Parkowski panicked.
She threw herself away from the door and started walking back towards the ILIAD area.
“Who’s there?” a muffled voice said from beyond the bend in the hallway.
She kept walking into the ILIAD high bay.
“Ms. Parkowski,” she heard a voice say from the dark hallway.
She recognized the person now. Dr. Rosen — Dr. Pham’s boss.
Parkowski spun on her heel and went back to the entryway.
“Yes?” she said quietly as she poked her head out, her heart beating at a million beats per second.
Rosen stood in front of the door to the “NASA room.” He did not look happy. “Ms. Parkowski,” he repeated, beckoning her to come closer with his finger. “What are you doing here at this hour?”
“Just finishing up my work,” Parkowski said hastily, trying to keep the panic out of her voice, as she walked towards him. “I’ve got a lot on my plate.”
He glared at her.
“Can I leave?” she asked.
“What were you really doing?”
“I was getting a sip of water from the water fountain. I left my bottle at home.”
“You weren’t, by chance, trying to get into the secure room here?” Rosen pointed at the cipher lock.
Parkowski shook her head. “No.”
She was an awful liar. Hopefully, Rosen couldn’t pick up on it.
“I heard from the security team that someone without the correct access was trying to get in yesterday,” the senior Aering engineer continued. “That wouldn’t by any chance happen to be you, would it?’
Parkowski gave him an odd look. “No, that wasn’t me,” she said, a little surprised. This time she was telling the truth.
Rosen seemed like he was about to ask her another question when they both heard heavy footsteps coming from the direction of the ILIAD high bay.
She turned around. It was Bert, the old security guard.
Parkowski breathed a sigh of relief. She hadn’t liked where the conversation with Rosen had been going.
“Is everything ok here?” he said to the two engineers as he arrived.
Parkowski was about to speak up when Rosen spoke for both of them. “Yes, we were both just leaving,” he said as he glared at her.
She nodded. This was probably her signal to get the hell out of Dodge. Parkowski went to her cubicle to get her bag as Rosen stormed out of the high bay towards the facility’s exit.
Parkowski turned to go but she found Bert standing in her way. “Grace, what’s going on?” he asked, almost innocently.
“I don’t know,” she lied again. “I was about to leave and went to get a sip of water and ran into Dr. Rosen. He started interrogating me and then you came.”
If he detected the lie, he didn’t let on.
The older man sighed. “You should go home, bad things happen here at night.”
“What do you mean?”
Bert leaned against the side of the cubicles. “Last night, someone with Aering access tried to break into the secure room in the hallway.”
“Really?” Parkowski said, intrigued.
The security guard nodded. “Yeah, and that was after they changed the codes and limited the access because last week someone did get into it.”
“No way,” she said breathlessly.
“Yes, but the weirdest thing is, it didn’t look like they exfiltrated any data or tampered with anything in the room, they just went in and out.”
“Weird,” Parkowski echoed.
“The theory is that they tried to break in last night, too,” he continued. “But after last week, leadership decided to limit access to only a couple of people, Dr. Rosen included, and to change the code on the lock. I don’t think they’ve told anyone yet, that room isn’t used very much. Hopefully, that deters them.”
“Yeah,” she said in response. “Hopefully it does.”
That was new information, confirming what Rosen had told her. Someone else had tried to get into the room, someone other than her. Parkowski wondered if they were interested in Bronze Knot or in one of the many other programs with data in that room.
“Anyways,” Bert went on. The man did like to talk. “I don’t know what’s going on in there, but I’ve been here a long time. Almost forty years. If I was able to give you any advice, any advice at all, it’d be to stay away from whatever the hell is going on in that room because I’ve never seen management here so spun up.”
Frustrated, Parkowski went home, this time empty-handed. But now she had even more questions than she'd had before.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
At dinner, Parkowski barely touched the burrito her roommate had picked up for her dinner and went to bed early, around nine o’clock.
It took her over an hour to fall asleep. She tossed and turned, still worrying about her new knowledge that her infiltration of the secure room of Aering had not gone unnoticed. She had been as careful as she could, but maybe not careful enough.
Parkowski fell into an uneasy sleep.
A few hours later she woke up.
At first, she wasn’t sure why she was awake, but then she heard the steady buzz of her phone vibrating.
Someone was calling her.
Parkowski sighed and rolled over to her nightstand and checked the time. 2:04 AM. Who could be calling her in the middle of the night?
She thought about ignoring it, she recognized the Los Angeles area code but not the number itself, but then remembered that the automated Aering remote notification system sometimes used new or unique numbers to reach the company’s employees scattered throughout the area.
She hit the green “answer” button on the phone’s screen.
“Hello,” Parkowski said.
At first, there was no response. Had she messed up whatever the Aering notification system was trying to tell her?
“Hello,” she said again.
This time someone spoke up, an unfamiliar, deep, gravelly male voice she had never heard before. “Grace Parkowski,” the strange voice said slowly but clearly. “You are endangering national security. Cease your investigation into ‘Bronze Knot’ before it is too late.”
“Wait… what?” Parkowski said, confused, but the call had already ended.
She sat up in bed, bewildered — and terrified.
Ok, Grace, deep breaths, she thought.
How did anyone know about her unofficial investigation of sorts? The only people she had spoken the words “Bronze Knot” to were DePresti and Dr. Pham. The former had admittedly asked around at work but hadn’t used her name, the latter she wasn’t a hundred percent sure had gone to anyone else. Her roommate had access to her computer and the screenshot on it, but she was significantly less technically adept than Parkowski and likely wasn’t snooping around anyway.
The call itself was bizarre.
How could she be “endangering national security” as the caller put it?
ILIAD was a science mission, run through NASA, not some Department of Defense boondoggle like what DePresti worked on. And “cease your investigation before it is too late,” was that a threat?
She was a little worried now. Parkowski looked up the non-emergency number for the LAPD and started to dial it, but canceled the call.
Parkowski couldn’t sleep the rest of the night. She just lay there, staring at the ceiling or tossing and turning.
At six, she finally got up and out of her bed feeling more tired than when she had gone to sleep. Her roommate snored away in her room next door. Parkowski wanted to do just that; call out of work, tell Dr. Pham she wasn’t feeling well, and just stay home all day. But she knew that she couldn’t. She had to finish planning her mission and maybe do some more poking around to see if she could tease any more information about Bronze Knot out from the Aering internal network.