Parkowski changed and left the facility as soon as she could.
She wanted to investigate further, but the building was packed with people. She would never make it back into the secure room, even if she got the key, and Parkowski had struck out on every attempt at getting anything out of the internal Aering network.
Her curiosity ate at her, and there was no way to satisfy it.
Negative thoughts ate at her mind.
What if they never started the ILIAD program back up again? Her promotion was probably gone, she had somehow screwed everything up so badly that the entire project was at least temporarily shut down.
Would she need to get a new job? Would they move her to another program? Would Dr. Pham still be her boss? The questions got more and more complex as she drove through the midday LA traffic back to her apartment.
The sun was shining and the November rains hadn’t started yet. Unfortunately, Parkowski hadn’t spent much time outside the last few weeks. She’d have to change that once she got everything sorted out.
She decided to take a shower — she hadn’t done that this morning. While she was shampooing her hair, Parkowski could have sworn that she heard a banging on a wall somewhere in the apartment building, but she ignored it.
When she got out of the shower and started to towel off, Parkowski heard the knocking again. It was on her apartment door.
She groaned and went to check the peephole. It was DePresti, in his Space Force OCPs and carrying a handful of red roses.
Parkowski groaned again. He was the last person she wanted to see right now. She thought she had given him a key to her apartment at one point, her roommate’s boyfriend had one too, knowing DePresti he had probably misplaced it.
“Grace, let me in, I know you’re in there, I talked with your boss,” DePresti said loud enough for her to hear him on the other side of the door. “I called him on the way to Aering and did a U-turn and came here.”
She ignored him.
“I want to talk with you about Bronze Knot.”
Parkowski unlocked the door and opened it a fraction.
“Grace, goddammit it, you were right. I was wrong. Something weird is going on.”
She sighed and opened the door all of the way. “Come on in.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
DePresti stepped through the door and took off his hat. “Grace, I have to tell you I’m sorry,” he said as he handed her the flowers. “I should have listened to you.”
She narrowed her eyes as she took the bouquet.
“Do you know what Bronze Knot is?” Parkowski asked. Maybe she would finally have the answer to her all-consuming question.
DePresti shook his head.
“Then why did you tell me that I was right?”
He sighed. “Grace, go put the bouquet in water and sit down. I want to tell you everything from the beginning.”
She went and got a vase, cut off the bottoms of the stems, and put the flowers in, then sat down on the recliner. DePresti went into the kitchen and got one of her roommate’s beers and opened it before sitting down on the couch.
“A beer at 11 AM?”
“I need it.”
“And in uniform?”
“I really need it.”
“Ok, start at the beginning,” Parkowski ordered.
He leaned forward. “So, do you remember the big project I’m working on?”
“The classified data link?”
“Yeah.”
“Yes, I remember it,” Parkowski said, rolling her eyes. “It’s the only one you can talk with me about.”
DePresti took a sip of his beer. “So, part of that data link is a cross-domain solution, a guard. It prevents data from going from a higher level of security classification to a lower one on the same network.”
Parkowski thought for a minute. Those server racks in the secure room, they had guards in them. “Go on, but I don’t know where this is going.”
“So, for that piece of hardware to operate at the ops site out at Schriever,” DePresti continued. “I need an ATO — Authority to Operate. It’s a piece of paper saying that I can connect to other networks or data feeds.”
He took a breath. “So, yesterday I finally got all of the paperwork done and called over to the AFOSI office at Los Angeles for them to come take a look at it so they could take it to get signed,” the Space Force officer continued. “They — the local AFOSI agent — don't sign it, someone at the Pentagon does, but they courier it there for signature. It can’t be sent electronically.”
Parkowski’s mind flashed back to a few days ago. “Was the AFOSI agent an older white guy with a mustache?”
“No, younger dude, Hispanic or Mediterranean,” her boyfriend replied, “why?”
She quickly told him about her visit from the AFOSI/PJ agent.
“The two letters after ‘AFOSI’ tell you what detachment they belong to. That one — PJ — is the same detachment this guy who I saw was from,” DePresti said. He took another sip of beer. “That’s their special projects division. They handle all of the SAP and SCI data.”
He cleared his throat. “Anyways, this dude comes over this morning and is going through my paperwork with me. And I ask him all casually ‘Have you ever heard of a program called Bronze Knot?’”
“And then what happened?” Parkowski asked. Her boyfriend's boring work story now had her undivided attention. She was on the edge of her seat.
“His face turned white. Like literally white, Grace, like a light switch. He asked me really nervously where I had heard of it.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“My girlfriend saw it as part of an error message at work on the ILIAD program.”
“And then what?”
DePresti finished his beer and got up to get another one. “He asked if I was read in, which of course I told him no. I’m telling you, Grace, before you mentioned that program I had never heard of it. I’ve never seen a program with ‘Bronze’ in it,” he said, sitting back down. “It’s not a Space Force program.”
She didn’t say anything. But, Parkowski’s mind was flying at a million miles per hour with possibilities.
“So the guy tells me, and I wrote it down before I left because I wanted to get it right. He says verbatim ‘I’ve been doing this for eight years and Bronze Knot is the scariest shit I’ve seen.’”
“The scariest shit he’s seen?”
“Yup.”
“Did you ask what it was?’
“Hell yeah, I asked him what it was,” DePresti said with a smile. “I turned into you at that moment, Grace I needed to know what’s behind the Bronze Knot door.” He smiled. “But, the AFOSI agent told me he couldn’t. He told me it was a waived SAP — my understanding of that means it doesn’t have to be reported formally to Congress — and that I was better off not knowing.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“I don’t know, Grace, I’m sorry,” he said. “I pressed him a little more, but I also needed to get this ATO approved so I let him go. He didn’t give me anything else, just another warning not to look into it.”
Parkowski sat there, processing this new information.
A lot of things were coming together.
“Is that all?” she asked.
DePresti shook his head slowly. “Nope, and I have to apologize again.”
“What for?”
“So, before, when you asked me to look around at Space Systems Command for Bronze Knot stuff,” DePresti explained. “I did — but only on the SAP-level network I have access to.”
“So?”
“So there are other networks,” he went on. “The main one being JWICS, which I think stands for Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System — don’t quote me on that. Anyways, it’s the main Top Secret-level network used by the intelligence community.”