Chapter 81 Richard Harrington Is Human After All.
The iron gates of the Vane estate hit the stone stoppers with a loud bang, and Alex kept his foot on the gas until the car slid to a halt in the center of the dark courtyard.
The fog was so thick that the house looked like a gray shape without edges, and the air smelled of salt and wet pavement as Sarah climbed out of the passenger seat. She was clutching the hard drives against her chest like they were the only things keeping her upright, and she didn't look back at the long driveway to see if the black SUVs had finally stopped following them.
Mark stepped out of the back seat and stood by the car door, his eyes moving over the dark trees and the cliffside, his hand resting on the roof of the vehicle while he waited for his mother to reach the front steps.
"The house is empty, my mother is at the coastal cottage for the night, so we have the library to ourselves and the security system is already set to high," Alex said, his voice was low and gravelly, and he took the heavy bag of drives from Sarah as they walked through the front door.
"Is the server in the library connected to the main grid, because if it is, Helena will see us the moment we log in," Sarah said, she followed him into the wide hallway, her boots clicking on the marble floors in the quiet house.
"It is a standalone workstation with its own satellite uplink, and it doesn't touch the Harrington servers, so we can work without leaving a digital footprint for the city lawyers to find," Alex replied, he led them into the library and flipped a single switch that bathed the room in a soft, yellow light.
They were working together now, a pair of men who had been pushed into a corner, and the tension between them had turned into a focused energy that was directed entirely at the computer screens.
"I am starting the recovery on the Veridian files first, I want to see if the zoning maps were altered before the city council meeting," Sarah said, she sat down next to Alex and started typing, her fingers moving with a steady rhythm that ignored the shaking in her hands.
"I am going deeper than the zoning maps, I am looking for the communication logs between Helena and the private security firm, because I want to know exactly how much she paid them to follow Mark," Alex said, his jaw was set and he didn't look away from the monitor as the first progress bar appeared on the screen.
"I can handle the server cooling, the drives are running hot from the transfer and we can't afford a hardware failure right now," Mark said, he moved to the back of the workstation and started adjusting the internal fans, his eyes fixed on the temperature gauges.
"The first drive is mounted, and the data looks clean, Sarah, but there is a hidden partition that is encrypted with a legacy code from the seventies," Alex said, he stopped typing and looked at the screen with a confused expression.
"Why would Helena have files from the seventies on a modern work drive?" Sarah asked, she leaned in closer to the monitor, her shoulder brushing against Alex's as they both stared at the blinking cursor.
"Maybe she didn't put them there, maybe she just copied the entire directory from my father’s private backup without looking at what was inside," Alex replied, and he started a brute-force decryption on the folder, his fingers tapping a fast beat on the edge of the desk while they waited.
"If it is a Harrington file, the password will be something to do with the original land acquisition or the date the first tower went up," Mark suggested, he walked around to the front of the desk and looked at the code.
"I tried those, but the system is asking for a medical ID number, not a date or a name," Alex said, and he paused for a second, his mind going back to a conversation he had with his father years ago about the Harrington family history.
"Try the ID from the old boarding school in the north, the one your father mentioned once when he was talking about the lack of discipline in the city," Sarah said, she remembered the way Richard’s face had changed when he spoke about that place, his eyes turning cold and distant.
Alex typed in a seven-digit number, and the screen flashed green before the folder finally clicked open, revealing a list of scanned documents that were yellowed and frayed at the edges.
There were no business plans in this folder, and there were no architectural drawings, there were only medical reports and incident logs from a school called St. Jude’s, and the name at the top of every page was Richard Harrington.
"He told me he was the captain of the rowing team, he told me he was the top of his class and that the teachers loved him," Alex said, his voice was a thin line of shock as he opened the first report and started to read the handwritten notes from a doctor who had been dead for twenty years.
"These aren't rowing injuries, Alex, these are reports of blunt force trauma and prolonged exposure to the cold," Sarah said, she reached out and scrolled down the page, her eyes widening as she read the description of a fifteen-year-old Richard being found in a basement with two broken ribs and a fever that nearly killed him.
"The headmaster was the one who signed the incident report, he claimed Richard fell down a flight of stairs, but the doctor wrote a note in the margin that says the bruising was consistent with a heavy belt," Mark said, his voice was quiet and he looked at the photo attached to the file.
The photo showed a young boy standing against a brick wall, his face was thin and his eyes were full of a jagged, hollowed-out look that made him look fifty years old instead of fifteen. He wasn't the billionaire king of the city in this photo, he was a scholarship student who was being broken by a system that didn't want him there.
"He didn't build the company to be rich, he built it so he would never be that boy again, and he treated us like soldiers because that was the only way he knew how to survive," Alex said, he leaned back in his chair and covered his face with his hands, the weight of the discovery hitting him harder than any of Helena's lies.
"It explains the lack of warmth, and it explains why he thinks everything is a war, but it doesn't change what he is doing to us right now," Sarah told him, her hand resting on his arm to keep him grounded.
"Wait, there is a second file in the directory, it was modified yesterday," Mark said, he pointed to a document at the bottom of the list.
Alex clicked on the file, and a video window opened on the screen, showing a dark room with a single lamp. A man was sitting in a chair with his back to the camera, but they all recognized the posture and the way he held his pen.
It was Richard, and he was writing something on a piece of Harrington letterhead, his hand was shaking as he signed the bottom of the page.
"I am not doing this for the board, and I am not doing this for Helena," Richard’s voice came through the speakers, sounding tired and small.