Chapter 24 - THE ENCRYPTED TRUTH
Thirty minutes later, Daniel slipped through the back entrance of a dingy, twenty-four-hour public library downtown. He headed straight for the computer stations tucked away in the darkest, most secluded corner of the basement floor. Paying cash at a terminal that required no identification, he sat down in front of a flickering monitor and pulled the black USB flash drive from his pocket.
His hands shook as he plugged the drive into the front USB port of the desktop computer.
For a terrifying five seconds, nothing happened. The screen remained frozen on the desktop background. Daniel held his breath, fearing that the drive was booby-trapped with a remote-wipe virus or a hardware-destroying surge. Then, a single command prompt window flashed open on the screen, instantly demanding a cryptographic decryption key.
Daniel stared at the blinking cursor. There was no password hint, no prompt for a security question. Just a blank input line.
*What key would they use? What key would Victor or his shadowy masters leave behind?*
He thought back to the broken bedroom wall from his childhood—the hammer, the hidden compartment, the skeletal remains of the truth that his family had tried so hard to bury. He thought about his eighth birthday—the day the world as he knew it shattered into a million pieces.
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With trembling fingers, he typed out the exact date of that fateful incident, combined with the number of hammer strikes he had delivered to the drywall: *10141994-48*.
He pressed Enter.
