversary. But nothing about The Lab and Lester was routine, and that tipped me off: there had to be something far more sensitive than attorney letters and employee records among these documents.

One day last week I thought I’d found it.

I came upon a stack of employee medical records. Apparently every new hire underwent a medical assessment upon arrival at PsT, to screen out any serious or infectious diseases. The doctors’ notes were there, in English, listing DOB, height, weight, BP, temperature, pulse rate, respiration rate, then a handwritten OK to work. It was the DOB that jumped out at me. Some of them were as young as ten, yet the doctor’s note was the same: OK to work. I cross-checked the children’s names with the payroll records and confirmed it. Those children photographed in the dining hall at PsT weren’t family members of employees, as I’d thought. Or at least not only family members. They were employees, too.

Okay, so CDMI used child labor. They weren’t the first Western company to exploit Asian child labor, and the practice didn’t violate any local laws. But it would be an enormous black eye for the company if the media found out, and I could see why Barrett was worried.

More to the point, I could see that the medical records were not remotely responsive to Mark Ivins’s document request. There was no legal requirement to produce these files to him, and hundreds of reasons not to. Hundreds of employees under the age of sixteen.

So I pulled all the employee medical records, placed them in a box, sealed it, and told Lester to deliver it to Mr. Barrett, for his eyes only.

I thought that might be the end of the DEFCON 1 level of secrecy, but the next day I got an email from Barrett: Shay, good work flagging those confidential employee documents. Might still be more. Stay alert! Barry

TODAY I DISCOVERED the real smoking gun.

It was Saturday, but I came into the office anyway. I did every day. It was warm there, and the coffee and Internet were free. Besides, there was nothing to do at home but worry about David if he wasn’t there and maintain silence if he was.

Lester had agreed to come in on his day off but not until after lunch. I couldn’t work on the documents without my official escort into The Lab, but I kept myself otherwise busy. I read the news online, focusing especially on the fashion features and anything coming out of Southeast Asia. I drafted some of the boilerplate language I would use in responding to Mark Ivins’s document requests, and I updated the forms I’d developed during my time at Jackson Rieders. I found some hanging file folders in the supply room and organized the drawers in my desk.

In the bottom of one drawer I found the documents I’d copied from the file boxes my first day on the job, the air charter contracts that had been misfiled with the asset sale documents. Also in that drawer was the legal pad containing the handwritten index of the boxed files I’d prepared that first day. As it turned out, it was a wasted effort, since I had to start from scratch to prepare the same index down in The Lab. I tossed the legal pad in the wastebasket, but as the pages fanned out in a cascade of words and numbers, one of the entries caught my eye.