Stormy Waters: Book 10 in The Dar & Kerry Series (39 page)

With a sigh, she typed a few lines into her program, then stopped and closed it. She switched to the network monitors instead, and started browsing them.

Given the hour, it looked pretty normal. Dar clicked and pointed, shifting the monitor from their outer boundary to the inner workings of the main office, drilling down to a department level. "Let's see. Duks must be working his guys' overtime tonight."

She clicked on a message icon, and typed in a note.

Hey, and you call me a slave driver.

Dar chuckled slightly and went back to her browsing. It seemed busy, and she racked her brains trying to think if there was a deadline she'd forgotten about.

Budgets? No, not for another month, and the quarter didn?t close for nearly two.

Her screen blinked, and she looked at it, seeing the message that had come back from Duks.

I? Here I sit alone in my office with just a dust bunnyunder my desk. Where are you? I was by your office this evening but you were not there.

Dar blinked at the message. Then she removed her cell from its clip at her belt and opened it, rapidly dialing Duks phone number. Her thighs jerked under the keyboard as she waited for him to answer, sending it bouncing slightly as her nerves jangled a howling warning. "Duks?"

"Ah, Dar." Duks sounded completely calm. "How are you?"

"Just listen to me," Dar said. "I'm in the network, and I see a ton of traffic on your servers. Are you running something?"

Dead silence. Then--"I am not."

"Can you check your running jobs?"

A rattle of keys sounded clearly through the phone. Dar waited, knowing if she had to she could have logged into a session herself and checked them, but also knowing Duks would know most intimately what belonged in the system and what did not.

"Paladar, we have a problem."

Dar licked her lips. "Okay," she responded. "What do you want me to do? I can isolate that box, Duks."

"Please do so."

Dar's hands moved in a blur, cutting off the multiple network accesses to the minis. It also cut off her access, of course, but in her mind, that wasn't important. "Okay, done."

"I am going to the computer room now. I will call you from there." Duks voice was quiet, and very, very serious. "Please do not, as of yet, contact anyone."

"Okay," Dar agreed softly. She closed the cell, and left it folded on her leg, while she opened up the monitor screen to its fullest size and stared at it, focusing on small surges here, and there, flickers of pale green against the normal green, completely ordinary to any eyes including hers.

A flashing alert caught her eye, and she clicked over to her router program, blinking at the screen as she read the cryptic results emerging from her own coding. Another warning about being accessed, and Dar almost clicked it closed before she caught a second line behind it, a routine access listing for a remote router that bore an IP not her own.

She dove after it going to the router in question and scoping it out immediately, found the session and captured the address before it could disappear. Then she deleted the session and locked the router down, allowing only her own login to access it.

Breathing a little faster, she ducked out of that router and into the core, searching for the offending IP. Her heart started to speed up as she located it, racing to trace it before it disappeared. She grabbed the Mac address and pasted it into a note pad, then searched it out.

"Ah." She captured the port and pasted that also, then redid the trace. As she'd expected, the address was now gone, but she had the port.

If she had the port, she knew what was on the other end of it. Grimly, Dar opened up her network documentation and pasted the port number into the search field, then hit enter.

Her cell phone rang. She answered it one handed while she stared at the screen. "Yes?"

"This is Louis."

Dar inhaled, making her nostrils flare in reaction. "Yes."

"Some person has been attempting to remove the records in this system that pertains to our customer accounting," Duks stated flatly. "The login that has run these reports belongs to my department, from the senior auditing unit."

Dar waited, but the line was silent. "And you did not ask them to do this?"

"I did not," Duks confirmed. "I am contacting security, and I would appreciate that you send me what data you saw that spurred you to contact me."

"I will," Dar replied quietly. "I may have another problem."

Duks sighed. "Paladar, please. One disaster at a time is all my heart can handle." He exhaled. "I will call you back after I speak with Able Jacobs."

"Okay." Dar let him hang up, satisfied, at least, that Duks had the situation under control. It would do no one any good for her to get involved. Duks was harsher on his own staff and security than she could ever be and she knew finding a data thief inside his department would send her old friend into an overdrive rage.

Now, to her other problem. Dar studied the screen again. The request for her program files had come from a PC on the fourteenth floor, just down the hall from her own office. It was, she recalled, a spare work room that also held two manual fax machines and a copier, and was occasionally used for visitors who needed access to a PC for various reasons.

Dar quickly dialed the phone again. She listened to the ring then exhaled when it was answered.

"Operations, Rosie speaking."

"Hi Rosie," Dar said. "It's Dar Roberts."

The woman's voice definitely perked up. "Oh, hi, Ms. Roberts! What can I do for you?"

Kerry had her admirers in the office, and so, Dar acknowledged, did she. Rosie was one of them. "I have something I need you to do," she said. "You know the computer in the printer room, on floor fourteen near my office?"

"Oh! Yes, ma'am, I sure do." Rosie assured her.

"Okay." Dar said. "I want you to go upstairs, and listen closely, okay?"

"Yes!"

Dar would have rolled her eyes if it had been a less serious occasion. "Rosie, this is very serious," she told the woman. "Someone just tried to access something from that PC that they shouldn't have." She heard the intake of breath on the other end. "So what I want you to do is to take a couple of plastic bags, and go down there. Put the keyboard and mouse in a bag, and take that, the PC and monitor, back to Ops with you, okay?"

"Right away, ma'am." Rosie acknowledged. "Do you want me to call security?"

Dar sighed. "They're busy with something else right now, and I'm not sure exactly what was going on with this PC. So just secure it, and I'll pick it up from you later."

"I'm on it," Rosie said.

Dar hung up, tapping the cell phone against her chin. Her PDA went off at that moment, almost scaring her out of her wits, and she just barely kept from tossing the cell phone across the room. She pulled the PDA out and examined it.

Sorry, sweetie. I was downstairs on the ship. What's up?

Dar wondered where to start.
Is the reporter still with you?A couple things just went down I'd rather not expose to the Herald in this lifetime.

The PDA was briefly silent then flashed. Be right there.

Dar nodded a little, and then opened her cell phone again and dialed. She waited. "Hi. This is Dar Roberts. I need a list of everyone who is logged into the building right now, and everyone who entered and exited within the last twenty five minutes."

THEY PARKED RIGHT in front of the office and walked side by side to the door. They passed together through the electronic portals, getting a nervous nod from the security guard on duty.

"Evening, ma'am's."

"Evening." Dar greeted him briefly for them both. She followed Kerry across the huge lobby to the elevators and they both went inside. "Jesus."

"Not how I wanted the night to end," Kerry confirmed, punching the button for the tenth floor. "But at least you stopped them, Dar."

"By pure god damned luck."

"Honey, whatever works." Kerry sighed. "I'm just glad you were there."

Dar stared morosely at the closed elevator doors until the conveyance stopped, and they were admitted to the tenth floor. She followed Kerry out and to the right, heading for the operations center.

"Just goes to show you how much we need your program." Kerry went on, with a touch of hesitance, "And you."

Dar paused with her hand on the door latch of the ops center, and cocked her head to one side. "You really mean that?"

Kerry looked right back at her. "If you mean personally, I'm going to kick your ass for even asking."

An unexpected smile appeared on Dar's face. "I love it when you talk to me like that." She opened the door and indicated Kerry should precede her, the wide open portal preventing Kerry from framing a suitable answer.

Kerry stuck her tongue out instead, and walked into the room, where the console operator was already standing up to greet them. "Hi, Rosie."

Dar followed her inside, and gave the woman a nod as well. "Got the PC?"

"Right there, ma'am." Rosie pointed toward a worktable on one side of the operations desk. "I went right out and grabbed it after you called me."

Dar walked over to examine their prize. The operator had certainly taken her words literally, and the computer, mouse, keyboard, and assorted cables were neatly wrapped in enough plastic to cover half the room they were presently standing in. Duct tape secured it, and she suspected it would take the sharp end of her Leatherman tool to free the poor captive. "Okay."

"Did you see anyone around there when you were getting it, Rosie?" Kerry asked. "Anyone in the hall or anything like that?"

"No, ma'am." Rosie shook her head. She was twenty-something, a middling height and hair color kind of woman who often reminded Kerry of a cocker spaniel. "There shouldn't be anyone up there this time of night, and it was empty as a graveyard when I was there."

Dar checked her watch, and decided to leave the wrapped PC where it was. She limped over to the big console desk and picked up the phone, dialing Duks' extension. "You there?"

"I am here." Duks answered. "Are you here?"

"Yeah."

"Good. Now that this important piece of business is concluded, would you come to my office?"

"Right." Dar put the phone down. "Ker let me go talk to Louis. I'll be back in a few minutes.?"

Kerry took a breath, then merely folded her arms. "Okay," she agreed. "I'm going to go upstairs and see what I can sniff out."

"Good idea." Dar winked at her, as she made her way to the door and bumped it open with an elbow. She limped out and the door closed behind her, leaving Kerry by herself with the console operator.

"Ms. Stuart?"

"Hmm?" Kerry had wandered over to examine the PC in its wrapping.

"How come Ms. Robert's is limping? Something happen to her?" Rosie asked.

Kerry turned her head to regard the operator, whose round, innocent eyes gazed back at her with a marked lack of guile. "Matter of fact, she got that saving me from a barracuda, Rosie."

If possible, Rosie's eyes became a lot rounder and a lot bigger. "No kidding!?"

"No kidding. "Kerry turned all the way around and faced her. "There we were, in the ocean, right?"

"Right."

Kerry waved her hands, mimicking a swimming motion. "I was swimming with our dog, and we swam under the dock. I felt something brush against me, then all of a sudden Dar jumped in, picked me up out of the way, and kicked a barracuda that was about to bite me right in the mouth!"

"Wow!"

"Yeah, but she got bit for her troubles." Kerry went on blithely, "But it was very brave of her."

"Sure was!" Rosie agreed fervently. "Wow. Were you scared?"

Kerry stuck her hands in her pockets. "Didn't have time to be."

"Wow," Rosie repeated. "That's amazing."

"Dar usually is." Kerry went to the door. "Well, I'm going to go check out our offices. I'll be right back." She left the Ops center and closed the door, pausing outside to grin and grunt contentedly. "If you don't like the rumors about you, my father always said, start some you do like."

She walked down the hall toward the stairwell. "Bet you never thought you'd ever use any of his advice willingly, huh, Ker?" With a slight shake of her head, she pushed the door into the stairwell open and started up the four flights to their offices.

DAR ENTERED DUKS' outer office, crossing the soft carpet and opening the inner door to an office that pretty much mirrored hers. "Evening."

Duks was behind his desk, leaning back with folded arms. He watched Dar as she took a seat opposite him. "How is your fish bite?"

"Eh."

"I see that you are favoring it."

"Hurts like hell," Dar allowed. "I went and got an antibiotic shot, but I've been running around on it all night."

"And I have made it worse." Duks said.

Dar shrugged.

"We have narrowed this down to four possibilities, Dar." Duks dispensed with the chit chat. "Tomorrow, I will call all of them into this office, and we will find out which one it is."

Dar cocked her head to one side. "You mean none of the four were here when it happened?"

"No. The job was set to run at this time," he said. "I am thinking someone imagined no one would be here to see it and remark on it." He laced his big fingers together and studied them. "It is hard to believe from any of these people. They have worked for me for many years."

Dar knew what he meant. You liked to trust the people who worked for you, but she'd found out the hard way over the years that loyalty really didn't generally exist. "That's rough," she said. "You sure it's one of them?"

He shrugged. "They are the only ones who know this login. It is the one we use to enable the reports to select from all four databases."

Hmm. "Logins and passwords can be obtained," Dar reminded him.

"Dar, what can I say to that? Perhaps it was me, then!" He stood up and paced behind his desk. "Is it not bad enough I have to find one of my most trusted staff is possibly a thief?"

"Hey." Dar held up a hand. "I'm just bringing it up, because it's true," she said. "How many times have we been in Mari's office because one person gave someone else their password?"