Page 45 of Oleander

“He did.”

“When did you decide the line had been crossed?” the prosecutor asked.

“Platform Nine,” Voss said. “I had spent years telling myself I was containing Mr. Burton. Then men died, and I realized I had only been making him comfortable.” He described Hollis ordering him to retrieve Dorothy’s archive and identify everyone who possessed a copy.

“What were you told to do once you found them?”

“Recover the files. Frighten the holders. If fear failed, I was told to use stronger persuasion.”

“What did that mean to you?”

“It meant violence, with enough distance between Mr. Burton and the act that he could call himself shocked afterward.” Voss said he refused when Hollis included a Platform Nine widow among the targets. “His exact words were, ‘Grief makes people reckless. Correct her.’ I told him no.”

Three nights later, he was ambushed in that warehouse.

“Were you meant to survive?”

“No.”

“Why did you give the files to the government and the press?” the prosecutor asked.

“They were not mine to bury,” Voss said. “Dorothy understood that if one person held everything, Hollis could reach that person. So we made the truth too widely held to kill.”

“What did Dorothy ask of you?”

“To make copies and distrust every single point of failure, including me.” A few jurors glanced toward him. Voss continued. “She said Hollis believed possession was control. Her answer was distribution. Attorneys got one set. Reporters got another. Regulators received material matched to their jurisdiction. The most dangerous records were divided so no one recipient held the whole map.”

“Did she ask you to protect her reputation?”

“No. She asked me to protect the people named in the files.”

“Did she ask you to destroy Hollis Burton?” Voss’s jaw tightened.

“She said he was doing that without assistance.”

The prosecutor played the phone call in which Hollis demanded that Voss be found and silenced. She played another in which he instructed security contractors to make recipients of Dorothy’s files afraid to use them. Voss identified Hollis’s voice, the contractor, and the coded references in the conversation.

“On that first recording,” the prosecutor said, “Mr. Burton refers to a ‘weather problem.’ What did that phrase mean?”

“A witness who might talk.”

“And when he said the problem should be moved offshore?”

“He wanted the witness taken somewhere without cameras.”

“The second call mentions a ‘late inspection.’”

“That meant a break-in after the target left home.”

“Did Mr. Burton invent this vocabulary?”

“Mostly. He liked ordinary words. He thought plain language made ugly orders disappear.”

On cross-examination, the defense attorney approached with a legal pad and no notes visible on it.

“You supervised surveillance, correct?”

“Yes.”