Henrik arrived at 4:13 a.m. looking like a man who had been disassembled by the last twelve hours and put back together by someone working from a rough sketch.
Maren opened the door and let him in without speaking. He stood in the hallway wet jacket, muddy shoes, the faint petroleum smell of gasoline clinging to him and looked around the apartment with the rapid, cataloguing gaze of someone who has recently been burglarized and now sees every room as a place where things can be taken.
"Sit down," she said. "I'll make coffee."
He sat at the kitchen table. He placed his hands flat on the formica and studied them as though they belonged to a stranger. Maren made coffee the real kind, French press, the process of grinding and boiling and pressing giving her something to do with the part of her brain that was screaming.
"Tell me what happened."
He told her. He'd gone home at 10 p.m. his apartment, a studio in Allston that he'd chosen because it was cheap and near the B Line and had a landlord who didn't ask questions. The door had been open. Not broken opened. The lock had been picked with a tool that left no marks, which was either professional competence or a message about professional competence.
His laptop was gone. The external hard drive where he'd backed up the Phase 0 files was gone. A folder of printed documents his notes, his analysis, his correspondence with the friend at UMass was gone. They'd taken everything digital, everything paper, everything that proved what he'd found.
They hadn't taken his clothes. They hadn't taken the $400 in cash he kept in a coffee can in the kitchen. They hadn't taken his phone, which had been in his jacket pocket because he'd stopped at a convenience store on the way home.
"It wasn't a robbery," he said. "It was an erasure."
Maren poured the coffee and sat across from him. The kitchen was cold the radiator had decided to take the night off, as it periodically did, with the unreliable temperament of a machine that had opinions. Alma's drawings rustled on the refrigerator when the heat cycled off.
"Do they know about the USB drive you gave me?" she asked.
"They know I had copies. They don't know I gave one to you I don't think. I was careful."
"Henrik, they broke into your apartment."
"They broke into my apartment because I stopped being invisible. I started asking questions. I pushed the maintenance request too hard. Someone flagged it." He wrapped his hands around the coffee mug. His fingers were pale. "But I never emailed you. I never called you from my apartment. I intercepted you in person, at the loading dock, in a camera blind spot. The only connection between us is the USB drive, and if they had that, they wouldn't have needed to break in. They'd already have the data."
This was logical. Maren noted it with the part of her mind that evaluated evidence. The part of her mind that was a mother in an apartment with her daughter sleeping twenty feet away was doing something else entirely something hot and sharp and mammalian that had nothing to do with logic.
"You can stay here tonight," she said. "On the couch. But we need to move fast. If they're cleaning up evidence, the Phase 0 server in the sub-basement is next."
"Tuesday night."
"Tuesday night. The twelve-minute window."
"That's three days."
"Then we use three days."
She did not sleep for the rest of the night. Neither did Henrik. They sat at the kitchen table and planned.
• •
The plan had three components.
First: the extraction. Tuesday, 2 a.m. Henrik's revoked keycard, reactivated during the firmware reset. Twelve minutes to enter the sub-basement, access the segregated server, and copy the full Phase 0 database donor profiles, template library, signal specifications, session logs, everything onto an encrypted external drive.
Second: the handoff. Two channels, simultaneous. Maren would deliver a copy to Rina Lacey, a health-and-pharma reporter at the Boston Globe who had built her reputation on the opioid litigation coverage and had the editorial muscle to run a story that would survive Sollen's legal counter-offensive. Separately, Henrik would deliver a copy to a federal prosecutor an assistant U.S. attorney named Catherine Hale, identified through a law-school friend of Henrik's who worked in the district office and had confirmed, without asking why, that Hale was the kind of prosecutor who ate pharmaceutical fraud cases for breakfast.
Third: the insurance. Before the extraction, Maren would place a sealed envelope containing a written summary of the Phase 0 findings no data, just narrative in a safety deposit box at a bank in Cambridge. The key would go to David, with instructions to open the box if Maren failed to contact him within forty-eight hours of the extraction. She did not explain to Henrik what "failed to contact" was a euphemism for.
"Why the journalist and the prosecutor at the same time?" Henrik asked.
"Redundancy. If Sollen blocks one channel, the other survives. And a federal investigation is slow. A front-page story is fast. We need both."
Henrik nodded. He had the look of a man who had been given a task that was larger than anything he'd done in his life and was choosing, moment by moment, to rise to it rather than collapse beneath it.
Maren contacted Rina Lacey on Sunday morning.
She used a burner phone she bought at a CVS in Medford cash, no loyalty card, the mundane operational security of a woman who had been thinking like a spy for approximately seventy-two hours and was grimly unsurprised by how easily the tradecraft came.
Rina answered with the cautious alertness of a journalist who received calls from unknown numbers and had learned that some of them were tips and some of them were threats and the difference was often unclear.
"This is Dr. Maren Shaw. I'm the lead researcher on the Somniplex trial at Sollen Pharmaceuticals."
Silence. Maren could hear Rina recalibrating the phone call equivalent of sitting up straighter.
"I'm listening."
"I have evidence that Sollen conducted an unauthorized preclinical trial involving targeted memory modification in human subjects without consent. I was one of the subjects. I'd like to give you the data."
A longer silence. Then: "When?"
"Tuesday night. I need to extract the data from a secured server first."
"Dr. Shaw, I have to tell you if you're calling me before you have the data, that means you want a commitment. You want to know that if you walk into that building and get what you're looking for, there's a story waiting for it."
"Yes."
"Then I need to know what we're talking about. Not the data the shape of it. What does this look like?"
Maren told her. She told her about Phase 0 and the fourteen subjects and the 6 Hz signal. She told her about the memory transplantation protocol. She told her about Dolores Aguilar remembering her living husband's funeral and about Henrik Cale hearing a Portuguese lullaby that belonged to someone else. She told her about M-1. She told her about the aquarium.
Rina was quiet for twenty seconds. Then: "I'll clear Tuesday night. Where do you want to meet?"
"The Globe's offices in Dorchester. I'll come to you."
"Bring the drive. Bring anything paper you have. And Dr. Shaw be careful. Pharma companies don't usually break into apartments, but when they do, it means the thing you've found is worth more than a lawsuit."
"I know."
She hung up. She sat on the bathroom floor the bathroom had become her office for dangerous conversations, the fan and the tile providing the acoustic cover and the cold clarity she needed and she felt something she hadn't felt in weeks: forward motion. Not the circular, trapped, centripetal motion of a woman auditing her own memories but linear momentum. A direction. A destination.
Henrik, meanwhile, contacted his law-school friend, who contacted Catherine Hale, who agreed to accept a data package delivered to her office's after-hours drop box on Tuesday night without asking what was inside. This was, as Henrik pointed out, either impressively discreet or a sign that the federal prosecutor's office had already heard rumors about Sollen. Both possibilities were useful.
Sunday evening, after Alma was in bed, Maren wrote the summary letter. She used pen and paper lined notebook paper, the kind Alma used for school and she wrote in her small, precise handwriting the facts as she understood them: Phase 0, fourteen subjects, memory modification without consent, M-1 as primary donor, the 6 Hz signal architecture, Lena Voss's involvement, the custody threat. She sealed it in an envelope. She addressed it to David.
On Monday, she took the envelope to a bank in Cambridge and placed it in a safety deposit box. The clerk was a young woman with braces who processed the paperwork with the efficient boredom of someone who filed these requests fifty times a week and never wondered what was inside the envelopes.
Maren hoped he would never open it. Maren hoped the box would sit in the bank's vault and gather dust and become a curiosity of their divorce what was in that envelope Maren left at the bank? and that the answer would be: nothing that mattered anymore, because the danger passed.
But if the danger didn't pass, David would have the letter. And the letter would tell him everything. And David, who was a structural engineer and understood load-bearing and the precise moment when a system exceeds its capacity, would know what to do.
Monday night, Maren put Alma to bed. She read Charlotte's Web, chapter fifteen the chapter where Wilbur wins the prize at the fair, which isn't really about Wilbur at all but about Charlotte, who is dying, who has given everything, who has spun words into the air for someone she loves.
Alma fell asleep on the last page.
Maren sat in the doorway for her count of ten.
Then she went to the kitchen, where Henrik was sitting at the table reviewing a hand-drawn map of the sub-basement layout sketched from memory, on the back of a grocery receipt, because analog was all they had left and she said: "Tomorrow."
Henrik looked at her. He was wearing a sweater David had left behind in the move too big for him, the sleeves covering his knuckles and his face had the focused, terrified calm of a man who had decided to do something that couldn't be undone.
"Tomorrow," he said.
They went over the plan one more time. Service entrance, freight elevator, sub-basement three, keycard at 2:00 a.m., data transfer, twelve minutes, out. Simple. Clean. The kind of plan that works perfectly in kitchens at midnight and encounters reality at 2 a.m.
Maren set an alarm for 1:15 a.m. She lay down on her bed fully clothed shoes off, everything else on and closed her eyes and listened to the apartment and thought about what she was about to do.
She was about to steal data from her employer. She was about to break multiple federal laws. She was about to risk her career, her freedom, and her custody of Alma.
She tried to be afraid. She found that the fear, which had been enormous and all-consuming for weeks, had settled into something smaller and harder a stone in her stomach, dense and permanent, that she could carry if she didn't try to carry anything else.
She slept. For the first time in ten days, she slept. Three hours, dreamless, as though her brain her compromised, weaponized, uncertain brain had decided to give her this one last gift of blank, unedited rest before what came next.