Marriage, she thought as she made her way up the glide, was a minefield.
Following hunch and hope she bypassed the chaos of the EDD bullpen and tried the lab. She wondered what compelled e-types to work in glass boxes. Were they innately claustrophobic? Closet exhibitionists? Was it a need to see out, or a need to be seen?
Whatever the reason, Feeney and his team manned the comps and stations inside the glass, movements and voices silenced by the clear barrier. It was a little like watching a strange species in their natural habitat.
Feeney, his hair sticking up in mad tufts, popped one of his favored candied almonds in his mouth. Callendar, hips jiggling, fingers snapping, paced in front of a screen that scrolled incomprehensible codes. Someone she didn’t recognize-who could tell them apart?-rode a wheeled stool up and down a counter, his baggies and skin tank red and orange blurs, his ring-studded fingers flying over keys and controls.
And Roarke.
He’d shed his suit jacket and rolled the sleeves of his black shirt up to his elbows. The twist of leather restraining his hair at the nape indicated full work mode. He, too, sat on a stool, but unlike his companions remained almost preternaturally still but for the rapid movements of his fingers on controls.
She knew he was focused, utterly, on whatever task he worked on. If it gave him trouble he’d be thinking in Irish, and muttering curses in the same.
He’d filed away whatever business he’d done that day, whatever he would deal with that evening, or the next. Which would be considerable, she thought. He did that not just for the man-the boy as he thought of him-he’d enjoyed, nor for the pleasure he gained from the work, the puzzle of it. He did it for her.
Whether or not they always agreed on the ways and the means of the work, that single fact shone through the gray between them. In her life no one had ever put her so completely, so absolutely first.
And as she knew him, she knew the moment he sensed her. His fingers paused; he turned his head. Those brilliant eyes locked on hers as they had the very first time at a funeral for another of the dead they’d shared.
Her heart opened, and it lifted, weightless and free.
Marriage was a minefield, she thought again, but she’d risk every sweaty, breathless step for moments like this.
He rose, evading the orange and red blur, skirting around the pacing Callendar, and came out to her.
She didn’t protest when he tilted up her chin and brushed his lips against hers.
“You had such a look in your eyes, a ghrá.”
“I was thinking about people. Friends, lovers, partners. You get a check in the all-of-the-above column.”
He took her hand, a light link of fingers. “Conclusions?”
“Sometimes you get lucky with who you let in your life. Sometimes you don’t. I’m feeling lucky today.”
His lips curved slowly as he brushed hers again.
Feeney shoved open the door. “If that’s all the two of you can think about doing, go up to the crib and get it over with. Some of us are working.”
If she’d been the blushing type, she’d have turned scarlet. Instead mortification hunched her shoulders even as Roarke laughed.
“I’d be up for a break.”
“You’d be up for eternity if you could manage it,” she muttered. “No sappy stuff on duty.”
“You started it.”
She couldn’t argue so she said nothing and went inside the glass box. “Progress?” she said in a crisp cop’s voice.
“We’re peeling the layers off the vic’s holo-system,” Feeney said in the same tone. “Looking for any shadows, echoes, and signs of tampering. So far, it’s coming up a hundred percent on all levels. Same with his droid. No sign of tampering, no breaks in time or programming.”
“Holo-room security’s clean as well,” Roarke told her. “We’re picking it apart, bit by byte, but there’s no indication anyone left or entered that room after Bart and before the droid bypassed the lock the next morning.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say the kid’s head just magically chopped itself off.” Feeney puffed out his cheeks. “I sent a team over there this morning. Had them scan and manually search every inch of that room, looking for another access. It’s tight.”
“I’ve got some semi-good,” Callendar told her. “I’ve done analysis on the logs from the office holo-room and the vic’s. Serious player. He could easily put in ten-twelve hours on a series of games in a day, and pulled a few all-nighters. A lot of solo play in there, too, but he logs in with a variety of partners, home and office.”
She took a swig from a tube of Orange Sweet. It made Eve’s teeth ache.
“He logged in a lot of time on the new game over the last several months, again solo and office. And this isn’t the first time he took a demo disc home to give it a whirl.”
“Is that so? Always logged it before?”
“Always. Like a half-dozen home whirls before the last one. Crossing it with his home unit it was always solo play. The thing is, it’s different stages and versions of the game.”
“Improvements,” Eve concluded. “He’d take it home to test it out with the tweaks, or maybe add some from there.”
“That’s how it reads. Early days, they called it Project Super X.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, seriously. Project Super X, or PSX. Playtimes after five or six on weekdays, and some long multi-player sessions on weekends. Anyone who worked on any section of it had to log in and know the passcode, then had a user code. The four user codes that had full access track back to the four partners, but if any of those who worked sections confabbed with any of the others who worked sections, they’d have most of it.”
“Then it could be duplicated.”
“Close.” Callendar took another swig from the bright orange tube. “It would take a lot of time, trouble, skill, and cooperation, but you could get close.”
“What about the scenario he was playing at TOD?”
“That’s trickier. Passing to you,” she said to Roarke.
“One of the security measures, what I’d call an on-the-fly sort of precaution, was to change user names and codes every few runs.”
“So if anyone tried to hack from outside, or inside, they’d hit a new wall.”
“Theoretically,” Roarke agreed. “Still, even with the firewalls and fail-safes, you’d only have to get lucky once, access from that point. I’ve found some hack attempts, some attempts at infections from outside sources, typical stuff, and none of it successful. And there are several hack attempts from inside, but they coincide with basic security checks. To run the game in its holo form, the player would have to input his current name, code, and ID with thumb- and voiceprint. All of those are possible to bypass, of course.”
Eve aimed a cool look. “Of course.”
“But they had their additional security, which would have sent out alarms at an attempted hack. Assuming the hacker hadn’t already bypassed those. The discs themselves, at least the one in Bart’s home unit and the copy we have here, are imprinted to jam if any of these steps are missed or the ID process fails. An attempt to remove the disc, as we learned, results in self-destruct.”
“I know all of this.”
“Laying the groundwork, Lieutenant. They were careful, clever, vigilant. But certainly not absolutely hackproof as nothing is. In any case, those precautions make it tricky to ascertain absolutely who played what and when. So we have to extrapolate.”
“Meaning guess.”
“A reasoned and educated guess based on probability. Bart used a variety of user names and codes between his home and office, but as with most people, he has a pattern, and he repeats. To simplify, I’ve had the computer cull him out and label him User 1 in both locations.”
He ordered the data on-screen. “Here you see the dates and times he logged in on their PSX, by location, and whether it was solo or multi-player. We’ve crossed that with the other players, going alpha last name, you have Cill Allen as User 2, Var Hoyt as User 3, and Benny Leman as User 4. We have a separate data run on every employee who worked on the game, when, how long, in what capacity. You’ll want to run an analysis on those, I expect.”