Chapter 4
My late father had designed that specific routing protocol before his helicopter went down eleven years ago.
The monitor refreshed, the blue cursor jumping to a new line.
The terminal blinked steady in the dark room, waiting for an entry code.
I bypassed the secondary prompt on the monitor and forced a trace on the routing headers, but the screen only flickered before returning to the steady, blank entry line.
By ten o’clock the next morning, I was sitting across from Rachel Mercer at her mahogany conference table. The autumn traffic on Constitution Avenue hummed through the double-paned glass, a constant, low vibration that matched the tension in my shoulders.
Rachel rubbed her temples as she spread three pages of a Pentagon registry report between our mugs of cold black coffee. She was my clearance attorney, and her rapid, legalistic sentences usually cut straight to the point, but today she paused, her finger tracing a highlighted column.
“The Department of Defense registry flagged six separate administrative overrides in the last forty-eight hours,” Rachel said, keeping her voice low. “All of them came from the logistics division, but they used legacy credentials that should have been deactivated years ago.”
I adjusted my glasses and pulled the top sheet closer to my side of the table, my eyes scanning the cryptographic headers.
The active backup code at the bottom of the column was registered under the name of Arthur Harper.
“That code was supposed to be retired eleven years ago,” I said, my voice measured but tight. “I submitted the death certificate to the agency database myself after the crash.”
Rachel did not look up from her notes, her pen hovering over the paper.
“It was accessed from an internal node yesterday afternoon,” Rachel said. “And the verification protocols were bypassed using a secondary key.”
“Who authorized the verification?” I asked.
“The log shows Patricia Vance signed off on the security clearance audit in Berlin three days before you revoked her access card,” Rachel said, leaning back in her chair. “She still has friends in the administrative offices who don’t ask questions.”
May you like
I folded the registry pages and slid them into my leather folder, my mind already calculating the routing paths.
“I need to see what else that legacy code has opened,” I said.
