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“It will. We’ll figure out a plan. Meanwhile, just stay alive. And get some sleep.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Fallon came back on. “What Cass said. We’ll text with an update as soon as we have one.”
“Roger that.” He disconnected the call and powered down the phone. Nobody wanted him to risk being on the phone any longer than necessary. Nobody wanted him to get caught.
But now they all might have to face the same truth: Ryder may have come here for nothing.
Chapter 13
“Okay, stop. Go back to the directory tree.”
The agent sitting at her workstation—Keegan, early thirties, the most capable of the three she’d been working with for the past twelve hours—scrolled back to the root directory on the practice system. She’d built it that morning to simulate the air-gapped machine Ryder had found. If she could get someone else up to speed on how to crack it, they could send an agent in to do the extraction.
That was the theory anyway.
“Now show me what you’d do if the file structure doesn’t match anything I’ve described.”
Keegan hesitated. His fingers hovered over the keyboard. He was running through the options she’d given him, trying to find the right one.
Come on. You’ve got this one. They pretty desperately needed Keegan to understand this.
The hesitation stretched. Unfortunately, that was the answer.
“I’d…run a search query on the metadata tags?”
Close, but not quite. “Okay. Which tags?”
“The ones you listed. Creation date, modification history, user access logs.”
“And if the system doesn’t index by those tags? If the architecture is custom and the metadata structure is proprietary?”
He looked at her. Wanting to say the right thing, but not having it.
“Then I’d need to assess the architecture first.”
“How would you do that?”
Silence. She couldn’t blame him. What she was asking for was technically difficult at best. Almost impossible for someone not truly steeped in computers.
She leaned forward. “Forget the tags. Forget the search protocols. You’re sitting in front of this machine, and nothing I taught you applies. The interface is unfamiliar. The file structure doesn’t look like anything you’ve seen before. What do you do first?”
Keegan thought about it. She could see him working through the problem with genuine effort, and she liked him for it. The first agent had tried to bluff. The second had panicked. Keegan was actually trying. And given a few months, Cassandra could probably get him there.
They didn’t have a few months. Those trafficked kids definitely did not have a few months.
“I’d look at the system processes running in the background. See what the machine is doing on its own. That would tell me something about the architecture.”
“Good. That’s good. How do you access system processes on an operating system you don’t recognize?”
That was the question. That was the whole question. If he could answer that, she could work with him.
His fingers went to the keyboard, tried a command, got an error. Tried another. Error. He sat back and looked at her.
“I don’t know.”
She wanted to say that’s okay. She wanted to say you’re closer than the other two combined. Instead, she pushed forward, because she needed to know for sure.
