Thicker Than Water - DK5

by Melissa Good

  “Lady, do I ever,” Alastair remarked dryly. “Talk at you later, huh? Have a good day, Dar.”

  “Yeah.” Dar hung up the phone and grimaced. “Now you say that.”

  HER PHONE WAS ringing as she entered and she contem-plated letting it go to voice mail, then sighed and answered it.

  “Operations, Kerry Stuart.”

  “Hey, Kerry, this is Ilene, from the church?” The voice hesitantly added, “I do the youth group counseling with you?”

  “Oh, sure.” Kerry’s mental train jerked onto a new set of tracks. “Sorry. What’s up?”

  “Have you heard from Lena, the kid in the group? You know the one I mean?” Ilene asked. “She was supposed to meet me for lunch yesterday, and she never showed.”

  Kerry started shutting down her computer. “Well, maybe something came up; you know how it is. She didn’t call or anything?”

  “No. And yeah, I know stuff happens, but two of her friends were here just now looking for her. They said she hasn’t been around for a couple of days, and they’re a little worried. I thought maybe she might have contacted you.”

  “Me?” Kerry’s brow creased. “No. I don’t think I gave my number out to the group and I’m not listed in the phone book. If she does contact me somehow, though, I’ll definitely get in touch with you. Do they think something happened to her or—”

  “No one’s sure. It’s just weird for her not to be around for that long. She didn’t say she was going anywhere.” Ilene sighed.

  “Well, it was a long shot, but Casey said Lena really likes you, so I Thicker Than Water 17

  thought maybe you’d given her your number or something.

  Thanks anyway, Kerry.”

  “No problem,” Kerry replied. “I’ll keep an eye out for her, okay?”

  “Much appreciated. Talk to you later.”

  The unexpected call left Kerry a bit unsettled. She finished closing down her system, then checked her caller ID and copied Ilene’s number into her Palm Pilot. She’d met the other counselor a few times at church functions and rather liked her, but they hadn’t spent much time talking to each other since then.

  Pity, really, since Ilene shared her general background and upbringing. She'd been born in Detroit into a family of old car money whose reaction to her coming out had been, if not as spec-tacular as that of Kerry’s parents, at least as vicious. They’d taken just about everything she owned and had thrown her out of the house, forcing her to move somewhere, anywhere, and support herself.

  Just like Kerry, Ilene had made the transition, but for Ilene it had been much harder since the only job she’d had prior to moving was as a movie usher. She’d mixed in with a tough crowd there in Miami and gotten into a little trouble, but had ended up taking vocational courses and scraping together a career as a mechanic.

  It puts things into perspective, sometimes, when you look at other people and realize how lucky you are. Kerry leaned back and wished her Advil faster sailing as it headed towards her pounding headache. It was making her slightly sick to her stomach, and she hoped that the nausea faded before she had to make a dash for the restroom.

  Meetings didn’t usually bring one of those suckers on, but she’d been a little tense when she’d woken up late, and rushing to get to work never helped. Dar had shrugged off the timing problem, but Kerry was very aware of the eyes and ears monitoring her, and the last thing she wanted was people commenting that she took advantage of her relationship with Dar to wander in whenever she felt like it.

  Dar told her not to give a crap if they gossiped, but that didn’t really help her insides any. Of course, she also didn’t have the cojones to handle the comments like Dar did. When her lover was confronted with a caustic comment on her late entry, she merely replied with a smirk and the words, “Don’t you wish you had the reason I do?”

  It was flattering, in a way, but Kerry knew she turned brick red every time she heard it. “Ah well.” She flexed her shoulders, her fingers working a knot at the base of her skull. Maybe the rest 18 Melissa Good of the day would be peaceful, and she could get her mailbox cleaned out after she’d ignored it all weekend.

  A soft knock sounded on her inner door, and she swiveled to see it open and reveal Dar’s dark head poking through. “Hey.”

  Dar entered, walked over to her, and leaned on the back of her chair. “Can I kill Eleanor?”

  Ah. “What now, honey?” Kerry folded her hands over her stomach and gave Dar a loving benign look. “Did she promise a prospective client you’d take them to dinner again? You know it’s just because of your reputation.”

  “She promised a prospective client I’d give him free bandwidth if he signed a multiyear contract,” Dar replied with a dour look.

  “Oh. What a bitch.” Kerry sat up and reached for her keyboard. “Let me go tell her what she can do with her promise of free—”

  Dar covered Kerry’s hands with her own. “I told her. But I know she’s going to come to you with a sob story to get you to try to change my mind.”

  “Hah!”

  Dar gave her a kiss on the top of the head. “She’ll learn, one of these days.” She stepped away as Kerry sat back and swiveled around to face her. “Meeting go all right?”

  “Eh.” Kerry exhaled. “It gave me a headache. I’m waiting on the Advil.”

  Dar sat down on the desk, and brushed Kerry’s hair back and then stroked her cheek.

  It brought a smile to Kerry’s face and banished some of the tension. “Quiet by you? Maybe we can get out of here a couple minutes early. If they’re going to talk anyway, I might as well just take advantage of it.”

  “Sure.” Dar saw Kerry’s line light up. “I’ll let you get back to work.”

  Kerry circled Dar’s leg with one arm as she answered the phone. “Operations, Stuart.”

  “Ms. Stuart, this is Ramon in the ops center,” a tense voice responded. “I think something’s going on.”

  Kerry felt Dar lean forward to listen. “Something? Like what?”

  “There’s a huge file transfer going on from the banking T1’s, nothing like I’ve ever seen before. Can you take a look? I was trying to get hold of Ms. Roberts, but she’s not in her office.”

  “We’re on our way.” Dar hit the button and popped up off the desk, with Kerry right behind her. “Well, one thing—at least—”

  “We don’t have to answer our mail?”

  Thicker Than Water 19

  “You got it.”

  The door slammed after them, leaving the room in somber silence.

  “DID YOU HAVE to do that?” Angie asked, as she walked her brother out to his car. “I mean, good grief, Mike.”

  “Yes, I did,” Michael replied stubbornly. “God damn it, Angie, she’s our sister. I don’t care if our parents wish she wasn’t, she is.”

  Angie walked a few steps, glancing up at the clear, star filled sky. “I know.”

  “You don’t know. You don’t give a piss, Angie. You went right along with them when they wanted to give her the cold shoulder at the trial, and you could give a rat’s—”

  “That’s not true!” Angie grabbed his arm and swung him around. “I love Kerry. Don’t you take that high and mighty attitude with me. You went right along with it, too.”

  “I didn’t. I went over there where she was sitting.” Mike jerked his arm free. “You didn’t.”

  “For crying out loud, Mike! I was nine months pregnant,”

  Angie shouted. “What in the hell did you expect me to do, make a scene?”

  “Yeah,” Michael replied. “You could have stood up for her.”

  “Oh, you’re just impossible.” Angie turned and started back for the house. “All you want to do is start trouble about her to keep him from taking pot shots at you.” She slammed the front door, leaving Michael out in the chill of the fall night.

  “Yeah.” Michael exhaled. “Maybe.” He gave his head a half shake and went to his car. Several men walked towards the house and he stepped asid
e to let them pass. They spared him a glance, then continued on without acknowledging him.

  “Does he know what he has? Is he sure?” one asked in a doubtful tone.

  “He’s sure,” a second answered. “What I want to know is, where’d he get the dirt from? I thought the guy he had inside turned on him?”

  “Dunno. Guess we’ll find out shortly.”

  They passed out of earshot, leaving Michael standing there.

  He shook his head and sighed. “What now, I wonder? Did he get those pictures of old what’s-his-name and the hooker? Anything to make a scandal and take the heat off, I guess.” He paused as he turned towards the car. “Maybe we are related.”

  20 Melissa Good KERRY LEANED OVER Dar’s shoulder, watching her key in rapid commands on a console. Dar’s legs were locked around the base of the chair, and she rocked slightly—the energy coming off her was almost palpable.

  “What is it?” Kerry asked in a soft voice.

  “Dunno…dunno, yet,” Dar muttered, trying to wrestle an analyzer into place on the line. “Jesus, it’s big.” She gave up on her work, then keyed another screen. “I’m going to mirror and dump it.”

  “Ma’am?” The console operator sounded nervous. “We’re not supposed to do that.”

  “You’re not supposed to do that.” Dar finished her task.

  “Until I can see what this is, I’m not taking any chances.” She went back to work on the sniffer. “Damn port’s pushing so much data, I wonder if I can…Damn.”

  “Can you just put a…Ah.” Kerry closed her mouth and watched as Dar managed to get a handle on the traffic by throwing it to their packet analyzer. “Okay, let’s see what we…Oh, hell.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Encrypted,” Kerry said. “Well, that’s a good thing, right? I mean, you want your data to be encrypted.”

  “Mm.” Dar traced something with a long fingertip. “I don’t like that header.”

  Kerry leaned forward again and studied the packet Dar pointed at. “Why?”

  “Unusual port,” Dar murmured. “Do me a favor. Get Charles Ettig on the phone and feel him out. See if he’s got a big transfer going on. Just say we saw a usage spike on the pipe.”

  Kerry sat down and lifted the phone on the console. She pulled out her PDA and checked the number to dial, then punched it in and waited for a connection. “Charles Ettig, please. Kerry Stuart, from ILS.”

  Bad Musak happened for a few minutes, then it cut off.

  “Hello? This is Charles Ettig speaking.”

  Kerry kept her voice casual. “Charles, this is Kerry Stuart.”

  “Oh, hello, Kerry,” Charles responded. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine, thanks. Listen, one of our measuring systems caught a spike on the usage of your primary line. Are you guys moving some files?”

  There was a moment of silence. “Moving files?” Ettig asked.

  “No, not that I know of. I mean, it’s Monday, y’know, and we do have all the reconciliation transfers coming from the banks in here, is that what you mean?”

  Dar shook her head and pointed to herself.

  Thicker Than Water 21

  “No, this is something coming out of your building,” Kerry said. “Like if you were putting out a software upgrade, that kind of thing. We thought maybe you were distributing patches to your database.”

  “Oh.” Ettig pondered a moment. “Well, I guess we could be.

  Let me call around and find out.” He hesitated. “We aren’t being charged for it, are we?”

  Kerry chuckled. “No, it just seemed a little out of the ordi-nary, so we thought we’d ask.”

  “Okay.” Ettig now sounded more confident. “Thanks for keeping an eye on things. You know we really do appreciate that, huh? I’ll call you back.”

  Kerry hung up and gave Dar a quizzical look.

  “Beautiful,” Dar said. “I’m going to see if I can track down where it’s going.” She typed in a command and observed the result.

  “Be careful, Dar, you’re walking a very fine line here.” Kerry laid her hands on Dar’s shoulders and flexed her fingers against the powerful bone and muscle under them.

  “Got it.” Dar went to another screen and typed in a query.

  “Let’s see who you are, hm?”

  “It could very well be legitimate.”

  “Could be.”

  Dar waited, drumming her fingertips on the keyboard. “Cali-fornia. Okay.” A few more moments passed as the trace continued. “Well, it’s heading for a DSL node in San Francisco. They got anything in San Francisco?”

  “Three branches,” Kerry said. “But they’re on Frame Relay lines, Dar. Not DSL.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Where are they tapping in? Is it on our network?” Kerry inhaled. “Did we have a breach?”

  “Shit.” Dar started typing again. “Switch in Detroit.” She picked up the phone and dialed. “Mark? It’s Dar. Pull up all the changes and adds in Detroit over the last three weeks. Get them to Ops.” Without waiting for the answer, she hung up and started tracing ports. “It’s in the cloud.”

  “The Frame cloud? In the Tier 1?”

  “Yes.”

  “They were breached.”

  Dar’s fingers hesitated over the keys. “I’m going to cut it off.”

  The phone rang and Kerry picked it up. “Operations, Stuart.”

  “Kerry? This is Charles Ettig. Listen, I just talked to my people and they say there’s nothing going on.”

  Dar’s hands were a blur.

  22 Melissa Good

  “Okay, Charles,” Kerry replied. “Tell you what. We’re going to drop the traffic, and we’ll analyze it—see if we can figure out what it was and let you know. How’s that?”

  “Sounds just great, Kerry. Thanks again for taking such good care of us, okay?” His tone was grateful. “I know we can trust you guys.”

  “Thanks, Charles. Call you back.” Kerry hung up and exhaled. “Dar, if there was a breach, is it our fault?”

  “Depends where it is. Let’s trace it, then we can figure out what the hell we’re going to do. Damn. The last thing we need is a security crack right now.” Dar stared at the screen. “Even if it’s the Tier 1’s breach, it’s still our managed circuit. Damn it, damn it, damn it.” She thumped a fist against her forehead.

  Kerry put her hands back on Dar’s shoulders and gave them a squeeze. The tension was evident, and without really thinking, she gently massaged the muscles. “Let’s find out what the deal is, first. At the very least, Dar, we saw it happening.” She turned and looked at the console operator, who was studiously looking elsewhere. “Ramon, you did a great job finding this.”

  He glanced furtively at them. “Thanks, ma’am.”

  Kerry’s brow knit, then she realized he was uncomfortable with her interaction with Dar. For a second, she almost stopped and backed off. Then Dar’s skin shifted under her touch, and she stepped closer instead, adding her body’s warmth to the massage and thinking, To hell with it.

  To hell with it. This woman in front of her was what mattered, not a bug eyed nerdy boy standing by watching. “Dar?”

  Dar leaned back until she rested her head against Kerry’s stomach. “Yes?” She tipped her eyes up and looked at Kerry.

  “This could be a ranking fubar, Ker.”

  Kerry managed a smile. “You’ll handle it. We’ll figure it all out. Mark’s provisioning process is a solid one. I’m sure we can find an angle.”

  Dar’s shoulders relaxed, and she nodded. “I’m sure we can.”

  She typed a note into the console. “I’ll have him put that data dump somewhere so I can check it out tomorrow. Maybe I’ll get some clues from that.”

  Despite their stated optimism, Kerry knew they were both crossing everything they could.

  HANDS CLASPED BEHIND his back, the tall, dark haired man paced back and forth across Senator Stuart’s home office.

  “Roger, I appreciate what you’re saying, but h
ow can you be sure it’s real data? You said someone just gave it to you? I don’t under-Thicker Than Water 23

  stand.”

  “You don’t have to understand.” Roger glared dourly at him.

  “Just look at it. Look at the names and the numbers, and you tell me, Bradley, you tell me if it’s real or not.” He threw a stack of papers on the desk towards Bradley.

  Bradley picked them up and studied them, impatiently at first, then slowly turning the pages. He paused, then sat down in a chair across from Stuart and stared at the writing. “Dear God.”

  Roger leaned back in his chair. “So you tell me, Bradley,” he repeated with deep sarcasm, “do we have a problem?”

  Bradley looked up. “We have a problem. Roger, we need to pay off whoever got this to you and fast.” To his surprise, Roger laughed. “I’m not joking.”

  Stuart got up and started pacing. “Oh, but you are; you just don’t know you are. The source I got this from not only can’t be bought off, I wouldn’t even try it.” He turned and pointed. “What I want to know is, how is it that someone,” he stared pointedly at Bradley, “was so god damned stupid as to put incriminating information in something so accessible? Tell me that, Bradley?”

  “Sir—”

  “Tell me why details about deals neither of us officially knows anything about are sitting in a military database in the sticks!”

  “Sir.” Bradley held up a hand. “Let me get Stevens and Perlamen in here; maybe they can make sense of it.” He went to the door and called out, “Gentlemen, we need you.”

  The two men entered, faced with the angry senator on the other side of the room. “Sir?”

  “They can’t explain it. You can’t explain it.” Roger’s voice rose. “No one can explain it, because I’m surrounded by idiots!

  The irony of it all is that the goddamned bitch who gave me this crap makes you all look like mental midgets.”

  “Sir, take it easy, please,” Bradley begged. “I’m sure there’s an explanation. Someone must have—”

  “Idiots!” Stuart bellowed. “‘It’s a simple deal, Senator.’ Isn’t that what you told me? Just some surplus military garbage being traded, nothing important. You stupid son of a bitch, did you see what’s in that data? Idiot! Idiots! All of you!”