“Do you remember anything that could help us? If you’ve maybe seen something and...” I peeked into the safe, then checked it to see if there was maybe another one behind it, but it didn’t look like it.

“No, I haven’t been in here often.”

I looked up at the ceiling, but the light bulb was bare. There wasn’t anything visible on the floor either.

“I think there might be something...” James was patting his father’s chair.

“What?” I came closer. A beep coming from one of the walls made me jump and I nearly hit myself on the desk. “What the hell was that?”

James was about to say something when a rectangular piece of the wall popped out and moved up right behind his back. A smile spread across his lips. “Looks like we found it.”

“How did you do that?”

“There’s some kind of a button under the seat,” he said.

We went to take a better look, and I realized it was yet another small safe with a computer screen on it. Whoever had made this hiding place had to be really good because we hadn’t seen anything different on that wall, but the way the light fell on the paint had helped hide any rough edges.

James swore.

“What?”

“Look what it says.”

I focused on the screen. “Oh shit.”

“We have one minute left.”

“Yeah, that’s not good.” I stared at the counter on the screen. A bomb. There was a fucking bomb somewhere inside, and it would explode in less than a minute if the second level of protection wasn’t passed. And the security measures in question consisted of a fingerprint and retina scan, with only one attempt before everything went boom. Fuck. We were never going to find out what was in the safe, but neither would the Desaltis. We’d successfully passed the first level by disabling the alarm, but we couldn’t do anything about this one.

“They knew about this.” James turned toward me. “They knew they shouldn’t trigger the alarm, so when you disabled it, that guy was able to get inside. He was looking for this.”

“Well, yeah, and now no one’s going to get it. Let’s go.” I started for the door, but James didn’t move. “James! Now!”

He was studying the screen and I wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t even know if we’d get to the door in time, but if we didn’t leave right now, we were screwed.

“James!”

“You go,” he simply said, and I let out a frustrated groan. There weren’t even any windows in here, so we couldn’t climb out somehow or jump to one of the nearby trees.