Chapter 36
Chapter Thirty-Six
Emma
The atmosphere in the Batcave was pressured, intense, focused. Tim handed me a thumb drive before I sat down. Asher went looking for Ben.
“This contains copies of code written by Baylor Moore and Hugo Wayne. Tate Riser’s a good kid with a lot of potential, but at the time, he wrote code by the book, didn’t know how to improvise, you know, think outside the book or the box.
I had to basically rewrite most of what he did, so there isn’t enough in the archive to make a comparison. ”
“Thanks. I found signatures, but now I’ll look specifically at Baylor’s and Hugo’s work so that when we find the ghostware, we can do a comparison. How’s the search going?”
Using the captured information, they’d managed to eliminate FI workstations. They were now checking individual devices that had the same identifier.
We were close. Now I was going to bury myself in the samples on the thumb drive.
“When you see Asher, please tell him I’ve gone upstairs, and I’ll see him later.”
I left a note on Asher’s chair in the conference room before I left.
Once back in the office, I locked the door, woke the boxes, put on a pot of coffee, printed a Do Not Disturb sign, and taped it to the door.
By the time I’d hung the sign, the coffee was finished.
I filled my lucky mug, grabbed a power bar from my snack stash, pulled up my playlist, adjusted my headset, and got to work.
I had a hunch and free rein on the mainframe.
My quarry had walked right in through the front door because someone had given them a key.
The hubris shown by not using an offshore VPN was telling.
We knew this wasn’t the first time, but the pattern indicated they didn’t know their way around.
How could that be unless they’d never been in our house before?
Or was what looked like lack of direction a distraction?
What would I find if I worked backward?