CHAPTER NINE
“Who are they? Where are they?” asked the admiral.
“One of them is in this room,” said Wyatt. He stared at the young woman beside the general and she blushed, shaking her head.
“No. No, I’m not on any sites here.”
“Yes, you are. Your phone still has fifteen open windows and seven of those windows were wedding shops. Someone is looking for a new wedding dress. Size eight.” Wyatt stared at his own screen, then back up at the young woman. She was frantically closing the windows on her phone.
“What does it matter? That’s her personal phone,” said Billings.
“Her personal phone allows the bad guys to get close. If she sets her phone near the computer, they could, conceivably, link to an open arm of the work computer.”
“This is madness! It’s not possible,” said Billings.
“I believe I just showed you that it is possible. The people doing this aren’t just some run of the mill hackers in Ghana or Haiti. These guys are sophisticated and I think organized, sharing information and attacking en masse.”
“What do you mean?” asked the Admiral.
“I mean, once they identify a weakness, an area that is ignored, they let their peers know and they attack. It’s like discovering a weakness in a defense and sending everything you have at it,” said Wyatt.
“If you’d just let us sit in there and do our thing, watching for weaknesses in your working systems, we might be able to help solve this puzzle,” said AJ.
“What do you want us to do?” asked Jamie.
“It would probably be a good idea to find these nine computers and wipe them clean. Close all their open windows, shut down any games or shopping sites, clear their cache and history, and clean it.”
“Yes, sir,” said Jamie.
She left the room, finding the nine computers that were lit up in red. She was surprised by how many open windows some of them had. One man had five travel sites open, eleven retailers, and three gaming sites.
When the four men walked into the room, the admiral stepped forward.
“These men are here under my orders. You do as they say and give them access to whatever they need. Clear?”
“Clear!” came the cry from the room.
“Let’s get to work,” nodded Hiro.
The process took much longer than expected. With a room full of computers and their own gamification systems, they really needed more than just four men. But it was all they had and they would find out what was happening one way or another.
“Is this the drone system?” asked Hiro to the young man at the desk.
“Yes, sir. We use it all the time. It helps us to become more proficient with the drones. This one had the capability to simulate weather. Although, right now it’s got a bug or something.”
“A bug?” frowned Hiro. The system was developed by G.R.I.P. and there was no way there was a bug unless someone planted one inside the Pentagon. “It would be highly unlikely that this system has a bug.”
“That’s what I thought, too. But when I try to simulate the drone in a storm with high winds, it’s like it can’t get out of the simulation. The drone shakes and waves until I reboot the system.”
“Don’t reboot the system again,” said Hiro. “Wyatt! Here, please.”
Wyatt quickly moved from the top level of workspaces to where Hiro was standing.
“Watch this,” he said nodding at the young man.
He began the program and they noticed that it was working with weather related issues as requested but when he tried to switch to non-weather-related issues, the drone seemed stuck in the other space.
“I can restart it,” he said.
“NO!” yelled Wyatt and Hiro.
“No, I think that’s what they want,” said Wyatt. “It’s behaving this way intentionally. The program is blocking the viruses and hacking attempts but every time you reboot, you’re giving it an opening to get in again.”
“I-I didn’t know,” said the young man. “I thought it was a problem with the program.”
“It’s okay. Let me take care of this from the back end.”
Wyatt’s hands were moving so fast on the computer, even Hiro, Tanner and AJ were amazed. Before they knew it, he was inside the program and inside the pentagon’s security systems.
“Who is Amelia Boerne?” asked AJ looking around the room. All eyes slowly turned to a woman on the lower level. She raised her hand.
“I’m Amelia,” she said softly.
“I need you to check your credit card right now,” said AJ.
“My credit card? B-but why? I mean, I don’t use it on this computer,” she said looking confused.
“Please, Amelia, just do it for me.” She didn’t have to. Within seconds multiple warnings popped up on her phone regarding fraudulent charges. One was for nearly ten-thousand dollars.
“Oh, my God! Someone hacked my card,” she said covering her mouth.
“Take a minute and go call your credit card company. Freeze the card right now and go into the conference room to handle the rest of it. Don’t use your phone. Use the desk phone in the conference room,” said Tanner.
Wyatt slowly turned in his chair, as Amelia’s peers rushed to comfort her. He looked at AJ, Tanner, and Hiro, shaking his head.
There were warning signs all around them. Each person had a work phone and a personal phone, both of which were left near their computers as they stepped away to comfort Amelia.
All four of the men watched the screens, seeing glitches, glimpses of something happening behind the scenes that only they would notice. As men and women walked from the work space toward the small kitchen space, it increased, sending warnings up their spines.
“This is bigger than we thought. Much bigger and we need to find out what they’re looking for beyond the obvious of classified information.”