Thicker Than Water - DK5 (4 page)

“We’re on our way.” Dar hit the button and popped up off the desk, with Kerry right behind her. “Well, one thing—at least—”

“We don’t have to answer our mail?”

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19

“You got it.”

The door slammed after them, leaving the room in somber silence.

“DID YOU HAVE to do that?” Angie asked, as she walked her brother out to his car. “I mean, good grief, Mike.”

“Yes, I did,” Michael replied stubbornly. “God damn it, Angie, she’s our sister. I don’t care if our parents wish she wasn’t, she is.”

Angie walked a few steps, glancing up at the clear, star filled sky. “I know.”

“You don’t know. You don’t give a piss, Angie. You went right along with them when they wanted to give her the cold shoulder at the trial, and you could give a rat’s—”

“That’s not true!” Angie grabbed his arm and swung him around. “I love Kerry. Don’t you take that high and mighty attitude with me. You went right along with it, too.”

“I didn’t. I went over there where she was sitting.” Mike jerked his arm free. “You didn’t.”

“For crying out loud, Mike! I was nine months pregnant,”

Angie shouted. “What in the hell did you expect me to do, make a scene?”

“Yeah,” Michael replied. “You could have stood up for her.”

“Oh, you’re just impossible.” Angie turned and started back for the house. “All you want to do is start trouble about her to keep him from taking pot shots at
you
.” She slammed the front door, leaving Michael out in the chill of the fall night.

“Yeah.” Michael exhaled. “Maybe.” He gave his head a half shake and went to his car. Several men walked towards the house and he stepped aside to let them pass. They spared him a glance, then continued on without acknowledging him.

“Does he know what he has? Is he sure?” one asked in a doubtful tone.

“He’s sure,” a second answered. “What I want to know is, where’d he get the dirt from? I thought the guy he had inside turned on him?”

“Dunno. Guess we’ll find out shortly.”

They passed out of earshot, leaving Michael standing there.

He shook his head and sighed. “What now, I wonder? Did he get those pictures of old what’s-his-name and the hooker? Anything to make a scandal and take the heat off, I guess.” He paused as he turned towards the car. “Maybe we are related.”

20
Melissa Good
KERRY LEANED OVER Dar’s shoulder, watching her key in rapid commands on a console. Dar’s legs were locked around the base of the chair, and she rocked slightly—the energy coming off her was almost palpable.

“What is it?” Kerry asked in a soft voice.

“Dunno…dunno, yet,” Dar muttered, trying to wrestle an analyzer into place on the line. “Jesus, it’s big.” She gave up on her work, then keyed another screen. “I’m going to mirror and dump it.”

“Ma’am?” The console operator sounded nervous. “We’re not supposed to do that.”

“
You’re
not supposed to do that.” Dar finished her task.

“Until I can see what this is, I’m not taking any chances.” She went back to work on the sniffer. “Damn port’s pushing so much data, I wonder if I can…Damn.”

“Can you just put a…Ah.” Kerry closed her mouth and watched as Dar managed to get a handle on the traffic by throwing it to their packet analyzer. “Okay, let’s see what we…Oh, hell.”

“Yeah.”

“Encrypted,” Kerry said. “Well, that’s a good thing, right? I mean, you want your data to be encrypted.”

“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.

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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!

The irony of it all is that the goddamned bitch who gave me this crap makes you all look like mental
midgets
.”

“Sir, take it easy, please,” Bradley begged. “I’m sure there’s an explanation. Someone must have—”

“Idiots!” Stuart bellowed. “‘It’s a simple deal, Senator.’ Isn’t that what you told me? Just some surplus military garbage being traded, nothing important. You stupid son of a bitch, did you see what’s in that data? Idiot! Idiots! All of you!”

“Sir!” Perlamen said. “We can incriminate—”

“We’re all incriminated, you jackass!” Stuart yelled at the top of his lungs. “This is not in the hands of any friends of ours. For God’s sake…For God’s sake…” He clutched his head. “Ah!”

“Sir?” The men rushed forward. “
Sir
!”

“UGH.” KERRY SLID down into the hot tub and cradled her neck on its edge. “Thank God that’s over.”

Dar had her eyes closed. “Yeah.” She squirmed around, taking advantage of the heavy jets of water. “Thank God it turned out to be a firmware glitch, not a stolen file. Even if it took us most of the night to figure it out.”

“Mm.” Kerry turned her head, captured her straw, and sucked in a mouthful of peach iced tea. “It’s not quite ten. We’ve stayed later.”

Dar tangled her legs with Kerry’s and exhaled. “Uh huh. Glad we didn’t have to. I’m tanked.”

“Fish tanked?” Kerry snickered, splashing her a little.

“Wench. Get your snorkel ready.” The cordless phone rang, and, after giving it an evil look, Dar picked it up and answered it.

“Hello?”

There was silence, then a gasp. “Um…um…can I talk to Kerry?”

Dar’s brow creased. “Sure.” With widening eyes and a shrug, she handed the phone to Kerry. The voice had sounded very young.

Kerry took it and put it to her damp ear. “Hello?” Dar sidled over and pressed her head against Kerry’s to listen.

“Oh, Kerry, hi.” There was a sharp intake of breath. “I’m really sorry to like, bother you this late and all that, but—”

“Lena?” Kerry’s mental recognition kicked in. “Is that you?”

There was silence for a breath. “Yeah.”

“Hey, folks have been looking for you,” Kerry said. “Where are you?”

Lena hesitated. “Um…not in a good place.”

Dar nestled closer and listened.

“What’s ‘not a good place’? Are you in the hospital?”

“No,” Lena muttered. “I’m in jail.”

Dar’s eyes widened in surprise. She and Kerry exchanged
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25

startled looks.

“In jail? What are you doing there?” Kerry sputtered. “What did you…?” She half turned and pushed the wet hair out of her eyes. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” Lena sounded tired. “It’s just really stupid, you know? My folks clued into like, me being gay, and they grounded me.”

“Grounded you?” Kerry’s voice dropped in pitch. “Did they think that would fix it?”

“Fuck if I know,” Lena replied glumly. “A window got busted in my old man’s car, and they called the cops on me.”

“Ah.” Kerry’s eyes narrowed slightly. “You need help getting out?”