Chapter 34
Chapter Thirty-Four
Seth wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her. Then he wanted to kiss her, thaw the ice he saw whenever she looked at him.
Which wasn’t often because she was pissed.
Pissed at him, and there was nothing he could do. He wanted to talk to her, just the two of them. Explain.
Tell her she’d made him feel things he was still trying to sort out. She wasn’t just a job to him. Not anymore.
But they weren’t alone, and she was concentrating on the screen in front of her, her fingers flying over the keys. There were two spots of color in her cheeks that told him her anger hadn’t abated.
He dropped his gaze to his own terminal and tried to concentrate. His inbox—the secret one attached to the dark web where he did some of his searches—pinged with a message.
Well, fuck. The janitorial staff was clear. Nothing that indicated any of them set the fire. Didn’t mean they hadn’t, but nobody had a sketchy background or a fake identity.
“What the…” Callie muttered.
All eyes were instantly on her. “What is it?” Seth asked, though maybe he should have let Ghost do it.
Because she didn’t look at him or respond. She kept scrolling, reading the code.
“Callie?” Ghost asked. “Anything you want to tell me?”
“Sorry,” she said, looking over at the boss. “Something is odd. I didn’t see it the other night because I hadn’t eliminated the other possibilities. I’d run the diagnostic tools and nothing turned up.” She pointed at the screen overhead because they’d been able to watch her work by mirroring what she was doing. “It looks like somebody’s inserted unreachable code. That means it’s sitting inside conditional branches that can never be satisfied. It’s not functional during normal operations. But it shouldn’t be there, which means there could be another purpose.”
“Such as?” Ghost asked.
“A backdoor, maybe. It would take complex activation triggers, but it’s possible this code is meant to activate under specific circumstances.”
“Can you tell what those are?”
“Not easily. And not quickly either. It’s unfinished, though, because what it’s currently doing is preventing the system from functioning. That’s why I couldn’t get the code to work.”
“Okay, so who has access to the code? Who could potentially do this?”
“Anyone on the team. I assume you already know who we all are.”
“We do. But tell me who has the skill.”
Callie huffed a breath. “Any of us could do it. Everyone on the team is better than average, though not everyone has the same ability.”
Ghost shot a look at Seth. A silent plea for help in cutting through the computer stuff and getting to the meat of the problem. “Rank everyone by ability,” Seth told her. “Please.”
She didn’t look at him, and for some reason it was killing him inside. Like he’d been thrown into a dark room and left to rot. He thought Ghost might end up prompting her again, but she finally started to speak.
“Me. Dr. Robbins. Leo Spinner. Javier Dillon. The rest—Ronald Forde, Charlie Althoff, Blaine Parsons, and Jarrett Mooney are about equal. But all are good. They all have copious experience. They’ve worked in the field a lot longer than I have, except for Javier, who’s only a couple of years older than me. He’s still very good, and very creative.”
“We’ve looked at all of their backgrounds,” Seth said to the room at large. “Nothing stood out. No radical beliefs, no ties to organizations that are anti-US. The only person with any foreign contacts was Callie.”
Her head swiveled to him. Her eyes were glacial. “Oh, so because I spent time in Poland, and because I speak foreign languages—especially Russian, I’m guessing—that made me a potential suspect? Or maybe it was the fact my mother was Polish?”
He wouldn’t apologize for doing his job. “Those were factors, yes. You were the most obvious choice. But it’s not you. We know it’s not.”
“Well thank you very much, Captain America. I’m so thrilled you’ve eliminated me and my dirty foreign ties from suspicion.”
Okay, so she was making him feel like shit. Maybe he deserved it. “I did my job, Callie. Same as you’re doing yours. And maybe I’m an asshole for it, but I can’t apologize for doing what I have to do. But hurting you was never part of it. I’d give anything to change that.”
“So would I.”
The silence in the room was awkward. It didn’t last, thankfully.
“Can you remove that part of the code?” Ghost asked.
“Here, yes. But the real code at GRL? I can, but somebody’s going to notice. And maybe do a better job hiding it the next time. Not that they didn’t already hide it well.”
“We want them to notice,” Seth said. “So we can find who did it and what the purpose is.”
She turned to him again, her eyes wide behind the glasses she’d put on to work. “If somebody inside GRL is tampering with the code, and Mikhail was after me to provide access to the system, then whoever’s on the inside wasn’t working for him. Because he wouldn’t need me then.”
“That’s right.”
“But anyone tampering with the code would need to know the end goal. What you’ve told me about the true purpose of the project isn’t anything I knew, which means nobody else should either.”
He could see where she was headed so he said it for her. “A supervisor might.”
She stared at him.
“Oh God,” she said softly. Her shoulders sagged. If it was true, it was one more betrayal in a list of betrayals. One more blow to her already fragile trust in those around her.
“I’m sorry, Callie. Doesn’t mean it’s the answer. But it might be.”
She shook her head. “I can’t believe it’s Dr. Robbins. She hired me, mentored me. Gave me responsibility and autonomy when nobody else would have. There has to be another explanation.” She snapped her fingers. “Leo might know what the scope of the project really is. He’s her second and he doesn’t like me.”
Seth opened a file and typed in a search. “We checked the badging records, and nobody from your team was in the building that evening. But they could have erased it. We’ve got the camera footage from the parking lot. It’s a shared lot with the other companies in the complex so the cameras aren’t maintained by GRL. It’s possible we can find one of them on the feed. Then we’d know.”
He sent the footage to Kane and Ethan to study, then put three pictures onto the overhead monitor. Ghost had given him the signal that now was the time.
“Do you know these men?”
He could see the recognition on her face. And the surprise. “That’s Wilhelm and Cyril. They’re Polish graduate students. They go to UAH and work at the pizza and pasta place in the Gateway. Or did. I haven’t seen them lately. I’ve chatted with them when I was at lunch before. They were happy to meet someone who spoke their native language.”
“Did you know them in Poland?”
“No, I did not.” Her tone was clipped, and he knew she was annoyed with him for asking. For implying.
“And the last guy?”
She shook her head. “No, I’ve never seen him. Should I?”
Seth studied her as she gazed at the screen, but there was no hint of deception. No recognition either.
“We thought you would, yes.”
She turned to him. “Why? Who is it?”
“It’s Mikhail Volkov.”