Tuesday
I jiggled the Marlboro box on my way back to the Red Line. Whatever was inside rattled again, a slight tinny sound. Where was the damn train? Finally it rolled into the station. I tapped my foot until the doors opened, hurried in, and snagged a seat. Then I flipped up the lid of the box.
Inside was a flash drive, the kind I use to screen shows for clients. The label said it was sixteen gigs. That’s a lot of memory. An average video—at least the ones I produce—runs about thirty minutes, which, depending on the quality of the transfer, is rarely more than four gigs. I frowned. Why would Parks stash a drive like that in a Marlboro box? He had mentioned an errand he had to run. Was he planning to deliver it to someone? Had it flown out of his hands when he jumped? What was on it?
I stared out the window but, unlike this morning, paid no attention to the glimpses of Chicago racing by. This day couldn’t get any worse. I’d been fired from a job, someone I knew had killed himself, I was nursing a bout of guilt for not coming forward, and now I had a mysterious memory stick, which, for all I knew, contained proprietary or illegal data. What was next?
When I got home I treated myself to a big glass of wine and ran upstairs to my office. I slid the drive into my computer. My Mac politely informed me I was now connected to an external drive and asked whether I wanted to open it. I clicked and saw the familiar blue icon that indicates a folder. There was no name on it, just a series of what looked like random numbers. I clicked, and a bunch of files popped up. There had to be more than fifty. They weren’t labeled, though, and I couldn’t figure out what app had created them. I clicked on one. A screen popped up that had nothing but a rectangular box and the instruction to “Enter Key.”
It was encrypted.
I tried a few of the other files. They were encrypted too. I closed out and clicked “Get Info” on the folder. The folder contained five point five megs. Depending on what was inside, that might or might not be a lot of data. It was impossible to tell.
I sipped my wine and thought about it. Then I copied and dragged the contents of the drive onto my hard drive. I reopened the folder, clicked on a file that directed me to enter my key, and took a screen shot. I emailed it to Mac and asked him what he might know about it, aside from the fact it was encrypted. Then I realized I hadn’t told him we’d been fired. I picked up the phone.