Page 163 of The Session

“My family’s business is secrets. Your boss will know what it means,” said Mark.

“You play very dirty,” growled Laurent.

“No. I play by the rules. I just don’t have the liberty of writing them.”

“So . . . if this checks out—” began Diane.

“It will.”

“You said you’re getting out of the family business. What does that mean for the Vault?” she asked.

“I don’t know about any mythical places where they allegedly have everybody’s dirty secrets, but if they did, this Vault sounds like it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Some people might think it’s too valuable to get rid of,” Diane countered.

“Well, since we’re only talking hypotheticals, I had a realization,” Mark shared with them. “It’s not about possessing people’s secrets. It’s knowing how to access them that’s true power.”

Afterburner

Mark sat in the passenger seat of the golf cart and held on with terror and fascination as Benjamin drove at top speed through an endless corridor lined with extremely tall shelves.

It wasn’t so much their speed in the cavernous chamber as the fact that it was nearly pitch black, and Benjamin was navigating entirely by sound. The only illumination was the glow from the cart’s running lights reflecting low off the metal shelving.

The vast underground facility could have had a sunroof and it wouldn’t have made a difference to Benjamin because he was blind.

“I guess they told you this used to be a World War II fuel depot the navy built,” he told Mark as he slowed to take a corner. “My supervisor tried to explain the whole legal structure of it to me. It was kind of confusing, but I guess you know that too. This is on Indigenous people’s land in Canada where they have certain protections, but it’s being leased by some overseas corporation. I guess the point of it all is to make things a lot more complicated.”

As Mark understood it, Summit Strategies had engineered several legal and logistical means to keep the Vault as well hidden as they had.

They were on an island off the coast of Maine, just inside the Canadian border. And as Benjamin had explained, it was claimed by a tribe who leased it to a Summit holding company. While technically the Canadian government wouldn’t have had any problem serving a warrant here should they have been inclined, they didn’t know what was in the Vault, and trying to raid the facility had several practical complications. Any boat trying to dock at the pier would be visible from miles away, and the airstrip was closely monitored. The Vault itself was locked behind a several-ton steel door that could only be opened remotely, and the location of those controls was known only to a handful of people, which now included Mark.

Benjamin brought the cart to a halt. “Here we go.”

Mark got out and turned on the light attached to his cap.

Benjamin was standing next to a shelf filled with dividers and white folders with their tabs sticking out.

He ran his fingers across a label on the end of the shelf. “This tells us which section we’re in. Right now this is H, and if we keep going, you can tell each section if you know braille.”

Mark grabbed a folder off a shelf. The tab was in braille. Hearing the sound of it being moved, Benjamin reached out and touched the edge.

“Kathleen G. Tremaine,” Benjamin identified.

Mark flipped open the folder, and there were pages of transcripts, phone conversations, and what Summit called incident reports—significant life events.

“They say their names are blacked out inside, and the only way to identify the person it belongs to is the name on the folder,” Benjamin explained.

“That’s what they told me,” Mark agreed.

Mark continued to search through the pages. Sure enough, every place where the owner’s name would have been mentioned, there was a black redaction.

“How do you know which folder to put this into when it arrives?” Mark asked.

“There’s a braille reader next to the fax machine. Can you believe that? We’ve got fifty of them here. That tells us who it belongs to.”

Fax machines, Mark thought. That’s how old the Vault’s system is.

Max had shown him the intake part of the Vault and the different ways they collected information and then had it sent down here to be cataloged.