“Twice,” he echoed, then paused before continuing. “I’d be pretty pissed,” he said, collecting their trash into one bag.
“And everyone tells you everything is fine, but there’s one thread that keeps showing up but you can’t get any information on it,” Parkowski continued.
“I get it, I get it.”
“So can you look for me?”
He nodded. “I’ll do some surface-level inquiries, but I can’t promise anything. I doubt there’s any harm in performing a couple of searches.”
“That’s all I’m looking for,” she said, slightly relieved. “Thank you.”
Then, it was time to go scuba diving.
The next week started with a quiet Monday.
She tried again to go through the Bronze Knot search results on the Aering internal site when she got a chance but still had no luck. The words were just too common.
Parkowski started to wonder if the lack of results for the two words together was deliberate or unintentional. The SharePoint site’s search function seemed pretty intelligent, and considering how many results were there for the two words separately, she thought they would have appeared together, but that was not the case.
She left at three in a funk. Parkowski felt like she wasn’t really getting anywhere unraveling this mystery.
DePresti was coming to her place tonight for dinner. He had a meeting at OuterTek in Hawthorne and Marina del Rey was a much shorter drive than Hermosa Beach during rush hour. Plus, her roommate was at her own boyfriend’s apartment up by UCLA, so she had the place to herself.
Hopefully, her boyfriend was coming with some good news.
DePresti showed up, late, at six. “Sorry, a meeting ran really late.”
“It’s ok,” she replied. “I got started late, so it’s just ready now.”
They sat down at the tiny kitchen table to eat the chicken, rice, and mixed vegetables Parkowski had cooked.
“So, how was your day?” she asked DePresti after they got settled.
“Fine, how was yours?”
“Pretty quiet,” Parkowski said.
There was a brief, almost awkward pause.
“Did you look into ‘Bronze Knot’ for me?” Parkowski said quietly.
DePresti gave her an odd look, then smiled. “I did,” he said, taking a bite of his chicken. “And before you get your hopes up, I found out very, very, very little, mostly by elimination, but let me walk you through what I did do.”
“Ok,” Parkowski said. She stood up to get a glass of wine, a little dismayed at DePresti’s status report. “Thanks for looking though.”
“No problem,” her boyfriend said. He leaned back a little in his chair. “First, I took your advice and did some searches on the two main SAP networks we use. I figured a couple of queries wouldn’t trip any logging software. There were no results for ‘Bronze,’ none at all. I checked files, SharePoints, documentation pages, and anywhere where you might see a reference. No joy.”
“Got it,” Parkowski said. She poured her wine and sat back down.
“Then,” DePresti said, “I went to a guy I know, a retired O-4 who is one of the support contractors on base. This dude used to be part of SAPCO, which is the Department of Defense Special Access Program Control Office.” He said that last part with a flourish. “He knows all of the SAPs, and not just the Air Force and Space Force ones. I pulled him into a conference room and asked him point-blank, that my girlfriend ran into this weird error message at work with a SAP I’ve never seen before, that she wants to make sure she’s not crazy, and that it was a real thing she just accidentally saw.”
“And what did he say?” Parkowski asked. This might actually be going somewhere.
“So he said he had never heard of it,” her boyfriend replied, “and he told me that was the truth — if it was an unacknowledged or waived SAP he’d tell me if he did since you and I had no idea what it was in reference to; it wouldn’t be a security violation.”
DePresti took a deep breath. “But, he asked if I had looked around internally at all, and I was honest with him, I had searched on our networks. He did tell me something interesting, if I was looking for a SAP name, or a name that had been or would be protected by a SAP that wasn’t on the network, the internal search features wouldn’t even perform the search. They would just return a null result as part of the protection features of the system.”
Parkowski was about to ask a specific question on the topic of the network but the Space Force captain spoke first. “So, then I went back and did the search again,” he said, talking quickly, “and compared it to a different search term. And the system actually searched for the other term — it told me the search took 0.36 seconds — whereas for ‘Bronze Knot’ it just spit back ‘0 results’ without giving me a search time.”
She thought for a moment. “Meaning it’s some kind of protected term.”
He nodded.
“And that was it?”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much all I can do on my end without asking too many questions or getting myself in trouble,” DePresti told her. “Sorry.”
“No, actually, that was really helpful.” She finished off her glass of wine. “I know exactly what I have to do next.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Parkowski almost skipped into work on Tuesday morning.
She had spent the rest of the night formulating a plan to get a hold of her logs again and see if any other references would help her unravel the Bronze Knot mystery.
Parkowski knew she had to get into the “NASA room” as Pham had called it, but she didn’t have access. She would have to get in somehow.
More than anything else, Parkowski needed to figure out this mystery. Her promotion — and satisfying her own innate curiosity — depended on it.
That being said, were she to be caught, all bets were off. She’d be lucky to still have a job.
After checking her emails, she walked down the hallway towards the room. It had tall ceilings and was well-lit throughout. There were eight offices, four on each side, with the NASA room at the very end of the hallway before it veered off in a 90-degree turn to the left towards a different high bay.
The door itself was not like those of Pham, Rosen, and the other senior engineers’ offices. While the other doors were wooden with brass doorknobs, the NASA room’s door was metal and painted a matte black. Instead of a doorknob,it had a brushed steel handle with a cipher lock above it. There were five metal buttons with the numbers 1 through 5 next to them in descending order.
Parkowski had never seen a lock like that before, but she assumed that a multi-digit code needed to be inputted for it to open. Whether it was alarmed or not, she had no way of knowing. She knew the risks — there was no valid reason for her to be opening the door and she would at the very minimum get a security violation or write-up. She could be fired in a heartbeat.
However, it was a risk she had to take. Something was wrong here, something that was a risk to the mission, and by association, her livelihood and reputation.
Parkowski had to get to the bottom of it.
Her plan was fairly simple in theory, but complex in execution.
The first part wasn’t too bad. Over the last few months, she had seen people go in and out of the locked room. They didn’t seem too careful about trying to shield the code as they input it; why would someone want to get into the room who didn’t have access? She could easily walk by, strike up a conversation with someone while they typed the code in, and surreptitiously make a mental note of the code.
The next part was a little more complicated. Parkowski was going to have to find a good time to be able to type the code in herself without being noticed, either by another human or by some kind of active or passive security system, do what she had to do inside, and get out cleanly.