Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Zadie scrolled through another directory and hit a dead end. "That's the fourth partition that's been wiped clean."
It had been five days since Gideon was stabbed, and Darwin had finally cleared him for work. Not that Gideon had been doing nothing. Zadie had been secretly—or perhaps not so secretly—having him help her with ORACLE. The backdoor worked, but the AI was still real and still a bitch.
"Try the adjacent branch." Gideon tapped his screen from his desk. "One level up. There should be a transit log attached to it."
She backed out and navigated up. The comms room was quiet except for the faint hum of the servers and the click of two keyboards. Everyone else was in the kitchen eating brownies and drinking wine. Or beer.
This was Zadie’s and Gideon’s first night inside ORACLE through the backdoor, and so far, the core had given them exactly nothing useful. Public data. Org charts. Sanitized project summaries that read like brochures.
Finch kept a clean lobby.
Not to mention the AI kept doing sweeps, and every once in a while, she got a little too close.
"Got the transit log," she said. "But it's mostly metadata headers. The actual content's been stripped."
"Stripped or moved?"
"Stripped. There's nothing behind it." She leaned back and rubbed her eyes. "Whoever maintains this system is thorough."
"Finch doesn’t know dick about software or hardware, but he does know how to build a good team.
" Gideon winced as he shifted in his chair.
He'd stopped holding his side every time he moved, which either meant the pain was improving or he'd gotten better at hiding it.
"Go back to the shadow servers. The seventh one. "
"We already opened that."
"We skimmed it. I want you to go deeper. Past the routing logs. There should be a secondary cache underneath. The residual data the AI didn't have time to sort before it dumped everything."
Zadie navigated back to the shadow server from her first breach attempt. She dodged under the AI as she did a routine sweep.
Zadie pulled the routing logs and the vehicle coordinates from when they hit the hub. "There’s a missing SUV from this log."
"What do you mean?"
"Scout said there were four SUVs that came to SYN-7, but only three appear."
"Perhaps that explains how Isaac died in a car crash three miles from his house." Gideon glanced in her direction. "Finch had to cover his tracks and I’m sure he’s got IT people that neither nor Isaac knew about."
"It’s just weird because Isaac worked real hard to get noticed by Finch," Zadie said.
"Isaac knew Finch was doing bad shit, and he wanted in.
" She tapped her fingers on three keys at the same time.
"There's data here," she said. "But it's fragmented.
Partial records. Looks like the AI was mid-process when it panicked and shoved everything into the shadow server. "
"What kind of records?"
"Telemetry pings." She frowned. "ETHER transmissions, but the source codes don't match any of the node designations on your network map and it doesn’t run through the corridor like medical would."
"Put them on the wall."
She dragged the data onto the center monitor. A scatter of transmission points populated the topographical map. They were faint and incomplete, like stars seen through cloud cover. Most meant nothing to her. Fragments without enough data to resolve into anything meaningful—not even a location.
But four lined up with specific coordinates.
She sat up straighter. "Look at this." She overlaid the Ramsey vehicle waypoints from the portable drive. The original six pins dropped onto the map in their familiar positions. Two of the four new transmission points landed directly on top of existing waypoints.
"That’s from the scrubbed server?"
She nodded. "And that server just gave me two new locations." She zoomed in on two pins sitting on the map. One further north than any of the Ramsey waypoints. The other east, deeper into the interior.
Gideon stood, slowly, holding his side as crossed to the wall monitor and stared at the eight points on the map.
"ORACLE was tracking these locations." He groaned as he pointed to two different spots on the screen. "There are nodes in these locations. That means data was being sent from those coordinates through my network."
"Data from what?"
"Without source codes I couldn’t even guess." He traced the two new waypoints with his finger. "But it wasn’t a vehicle log, or there’d be a trace left behind like the ones you saw from the other day. This is pure data running through the corridor."
"Those enhanced men were wearing HELIOS devices," Zadie said. "Could it be from those?"
"It could be." Gideon inched closer. "Isaac wasn’t wearing one, which tells me Finch didn’t enhance him, which makes sense if Finch saw him as valuable because Finch knows what those chemicals will do to someone if left in the human body too long.
" He sat down at his desk and started pulling apart the transmission data.
"The AI copied fragments when it built the shadow server, and fragments don't lie.
" He isolated the transmission headers. "These pings were being collected and routed to a partition that doesn't exist on the public network map. But it’s hard to tell how much of it goes through my network and how much goes through—"
"Finch's shadow network," Zadie said.
"That’s where everything lives. The compound data. The enhanced soldier records. The Bralorne files. Everything we need to prove Finch is connected to it all." Gideon ran his hand over the top of his head. "That’s what I tapped into nearly three months ago on the day I got fired."
"I knew it." Zadie stood.
Gideon moved to the front of the room and picked up the box with the melted watch and patches inside. He pointed to the waypoints on the screen. "We’re going to take Finch down if the last thing we do."
"When this is over," Zadie said. "When we have what we need, and Finch is standing in a courtroom instead of a corner office—what do you want?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean afterward. When Darwin's name is cleared and we're not ghosts anymore. When we can walk outside without looking over our shoulders." She leaned into him and wrapped her arms around his body. "What does Gideon Rhodes want?"
He smiled. "I want to cook you a terrible meal in a kitchen with windows." He smoothed her hair from her face. "I want a dog. I've never had a dog." He kissed her cheek. "I want to take you to The Soggy Beaver and order whatever your dad used to order and sit in his favorite booth."
She wiped the tears that fell from her eyes.
"I want to sit on a porch somewhere and rebuild a broken clock while you write code next to me, and we don't say anything for three hours because we don't need to." He took her hand. "I want to grow old with you in the sunlight."
She threaded her fingers through his and held on. "I want to go to your parents' gravesite. Pay proper respect. And I’d like to visit Babs's grave. Bring her flowers. Thank her for keeping you alive long enough for me to find you."
"Babs would've liked you."
"My dad would've have loved you," she said.
"I want to be with you without a shadow over our heads, and in order to have that, we need Finch in handcuffs.
Not dead. Not disappeared. I want him sitting in a courtroom watching Darwin testify.
I want him hearing his own data read into the record.
I want the world to see exactly what he did, and I want him to have to sit there and listen. "
"That's very specific."
"I've had a lot of time to think about it."
He squeezed her hand. "Then that's what we do."
She looked at the monitor. Eight dots on a map. A melted device that might be the key to everything or nothing. A backdoor into a system that had tried to kill them twice.
It wasn't enough. Not yet. But it was a start. And starts were what this team was built on.
"Come on," she said. "Shepherd made brownies, and Coulter eats everything."
Thank you for reading HOLLOW CODE.