Chapter 29
“My father designed the original architecture for this room,” I said. “He left a physical bypass behind rack four.”
Marcus squeezed into the narrow gap between the metal frames, his flashlight beam cutting through the dust. He found the small junction box near the floor and connected the fiber cable directly to the motherboard.
I sat on a plastic packing crate with my laptop balanced on my knees. I opened the terminal window and entered the first five cyphers from the yellow notepad.
The system rejected the first attempt, the red error text flashing across the screen. I adjusted my glasses, looking closely at the syntax of my father’s handwritten code. The third character was not a eight; it was an uppercase letter B.
I retyped the sequence, hitting the return key. The red warnings vanished, replaced by a scrolling directory of the agency’s raw system logs.
“We are in,” Marcus said, his voice quiet in the hum of the fans. “The system is showing the master digital certificate.”
“Download the entire signature log for the last twelve months,” I said. “Make sure to include the automated generation timestamps.”
“Someone is initiating a remote system query from the third floor,” Marcus said, looking at his handheld diagnostic monitor. “We have about four minutes before they trace the port connection.”
“Take the drive,” I said, ejecting the storage device. “Go back through the loading dock. I will meet you at Rachel’s office.”
At two in the afternoon, the conference table in Rachel’s brick-faced office was covered in thick paper folders. Maya Ellis sat near the window, her left hand holding her wrist where the white line of her scar showed beneath her sleeve.
Rachel was highlighting sections of the certified bank records, linking them to the defense contract documents.
“We have the exact timeline now,” Rachel said, placing a document in the center of the table. “The Vance subsidiary purchased the cheap silica alloy for the armor plating three weeks before Harrison’s unit deployed.”
“They knew the plates would shatter on impact,” Maya said, her voice barely louder than a whisper. “The testing reports said the material was sub-standard, but Harrison signed the safety waiver anyway.”
“I have the automated signature logs from the server room,” I said, opening my laptop. “We can prove Harrison used my digital certificate to sign the procurement invoices while I was in Richmond for our anniversary.”
“This is not about recovery anymore, it is about exposure,” I said, sliding the printed log toward Rachel.
May you like
Maya looked at the columns of numbers, her expression tight. “Will the Senate committee actually look at these? Harrison told me they own half the members on the panel.”
“Senator Hayes is chairing the committee,” Rachel said. “He has been waiting for physical proof of the financial routing. This document chain binds the defective armor directly to Patricia’s Zurich accounts.”
