“Mm.” Dar traced something with a long fingertip. “I don’t like that header.”
Kerry leaned forward again and studied the packet Dar pointed at. “Why?”
“Unusual port,” Dar murmured. “Do me a favor. Get Charles Ettig on the phone and feel him out. See if he’s got a big transfer going on. Just say we saw a usage spike on the pipe.”
Kerry sat down and lifted the phone on the console. She pulled out her PDA and checked the number to dial, then punched it in and waited for a connection. “Charles Ettig, please. Kerry Stuart, from ILS.”
Bad Musak happened for a few minutes, then it cut off.
“Hello? This is Charles Ettig speaking.”
Kerry kept her voice casual. “Charles, this is Kerry Stuart.”
“Oh, hello, Kerry,” Charles responded. “How are you?”
“I’m fine, thanks. Listen, one of our measuring systems caught a spike on the usage of your primary line. Are you guys moving some files?”
There was a moment of silence. “Moving files?” Ettig asked.
“No, not that I know of. I mean, it’s Monday, y’know, and we do have all the reconciliation transfers coming from the banks in here, is that what you mean?”
Dar shook her head and pointed to herself.
Thicker Than Water 21
“No, this is something coming out of your building,” Kerry said. “Like if you were putting out a software upgrade, that kind of thing. We thought maybe you were distributing patches to your database.”
“Oh.” Ettig pondered a moment. “Well, I guess we could be.
Let me call around and find out.” He hesitated. “We aren’t being charged for it, are we?”
Kerry chuckled. “No, it just seemed a little out of the ordi-nary, so we thought we’d ask.”
“Okay.” Ettig now sounded more confident. “Thanks for keeping an eye on things. You know we really do appreciate that, huh? I’ll call you back.”
Kerry hung up and gave Dar a quizzical look.
“Beautiful,” Dar said. “I’m going to see if I can track down where it’s going.” She typed in a command and observed the result.
“Be careful, Dar, you’re walking a very fine line here.” Kerry laid her hands on Dar’s shoulders and flexed her fingers against the powerful bone and muscle under them.
“Got it.” Dar went to another screen and typed in a query.
“Let’s see who you are, hm?”
“It could very well be legitimate.”
“Could be.”
Dar waited, drumming her fingertips on the keyboard. “Cali-fornia. Okay.” A few more moments passed as the trace continued. “Well, it’s heading for a DSL node in San Francisco. They got anything in San Francisco?”
“Three branches,” Kerry said. “But they’re on Frame Relay lines, Dar. Not DSL.”
“Uh huh.”
“Where are they tapping in? Is it on our network?” Kerry inhaled. “Did we have a breach?”
“Shit.” Dar started typing again. “Switch in Detroit.” She picked up the phone and dialed. “Mark? It’s Dar. Pull up all the changes and adds in Detroit over the last three weeks. Get them to Ops.” Without waiting for the answer, she hung up and started tracing ports. “It’s in the cloud.”
“The Frame cloud? In the Tier 1?”
“Yes.”
“They were breached.”
Dar’s fingers hesitated over the keys. “I’m going to cut it off.”
The phone rang and Kerry picked it up. “Operations, Stuart.”
“Kerry? This is Charles Ettig. Listen, I just talked to my people and they say there’s nothing going on.”
Dar’s hands were a blur.
22 Melissa Good
“Okay, Charles,” Kerry replied. “Tell you what. We’re going to drop the traffic, and we’ll analyze it—see if we can figure out what it was and let you know. How’s that?”
“Sounds just great, Kerry. Thanks again for taking such good care of us, okay?” His tone was grateful. “I know we can trust you guys.”
“Thanks, Charles. Call you back.” Kerry hung up and exhaled. “Dar, if there was a breach, is it our fault?”
“Depends where it is. Let’s trace it, then we can figure out what the hell we’re going to do. Damn. The last thing we need is a security crack right now.” Dar stared at the screen. “Even if it’s the Tier 1’s breach, it’s still our managed circuit. Damn it, damn it, damn it.” She thumped a fist against her forehead.
Kerry put her hands back on Dar’s shoulders and gave them a squeeze. The tension was evident, and without really thinking, she gently massaged the muscles. “Let’s find out what the deal is, first. At the very least, Dar, we saw it happening.” She turned and looked at the console operator, who was studiously looking elsewhere. “Ramon, you did a great job finding this.”
He glanced furtively at them. “Thanks, ma’am.”
Kerry’s brow knit, then she realized he was uncomfortable with her interaction with Dar. For a second, she almost stopped and backed off. Then Dar’s skin shifted under her touch, and she stepped closer instead, adding her body’s warmth to the massage and thinking, To hell with it.
To hell with it. This woman in front of her was what mattered, not a bug eyed nerdy boy standing by watching. “Dar?”
Dar leaned back until she rested her head against Kerry’s stomach. “Yes?” She tipped her eyes up and looked at Kerry.
“This could be a ranking fubar, Ker.”
Kerry managed a smile. “You’ll handle it. We’ll figure it all out. Mark’s provisioning process is a solid one. I’m sure we can find an angle.”
Dar’s shoulders relaxed, and she nodded. “I’m sure we can.”
She typed a note into the console. “I’ll have him put that data dump somewhere so I can check it out tomorrow. Maybe I’ll get some clues from that.”
Despite their stated optimism, Kerry knew they were both crossing everything they could.
HANDS CLASPED BEHIND his back, the tall, dark haired man paced back and forth across Senator Stuart’s home office.
“Roger, I appreciate what you’re saying, but how can you be sure it’s real data? You said someone just gave it to you? I don’t under-Thicker Than Water 23
stand.”
“You don’t have to understand.” Roger glared dourly at him.
“Just look at it. Look at the names and the numbers, and you tell me, Bradley, you tell me if it’s real or not.” He threw a stack of papers on the desk towards Bradley.
Bradley picked them up and studied them, impatiently at first, then slowly turning the pages. He paused, then sat down in a chair across from Stuart and stared at the writing. “Dear God.”
Roger leaned back in his chair. “So you tell me, Bradley,” he repeated with deep sarcasm, “do we have a problem?”
Bradley looked up. “We have a problem. Roger, we need to pay off whoever got this to you and fast.” To his surprise, Roger laughed. “I’m not joking.”
Stuart got up and started pacing. “Oh, but you are; you just don’t know you are. The source I got this from not only can’t be bought off, I wouldn’t even try it.” He turned and pointed. “What I want to know is, how is it that someone,” he stared pointedly at Bradley, “was so god damned stupid as to put incriminating information in something so accessible? Tell me that, Bradley?”
“Sir—”
“Tell me why details about deals neither of us officially knows anything about are sitting in a military database in the sticks!”
“Sir.” Bradley held up a hand. “Let me get Stevens and Perlamen in here; maybe they can make sense of it.” He went to the door and called out, “Gentlemen, we need you.”
The two men entered, faced with the angry senator on the other side of the room. “Sir?”
“They can’t explain it. You can’t explain it.” Roger’s voice rose. “No one can explain it, because I’m surrounded by idiots!