Jonathan recognized the reference to one of his most inviolable philosophies: that the simplest, most elegant explanations were most often the correct ones.
Venice continued, moving the cursor on the screen to highlight her points as she spoke. “There are tons of correspondence and assorted other details that I haven’t had a chance to look at yet, but my attention was first drawn to these files here.” The arrow-point cursor stroked a list of ten or twelve files that all ended in a similar suffix.
“Note the dates,” she said. “These were all opened yesterday, and they all came from one of the thumb drives.”
She said this stuff as if people could read her mind and understand the implications. Jonathan feigned patience and waited, confident that a sensible explanation was on the way.
“But if you look here,” she continued, clicking to a different screen that to Jonathan’s eye showed more files that looked essentially the same as the others, “you’ll see that the same files were erased from the computer’s hard drive just today.”
Jonathan raised his hand, as if in a classroom. “If they’ve been erased, how can we be looking at them?”
Venice gave him a look of pure disappointment. “Come on, Dig. You’re not new at this. You know that no file is truly erased. Not if they don’t use a magnet or a shredder. If you know what to look for, you can search for recently erased files. You might not be able to pull up the files themselves without some extra work, but the file names will still be there.”
“Let me guess,” Boxers said. “You did the extra work.”
She beamed. “You said that you thought Banks was in the process of erasing files when you crashed his place. Building on that, I went to the erased files and entered today’s date, and I got this.”
She switched back to the first screen. “I searched on the file names. You see that they’re kind of weird? That ‘dot pic’ suffix? Well I copied and pasted, this is what I came up with. The backup file from the thumb drive.”
Jonathan felt a tingle in the small of his back. He sensed that something big was on the way. “Albert Banks hadn’t gotten to the backup yet to erase it.”
Venice nodded. “That, or he didn’t know that a backup had been made. You’re welcome, by the way, for forcing you to buy all that memory and storage space. It helps to be able to load all these files simultaneously.”
“Have I ever denied you anything?” Jonathan asked. One of the advantages of owning limitless funds was the ability to have it all. He never said no to a technology request from Venice. Most of the time, he didn’t even know what he was saying yes to.
“I’d be even more impressed if the files were open and we knew what they were,” Boxers said.
“I was thinking the same thing,” Venice said, oblivious to Big Guy’s sarcasm. “And let me tell you, I had to search for a while to figure out a way to open them. It turns out that the files were done in a partially encrypted program that I’d read about a couple of years ago. It’s used for the transmission of large documents, often architectural drawings.”
She clicked again, and the screen filled with a detailed drawing of what appeared to be a bridge. It was a skeletal view, revealing structural members in both plan and elevation views. Venice clicked again, and the screen revealed what looked to be a small part of the larger drawing shown in cross-section.
“Engineering sketches?” Jonathan wondered aloud.
“That would be my guess,” Venice said. “There are dozens of drawings like this within the file. Maybe hundreds.”
“What am I missing?” Boxers asked. “Banks was an engineer. Shouldn’t he have lots of this kind of stuff in his computer?”
“Ah, you weren’t paying attention,” Venice said. She clicked back to the first image. “What are we looking at?”
Jonathan held up his hand. “Ven, please. I know you groove on this, but is there a way to cut to the chase?”
“Look, Digger,” Venice insisted. “Look at the lower right-hand corner. Look at the name of the bridge.”
Then he saw it. “The Brooklyn Bridge? The original? Wow, I thought the drawing looked old. But why is that significant?”
“Because it was built over a hundred years ago. You said it yourself, it’s an old bridge. Engineers design new things, not old things.” Her eyes narrowed. “On the other hand, what group of people can you think of that would want to see detailed drawings of existing structures?”
Jonathan felt a chill. “Terrorists?”
She smiled.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Boxers said. “At what point did I become the voice of reason? You can’t conclude something like that from the presence of a drawing. Maybe he just likes old bridges.”
“You saw how feverishly he was trying to erase the files when we got to his house,” Jonathan said. He looked to Venice for confirmation. “That’s the timing, right?”
“I checked my record of your phone call after the shooting at Banks’s place. Just about a perfect match.”
Jonathan could tell that Boxers was close to being convinced, but didn’t want to be.
“But there’s more,” Venice said. She had the most stunning smile when she thought she’d come up with something big. She started clicking more files, and more drawings popped up on the screen. “This is the file on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge,” she said. “And here is the Holland Tunnel. The Sumner Tunnel in Boston. New York’s Penn Station.” She stopped there. “There are more, but from what I can tell, they’re all major commuter routes. Can you think of a better terrorist target than a place that is guaranteed to have thousands of people at risk for the initial blast, and then millions more inconvenienced for years to come? Think of the economic consequences.”
Jonathan sat back in his seat, rubbing his face vigorously with his hands. He knew that she’d found the pulse of the plot they’d been looking for, but the ramifications made him feel a little dizzy. He held out his hands as if to stop the onslaught of ideas.
“Okay, let’s hang on a second. Let’s take a step back. We’re about three steps away from proclaiming that FLOTUS is a terrorist. Is that where we’re going here?”
Even Boxers looked shocked. “I believe that’s exactly where we’re going.”
Venice said, “It’s perfectly consistent with her past. Maybe this has been her plan all along.”
Jonathan scoffed, “Okay, that’s a step too far. Not even the president knew he wanted to be president until after they’d married.”
“She didn’t have to be First Lady to pull off an attack,” Venice said.
Jonathan liked that. “And maybe the reason why she didn’t pull the trigger before was because of her trajectory toward the White House. Whether she was biding her time for the perfect moment or delaying so that she wouldn’t screw things up for her husband, either way would explain the long leash on her plan.”
“Might explain why the Secret Service was shooting at each other,” Boxers offered. “Word got out that she was trying to pull the trigger and they decided to take her out.”
Therein lay the glitch in the theory that Jonathan just couldn’t embrace. “Come on, folks. Even my cynicism has limits. If that hit last night was truly executed by the Secret Service, that means killing each other. Box, could you have opened up on a unit operator?”
“If I thought he’d turned to the other side? You betchum, Red Rider. Without flinching.”
Jonathan let it go, but it sounded like more talk than truth. Soldiers and cops and firefighters developed a brotherhood of shared fear and sacrifice that made them a family. Fratricide would be no easier among them than it would be among brothers born of the same mother.