Chapter 7: Ophelia Park Receives an Anonymous Package

The thumb drive was small enough to disappear in a coat pocket, which was where Ophelia found it — not in her mailbox, as she initially thought, but in the breast pocket of her wool blazer, the one she'd worn to the Monday press briefing and hung on the hook behind her desk. She had reached for a pen and her fingers had closed around something that wasn't a pen.

She stood very still for a moment, one hand still in the pocket, her body making the instinctive calculation of someone who had been in this business long enough to know that objects that appear in your coat without explanation are either mistakes or messages.

It was a standard USB drive, black, no branding, the kind you could buy in a pack of ten at any drugstore in the district. Tape wrapped twice around its casing. Nothing written on the tape.