A More Perfect Union

by Carsen Taite

  Zoey nodded and walked out of the room past Julia who entered with a curious expression. Julia shut the door behind her. “What is it about women in uniform?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Julia waved a hand in front of her eyes. “Earth to Rook. Uniform equals hot. I might be in a relationship, but I’m not dead. Don’t tell me you didn’t notice.”

  Oh, I noticed, Rook thought. Zoey Granger had her attention, but she wasn’t going to cede all the power that easily. She feigned nonchalance, but she was going to have to work hard to keep her libido in check during the course of this investigation or risk losing her heart and her reputation.

  Chapter Nine

  Rook returned to the car and contemplated her schedule while George navigated back through the guard gate. In order to make the appointment at the Pentagon, her afternoon was going to undergo some serious shuffling. She should never have allowed Julia to goad her into taking this case, but now that she had she was determined to wrap it up in short order. A few interviews today, a few over the next week, and then a report detailing their findings which she imagined to be something like, military men chose to use dicks instead of brains when exercising judgment. No new story there—the list of sex scandals in the military was longer than she had time to recall.

  She wasn’t judging. If she were forced to live a life so confined by rules and authority, she imagined she’d eventually succumb to making decisions based on pure pleasure as well. The students at McNair might be professional soldiers like Julia said, but they were probably still much like any other college students—academically smart, but stupid when it came to thinking about how one dumb decision at a party might pop up during a job interview years down the road and derail their whole career. Today’s soldiers had likely been lulled into a false sense of well-being with troops pulling out of Iraq and both houses of Congress insisting they didn’t want to get involved in Syria. The students likely viewed their time at McNair as a boondoggle complete with drinking games and expensive hookers. She, however, didn’t have that luxury, and picked up the phone to check in with the office.

  “Rook, where have you been? Eric’s been looking everywhere. He’s got some news about Diamond Credit.”

  “Put him through.” Rook listened carefully, stopping Eric’s report only to interject a few pointed questions. When he finished, she gave him instructions and then directed George to drive her to Diamond Credit’s headquarters. “This won’t take too long,” she told him when he pulled up to the building. “Grab us some lunch, and I’ll text you when I’m done.”

  Rook punched the button for the twentieth floor of the sleek steel and glass building where Melissa Mendoza, the CEO of Diamond Credit, and all the other C-Suite Diamond execs had their offices. The receptionist didn’t recognize her, but when Mendoza’s assistant came out to the plush, top floor lobby to see who was trying to get in to see her boss without an appointment, Rook was ushered directly back to Mendoza’s office.

  Melissa looked up from her desk as Rook strode into her office and called out, “Tell me you’re here because you have some good news.”

  Melissa was a crisp, no-nonsense woman, which was exactly why Rook had taken her company on as a client. She didn’t waste a lot of her time, she gave Rook a wide berth to do her job, and she paid well. Rook liked her and wished she was here to give Melissa what she wanted. “I have news. Let’s leave it at that for now. How fast can you get your CIO and CFO in here?” Melissa answered by pressing a button on her phone and instructing her assistant to interrupt whatever the two other execs were doing and get them to her office, pronto. She leaned back in her chair. “Any chance I get a preview of what you’re about to say?”

  Rook shook her head, instead fishing out her phone and initiating a FaceTime call with Eric. When his face appeared on her phone, she showed it to Melissa. “This is my chief information officer, Eric Pryor. He’s been working to try and discover the source of the hacking.”

  “I trust our IT department has been helpful,” Melissa said.

  “In a manner of speaking,” Eric said. “I haven’t actually talked to any of them.”

  Melissa shot Rook a what the hell look, and she held up a hand. “I asked Eric to employ some special methods.” They both looked up at the sound of a knock on the door. “Let’s wait to let him describe it once we have the others in the room,” Rook said.

  Two men strode in and Melissa introduced Mike Anders, chief financial officer for Diamond, and Harvey Linus, the chief information officer. After a few minutes of small talk, Rook turned the show back over to Eric. “Tell the group what I asked you to do and what you found.”

  “You asked me to check for any backdoors to the system.” Eric took a moment to explain a backdoor, using the kind of layman terms that Rook preferred and then described how he’d conducted his search. “I found two methods a hacker could use to get into the area of the servers that house your customers’ sensitive information. One appeared to have been written into the system on purpose to allow for data retrieval in the event of an accidental system lockout.”

  “And the other?” Rook prompted him.

  “The other was a breach. The information that was released last week came from the breach.”

  Melissa leaned across her desk. “Linus, did you know about either of these?”

  The CIO shifted in his seat. “I knew about the built-in backdoor. The other access point is news to me.”

  “Well, that’s just great,” Melissa sighed. “Why didn’t the hacker just go in the backdoor that was already set up? Seems like it would be easier to take the path of least resistance.”

  “Good point,” Rook said. “Eric, any theories?”

  “Actually, yes. One reason might have been to avoid leaving tracks.”

  “I don’t understand. If they are accessing through a path that already exists, how would they leave tracks?”

  “I guess the best comparison I can think of is those TV crime shows where the person who lives in the house jimmies the window from the inside, forgetting that the burglar would have jimmied it from the outside. If there was a burglar, that is.”

  “You’re saying this was an inside job?”

  “I’m saying that even though there are two access points to reach the data, I believe that data was only transferred via the breach, but that’s not enough information, on its own, for me to conclude whether the breach came from someone inside the firm or an outside hacker.”

  Rook heard the clues loud and clear, but she waited for Melissa to home in on exactly what Eric was implying. It didn’t take long. “But you have reached a conclusion, haven’t you?” Melissa asked. “You have other information, right?”

  They all stared at the screen on Rook’s phone and Eric stared back, seemingly unfazed by the information he was about to impart. Even Rook, who already had a heads up about what he would say, was on pins and needles waiting for Eric’s conclusion. Finally, he cleared his throat and started talking.

  “Your system is vulnerable to outside hacking and there are a number of safeguards you can make that I’d be happy to share with you. But in this particular instance, I believe this was an inside job.”

  Linus slammed a hand on the arm of his chair. “Dammit, Melissa. I would’ve appreciated the opportunity to be part of this investigation. If we need to, we’ll polygraph the entire department, but next time I demand to be involved from the outset.”

  Before Melissa could respond, Rook broke in. “Hang on a minute. I don’t think Eric was finished. Eric, you want to tell them how you arrived at your conclusion?”

  “Sure, Rook. It was pretty simple, really. Once I established that someone was trying to throw me off their tail, I figured I would look at who had the most to gain from the data breach.”

  “You mean someone from my department sold the information?” Linus asked.

  “Actually, no. I was looking at bigger picture transactions.”

  “He’s talking about short sales,�
� Rook said. “While Diamond’s stock was in free fall last week, an upstart hedge fund was making a killing short-selling your stock. Do any of you happen to be familiar with the name SA Investments?” She looked at each of them. Melissa’s and Linus’s expressions registered genuine ignorance, but the other guy started to shift in his seat. “Eric pulled their SEC records and found that the manager’s name is Samuel Anders.”

  “That’s your son,” Melissa exclaimed, staring at the CFO.

  “I don’t know anything about this,” Anders said, raising his hands in protest. “Besides, are you really going to believe some hacker who’s probably sitting in a basement somewhere, violating a dozen federal laws?”

  Rook held back a laugh and injected a fierce tone into her voice. “Back down. Eric Pryor is sitting in my offices right now and he’s the best computer specialist you’ll ever meet. Of course, I don’t think you’re ever going to meet him or anyone like him where you’re going.” She turned back to Melissa. “You need to get your in-house counsel in here right away and lock down Anders’s office. But call the SEC first, so you can be first in the door.”

  Rook gave them a few more instructions, including not talking to anyone in the media until she had time to craft a statement for the press, and then she left. George showed up within minutes of her call and handed her a sandwich as she settled into the car.

  “You have about an hour and a half until your meeting at the Pentagon,” he said. “You want to go back to the office?”

  If she went back to the office, it would be easier to make calls and get a press release ready to go, but she’d likely get wrapped up in a ton of other cases vying for her attention. What she really wanted to do was have a little time alone to shift gears before she saw Zoey again and before she had to become immersed in the bureaucracy of the Pentagon. Once again, she pondered why she’d agreed to take this case. Would she have agreed if she’d known Zoey was going to be involved? Didn’t matter now since she’d already committed, but she was more committed than ever to making sure she finished the work quickly so she could extricate herself from the morass of military bureaucracy. She shivered at the idea she would have to spend any time at the Pentagon and decided she needed to steel herself for the afternoon ahead.

  Rook made a snap decision. “George, let’s head to Arlington. I’ll text Lacy and let her know the change in plans.”

  The trip from Diamond Credit’s offices across the river only took about thirty minutes, during which Rook called the office and dictated a draft of a press release about how Diamond’s CEO’s diligent efforts had uncovered the source of the data breach and she was working with the appropriate government agencies to ensure their obligations were met. She also called an old pal with the SEC and gave her the heads up that Diamond’s CFO was the target of their internal investigation. She typed a few emails on her phone and then leaned back in her seat to relax before they reached their destination.

  Without being told, George pulled into the parking lot of Twin Towers Florist and kept the car idling while she wandered around inside and selected a bouquet of fresh flowers. She returned to the car, and within five minutes, they pulled into the parking lot at Arlington National Cemetery. George showed their permit at the guard gate and drove directly to the spot they’d stopped at many times.

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Rook said.

  “Stay as long as you like.”

  Rook didn’t bother answering. There was no “like” to these trips although she made them often. Every single time was a horrific reminder that her brother Rory was gone and he would never be back. She pulled a plastic cone for the flowers from the receptacle near the roadway that ran through the massive cemetery and trudged toward his headstone.

  When she reached her destination, she knelt in the grass and let her gaze sweep the property. The long, white rows of sameness always struck her with their stark reminders of the cost of war, and her stomach roiled as she relived her own loss. Struggling to focus on something besides her grief, she forced her vision back to her brother’s headstone and murmured the words she’d memorized years ago. Rory had died on the battlefield, and even though his death hadn’t come at the hands of the enemy, the basic details—name, rank, branch of service, date of birth, and date of death—were followed with chiseled proof of his heroism, Purple Heart and Silver Star. She traced the words with her finger, truth and lies, blending together to tell a story that had ended too soon.

  The rest of the ritual was easier now that she was grounded. She told him about her meeting at the White House, the stupidity of the soldiers at McNair, and she even mentioned Zoey. He would have teased her unmercifully about being attracted to a soldier. When she was done talking, she nestled the plastic cone in the grass and inserted the flowers one at a time, taking care to arrange them in a beautiful display that Rory would have scoffed at. Today’s flowers were lilies. The florist had been stuffed with them, no doubt because of the impending Easter season. As ubiquitous as they were, Rook found comfort in their beauty, their soft, white purity.

  Her thoughts were shattered by the sharp crack of gunfire. She shook and braced for the rounds to follow—seven guns, three volleys in a row, twenty-one rounds to commemorate a death. She remembered thinking, during Rory’s funeral, how off balance it seemed that gunfire was used to honor him when gunfire was the reason his body was waiting to be buried. More irony—Rory was the only one in her family who would enjoy the joke.

  She finished arranging the flowers and stood, smoothing her rumpled clothes. Maybe someday she would find answers to the questions she had about his death, but in the meantime, she would visit and pay tribute to a life she believed had been given in vain.

  * * *

  Zoey took the keys from the landlord and only half listened as he rattled off all the things he thought she needed to know about the house. When he finally left, she took a few minutes to wander through the empty rooms. Somehow it looked smaller without all the furniture that had been here when she’d seen it the first time, but the thought of purchasing furnishings felt daunting. The movers would arrive later in the evening with the few boxes of books, clothes, and other personal effects she hadn’t been able to fit in her 370Z coupe, her one luxury. Their small load would barely fill a couple of closets in this house. Had she made a huge mistake not renting a cozy little apartment?

  Too late now. She’d signed the lease and this place was hers for the next year unless she wound up being shipped out. She checked the time, pleased to see that the entire process of this commitment had only taken fifteen minutes. If she drove back to the Pentagon, she could even stop and grab some lunch along the way. She locked the front door, climbed into her car, and drove off, scouring the side streets along the way for something quick that wasn’t fast food. She’d driven a few miles without finding any options when she spotted a sign for Arlington Cemetery, the one big item on her list of DC landmarks she hadn’t made it to yet. The cemetery was only a few miles away. If she skipped lunch, she could go by, pay her respects to fallen friends, and make it back to the office in plenty of time to prepare for the first round of interviews. A small nagging voice told her she was avoiding her new responsibilities, but she ignored it and took the next turn.

  After she parked, she walked around until she found the visitor center where a Marine corpsman showed her how to locate a particular grave using the app on her phone. She spent a few minutes looking up names and located one of the men she’d served with in Afghanistan. She’d lost others, but they must have been buried elsewhere. Unfortunately, after the bodies were returned home, she’d lost track of what happened, having returned her attention to the work at hand. She’d always intended to go visit the families of her fallen comrades when she returned to the States, but now that she was back, it felt awkward to show up at a stranger’s door, stirring up memories that were, to her mind, best left buried. She’d pay her respects now and not make similar promises in the future.

  Zoey hailed
a shuttle and gave the location to the driver. After a few more people boarded, he took off through the grounds, stopping to let passengers off and on as they drove past the perfect rows of white headstones, lined up by the thousands. She’d read in the visitor’s center that approximately thirty funerals were held here each day, and while she knew many of the dead were aging veterans, she couldn’t help but be overwhelmed by the marble markers of loss surrounding her.

  She found Lieutenant Kyle Peavy’s headstone fairly quickly after the shuttle driver stopped to let her out. Unlike the other markers she saw that contained endearments like “loving father” or “dutiful son,” Kyle’s headstone matter-of-factly listed his name, rank, date of birth, date of death, and nothing else. She’d known him as well as she’d known most of the people she served with, but she was embarrassed to admit she didn’t know if he had a family. What she knew could be summarized by her observation that Kyle had been a hardworking officer, dedicated to his work, but always finding time to have fun. She fished back through her memory and settled on a memory of Kyle pulling a prank on one of their fellow officers the day before a suicide bomber exploded on the sports field where Kyle and a few others were playing a pickup game of soccer.

  She kneeled in front of the white marble, wishing she’d thought to bring flowers, a flag, some tribute to a life that had been cut short. A life too quickly forgotten. “Dedicated soldier. Liked by all.” She whispered the words that should have been on this headstone, words she wished she’d said to him and vowed she wouldn’t forget again.

  A different shuttle picked her up for the ride back to the main gate, and it took a winding path through the cemetery, stopping to drop off and pick up other visitors along the way. Zoey stared out the window lost in memory and sadness. How could anyone work here each day amid the constant reminders of death and sacrifice? Suddenly, she spotted a familiar figure sitting in front of a headstone. No, it couldn’t be…could it? She squinted against the sunlight, certain her eyes were tricking her, but as they drove closer, she spotted the familiar sedan she’d ridden in the day she arrived in DC. Rook was hunched over a grave, her face drawn and her shoulders quaking.