“That’s impossible,” she muttered as she popped the top of another Red Bull, chugged it, then went back to work.
There were only a few users logged in to the box, and none of them had any active processes running. She checked the log file and found the sysadmin user was the only other account besides her own that had accessed the system in the past hour.
Sysadmin? Nobody is dumb enough to name a privileged account sysadmin anymore.
Looking closer, she found sysadmin had logged in for less than thirty seconds, then disconnected. A process named sysmaint still ran as sysadmin, and it was consuming seventy percent of the computer’s resources. But, as she watched, the process terminated. All traces of it were gone.
Someone had beaten her to the punch.
Chapter Five
“What’s the status?” Eric asked as he took his seat in the conference room.
“They reacquired Frist,” Clark said, “and they are preparing to exfiltrate.”
“How’s John?” Eric asked.
“Banged up, but otherwise unharmed.”
Karen cleared her throat and glanced between them. She was in her late twenties and her thick body sported a surprising amount of muscle. She had large breasts that Eric knew from personal experience had yet to droop, and as she swiped at her shoulder-length hair, his mind wandered back to their last awkward encounter before they had called off their relationship.
The silence lingered between them, and he realized it had become uncomfortable. “Yes?” he asked.
Clark glanced down at the table and said nothing.
She chewed on her lip, then said, “The drone—”
“—is untraceable,” Eric said. “You’ve promised me a dozen times.”
Karen frowned. “It’s not. At least, not in the way you’re thinking.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“The drone itself isn’t traceable,” Karen said, “but they could try to trace the components.”
“I thought we prepared for that.”
“We did,” Karen allowed. “Everything was bought in bulk.”
“Then why the sour look?”
Karen sighed. “It’s the lack of identifying markers. It’s obvious to anyone that the US is behind it.”
“That’s not proof,” Clark said.
“The doctors at the hospital inspected John’s prosthetic,” Karen said. “It’s too advanced.”
“They won’t get anything from it,” Eric said. “What about John’s blood samples?”
“Destroyed,” Karen said. “I hacked their computer system before the ambulance delivered him. I routed the blood samples for disposal and deleted the rest of the electronic records, but the doctors and staff are still eyewitnesses. We can’t erase them.”
“The Swiss may suspect we’re behind it,” Eric said wearily. “They don’t have proof.”
“They have a reason to keep looking,” Karen said. “Reinemann’s dead body was more than enough. The bombing was too public. John’s escape is going to send them over the edge.”
Eric wanted to disagree with her, but she made valid points. “Deion’s getting them out.”
Clark cleared his throat. “Should we mobilize a team?”
Eric shook his head. “No. We have enough assets in play. What about Holzinger’s murder? Do we have anything on it?”
“We’ve hit a wall,” Clark said. “The analysts can’t find anything linking Dynoson to the surge in oil prices.”
“Nothing at all?” Eric asked. “A company that size doesn’t get that big by playing by the rules.”
Clark shrugged. “Dynoson has interests all over the world, but they haven’t profited from the surging oil prices the way other companies have. They’re actually getting squeezed by the Chinese.”
“What a shame for them both,” Eric said. “Keep digging. Two people are dead. There’s got to be something.”
“Can Dewey have a look?” Karen asked.
Clark raised an eyebrow.
Eric frowned. “I think Elliot’s got him working on something.”
“Dewey works best when he’s overwhelmed,” Karen said. “It makes him think faster.”
“Fine, fine,” Eric said. “Stick Dewey on it and tell him I want a report in twenty-four hours.”
Karen descended into the bowels of the base, passing row after row of tunnels and doors until she reached the stairwell that led to the subbasement.
Dewey’s office was part of the original complex blasted from under mountains, and the concrete walls were rougher and the lighting dimmer than in the refurbished OTM headquarters. She wrinkled her nose. There was a musty smell that the base climate control system never quite eradicated, and she swallowed hard, then took a sharp right turn and knocked softly on the door to Dewey’s office.
A poster of a woman in some kind of flight suit covered the steel door, and Karen blinked, then recognized her as Katee Sackhoff from BattleStar Galactica.
She rolled her eyes and knocked harder.
Dewey had been quietly cranking out top-secret projects and sexually harassing female coworkers when they’d met at the NSA. The HR department had almost fired him a dozen times, but his superiors depended on his amazing output. It had taken her a few months to warm to him, but she soon realized that Dewey had a gentle soul.
The little creep is just incapable of showing it to anybody.
She had recommended Dewey for the OTM. His porn surfing had almost landed him in a cell in Leavenworth, but Fulton Smith had personally authorized Dewey to continue working at the OTM, assigning him special projects for years without anyone’s knowledge. Eric had been concerned when he discovered what Dewey had been working on, but Doctor Elliot had been outraged.
Especially when he found out Dewey had continued some of his research.
Dewey had a singular, invaluable ability — he could consume vast amounts of information and become an expert in almost anything in days. It made him one of the OTM’s most important assets and had caught the eye of Nancy Smith.
“Come in,” a nasally voice called out from inside.
When she opened the door, she found Dewey lying on a hospital bed in the center of his office, staring at a wall of monitors hovering six feet above his body.
“What on earth are you doing?”
Dewey glanced over and smiled. He was a bit taller than Eric, with pallid skin and a patchy brown goatee. His mousy hair was long past regulation length, but since he was confined to his office and the base cafeteria, no one cared.
She had tried in vain to get him to exercise, but his idea of exercise consisted of playing Xbox games and shadowboxing to Xena reruns.
“Hey, Karen. What brings you to my humble abode?”
“You hung your monitors upside down?” Karen asked in disbelief.
“They’re not upside down,” Dewey said. “They’re at ninety degrees. See, when you rotate—”
“Dewey.”
“They’re still bolted to the array, I just turned it so that the screens pointed down. That way I can lay here.”
She wanted to scold Dewey, but his eccentric behavior had gotten even stranger over the past several months. “Are you okay?”
He blinked slowly. “I’m a… little brain-fried. This special project is intense. I’ve never read this much in my entire life.”
“Special project?” Karen asked. “What special project?”