Page 67 of Snow

For some reason, she thought of Snow and the way he had looked at her at dinner last night, like she was capable of things she hadn’t even imagined for herself. He would also be furious at the risk she was taking.

She heard the pin click, and her eyes flew open. Turning the tension wrench, she felt the lock surrender, and the bolt slid back with a soft thunk that sounded like a crack of thunder in the silent space.

She had done it. A huge smile spread across her face before she could stop it. She stood up and literally jumped up and down.

Okay, focus, Nova. The thought snapped through her mind like a whip. Her grin vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Every second she stood there celebrating was another second someone could walk in and catch her.

She slipped through the door into Brett’s domain and immediately felt the shift in the air, though she knew it was the same, stale, cold atmosphere that circulated through the rest of the administration area.

She turned and scanned the space. It wasn’t as big as she thought it would be. A heavy metal desk dominated the room. A laptop sat angled toward the chair, flanked by a phone, a leather-bound planner, and a ceramic mug stamped with the Gulf Tide logo.

Behind the desk, a long credenza ran beneath the narrow window. Two filing cabinets stood against the opposite wall, along with a bookcase filled with binders and technical manuals. There was nowhere obvious to begin, and every second she spent deciding was another second closer to getting caught.

Nova hurried to the filing cabinets. The top drawer squeaked as it opened, making her freeze for a microsecond, but then she opened it the rest of the way. She quickly rifled through the hanging files but found nothing but equipment manuals, maintenance schedules, and other rig operation material. The drawers in the cabinet and the one next to it offered nothing either.

“Come on,” she whispered, looking around the room. “There has to be something in here that I risked my life for.”

She rounded Brett’s desk and pulled open the top drawer. Nothing but pens, batteries, and two unopened rolls of breath mints. The second drawer was just more office supplies and some receipts. But something under the receipts caught her eye. When she moved the receipts, she found a passport. She picked it up and flipped it open. It was Brett’s. At least the picture was, but the name inside said he was Anthony Telesford. Why would Brett have a passport under another name?

Well, this just got interesting.

She pulled her phone out, snapped a picture of it, and then put the passport back in the drawer, covering it back up with the receipts.

She checked her watch. She had been inside for less than five minutes, though it felt like twenty.

Her gaze then landed on the credenza. Several files had been stacked neatly at one end, beside a tray of unopened mail. She flipped through them.

The top folder contained an inspection report from the previous week. Beneath it was a vendor contract. Her hand froze on the third file—Capperson’s personnel file.

Nova snatched it up and opened it. As she flipped through it, she felt a little disappointed that all it contained was the typical HR documents.

“Seriously?” she muttered in frustration. She had risked getting caught for a folder filled with exactly the kind of generic personnel records she could have requested through official channels.

She started to return the file to the credenza when something beneath it caught her attention.

A slim spiral-bound blue notebook lay half-hidden under the stack, its cover worn at the corners. Then she noticed the name written in small block letters along the bottom edge—Capperson.

The first few pages contained dates and times written down. On a few of the entries, there were initials and additional times as if someone was timing something.

Whatever she was looking at, it wasn’t just a journal. It was a record. Nova pulled out her phone and began photographing each page.

She turned to the last page and found the name Andre Matisse written at the top. Beneath his name were similar entries like the other pages, though not as many. She took a picture.

She closed the notebook and went to put it back where it had been when a few Polaroid photographs slipped out and fell to the floor.

She quickly bent down to pick them up, expecting them to be personal pictures. However, they weren’t. The first was a picture of long cylinder-type canisters. It kinda looked like a torpedo, but on a smaller scale. Each one had a dark band around its center and some kind of marking near the top, though the photograph was too grainy for her to read it.

The second picture appeared to show an assortment of metal components spread across a workbench, along with wires, something that looked like a small propeller, and a few sealed packages she couldn’t make out. There was also something that resembled a gaming controller.

The last photo was a large metal barrel. A white label covered part of its side, marked with symbols and lettering she couldn’t identify.

Nova photographed each Polaroid, front and back. There was no writing on the first two, but the third had a date scrawled along the bottom edge.

Just as she took the last picture, a muffled clang sounded somewhere outside. Nova crouched behind Brett’s desk with the photos in her hand.

Her heart was racing. She was going to get caught. She waited a few seconds, and when she didn’t hear anything else, she stood up slowly and then started to put everything back where she found it.

“Okay, now to get out of here,” she whispered before checking the desk and cabinets, making sure that nothing looked disturbed.