Parkowski paused, wondering if he was a threat to her plan, but he had headphones in and was watching a movie on his computer instead of working.
With a smirk on her face, she slipped past him and into the hallway.
Now the hard part.
She quickly but carefully walked along the office doors on the left side. As she got to the end, she slipped over to the right side and hid herself in the corner between the door’s hinges and the wall.
Time to input the code.
One.
Five.
Three and two together.
Four.
She heard a slight click as the lock disengaged.
Parkowski grasped the handle and opened the door.
She slipped inside and closed it behind her.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Parkowski found herself inside a large, dimly-lit, windowless room. Wide metal desks with cabinets above them lined the outer edge. A large, oval-shaped conference table with expensive chairs occupied the middle. In one corner stood a large server rack, at least a foot taller than her, with lights of every color flashing and blinking.
There was no alarm going off, no flashing red light, no indication that anything was amiss.
If she was going to get fired, it probably wasn’t tonight.
She finally exhaled.
Parkowski walked around the edge of the room, looking for any security cameras or other sensors, but found none.
With a shrug, she flipped on the light.
On each of the desks was a pair of computer screens, both of which were attached to a workstation underneath the desk. A few had smaller devices on the desk itself, in between the monitors, which Parkowski figured were KVM switches to use the same set of peripherals for multiple computers.
She bent over and checked one of the computer monitors. It had a yellow sticker on it with the words “TOP SECRET” in a bold font.
Parkowski smiled. This had to be it. Based on her conversations with her boyfriend, this was somewhere where she was not supposed to be.
If information on Bronze Knot was in the Aering facility somewhere, it was here.
She moved the mouse to log onto the computer but was met with a login screen.
There was more information here. “TOP SECRET//SCI//NOFORN” read a banner at the top. Parkowski wasn’t 100 % sure what that meant, but based on DePresti’s explanation a week ago, it had something to do with the CIA and the intelligence community.
She tried a different computer. This one was different — the banner read “TS//SAP//NF.”
A SAP. A special access program. Exactly what the error message had said that Bronze Knot was.
Parkowski had to get on this computer. But she didn’t have the login. An oversight on her part.
She went to each of the computers in the room. Each had similar stickers on the monitors and either an SCI or SAP banner at the top of the login screen.
The six-foot server rack in the corner also fascinated her. Each of the different computers inside of it had a sticker with a different code on it. Two were SCI and the remaining five had SAP-XXX, with XXX being a set of three letters. Four of them she didn’t recognize, but BKT stuck out like a sore thumb.
She thought for a moment. Why was all of this highly classified material inside of the NASA room?
“Because it’s not the NASA room, Grace,” she said to herself. It was a cover for whatever was really going into the room.
But why was it connected to the ILIAD mission? There was nothing classified about her day job — Parkowski was very sure of that. When she had first taken the job, she had asked very specifically if there was any classified work and was told no. Enough of her friends worked on classified projects where they couldn’t take any work home, have their phones at work, or even work in a building with windows. All of those things had sounded awful to her.
The words “data spill” loomed large in her head. Somehow, Bronze Knot data had gotten into her VR environment. Maybe the answer as to why that happened — and what Bronze Knot was — lay within this room.
She needed to log onto one of the TS//SAP computers and find out.
Parkowski sat down in one of the chairs around the conference room and thought about how she could gain access.
She knew that a lot of people were lazy with logins, writing them down on Post-it notes and whatnot. But this room had a security posture way above where Parkowski normally worked. Her other option was to go out and come back with some kind of hacking tool — an area where she had little experience but was willing to dive into it head-first to get to the bottom of the mystery.
But who knew if she would get another chance at this. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to figure out the answer to the mystery that had eluded her for weeks.
Parkowski started going through the room with a fine-toothed comb. Maybe, just maybe, someone left a clue as to how to get onto the SAP system with Bronze Knot information.
After a few minutes, she hit pay dirt in one of the cabinets above the computer monitors.
Someone had committed the cardinal sin of network security.
He or she, whoever it was, had written down their username and password on a small piece of paper that was taped to the inside of the cabinet door.
She had used her hand to feel around in the insides of the cabinet and brushed alongside a scrap of paper. Parkowski carefully removed it from the cabinet door without tearing it and saw that not only had the person carefully written down their SCI username and password, but they had also included the SAP one.
Parkowski went to the first computer she could find with the “TS//SAP” banner on it and used the SAP login information to get on.
It took almost five minutes to get to the desktop, but she was finally in. She opened the file manager and started to look around.
Unfortunately, whoever she was logged in as seemed to have their permissions extremely restricted. When she tried to open up anything on the shared network drive she ran into “permission denied” and “access not granted” error messages.
She tried opening up the browser. Nothing, just another error message. This computer was not connected to the outside internet or any internal network that contained web pages like Aering’s SharePoint.
Parkowski sat back, stumped. Maybe this person didn’t really use this network at all and just had access as part of something else, hence why they needed to write down their login information. They didn’t use it that much, so they needed to keep it somewhere to refer back to when they did access the network.
But why did they have access then in the first place?
There had to be something on this machine that she could get to.
Parkowski tried the network drive again. Still no access.
She tried to get into the computer's own drive — the one physically located inside the computer — but it was locked down as well. But at the top left of the window, she saw the recently accessed folders. Whoever had used this login last, they had left a trail of where they had gone on the SAP-level network.
Finally, a breakthrough.
Parkowski opened up one of the folders named “BKT Logs” and all of the missing files from her previous missions were there, in addition to the ones from the rest of the missions, all the way up until yesterday. Someone had taken them off of the low-side Aering network and moved them to this protected system.
She tried another folder from the recently accessed list. This one was named “SAR-HBX CONOPS and Specifications” and as per the name contained a CONOPS (CONcept of OPerationS) and a series of high-level system specs for a reconnaissance satellite that Aering was offering to build for the government.