She grabbed the handle and turned the door inwards. “Yes fucking way,” Parkowski said with a big, dumb grin on her face.
That room was dark too.
DePresti shone his flashlight around to reveal a room that was nearly a carbon copy of the secure room in El Segundo.
Parkowski saw a lot of differences, but the overall theme was the same. Server racks in the back, workstations around the edge of the room, a large conference table in the middle, and a projection screen at the front.
“Are all classified rooms like this?” she asked her boyfriend.
He shrugged. “No, but I’ve seen plenty that look like it.” DePresti walked back to the server rack. He opened it and scanned the rack up and down. “There are stickers on the different server blades here for a whole range of SAPs, a bunch of which are old and the programs have been closed. There’s one I don’t recognize…” his voice trailed off, “and there’s one that says BKT.”
Bronze Knot.
Parkowski grabbed the laptop they had brought out of the waterproof satchel and walked it over to DePresti.
He fiddled around in the back and came out with a network cable.
“Plug it in,” he said.
She did and booted the laptop up.
The computer that Chang had given them connected to the network for the special access program that they had worked for so long to get access to.
She quickly learned that all that the server in the room was doing was taking data from the NASA MICS network and passing it along to the ILIAD virtual environment hosted at the Air Force facility in Orlando. The data was the sensor feed from the ILIAD mission on Venus, with the same BKT identifiers that she had seen while she was troubleshooting the dragon from her first mission.
It was a huge disappointment.
Parkowski checked and double-checked. There were no huge file directories, no security classification guides, and no documents that would help shed a light on the mystery.
It was yet another dead end.
She groaned and looked up at the ceiling.
“Let me try,” DePresti said.
Parkowski gave him the laptop. “Because you’re so much smarter than me?”
“No,” he said, “I just want to get another set of eyes on it.”
He too came up empty.
“I don’t get it,” he told Parkowski a few minutes later. “Why would a special access program, one that is even worth killing over, just be a bunch of fields in telemetry packets coming from a NASA science mission?”
“I don’t know,” she said, reaching out for the laptop. “Let me look again.”
This time, she dove into the packets that she had looked at on her Aering workstation so long ago.
She pulled up five, ten, twenty-five, fifty different telemetry logs. The BKT data was there, but here, on the high side, was clearly identified.
Interestingly enough, every five packets, there was something injected into it from a specific IP address into one of the sensor values.
“Mike, write this down,” she told DePresti. “One-seven-two, dot, one-six-eight, dot, one hundred, dot, fifty-five.”
“Ok,” DePresti said, fumbling in his bag until he got out a pen and a small notepad he had gotten from the motel. “Got it. What about it?”
“Is there any way of telling where this IP address is located?” Parkowski asked. “I remember seeing a list of IP addresses in one of the packets from your launch.”
“Hold on,” he said. He took the laptop and pulled up a document consisting of one large table.
“The IP addresses on the Cape are configured by building,” DePresti explained, “and the first two numbers indicate what building the workstation or server is. What were the first two values?”
“172 and 168.”
“172 and 168,” DePresti repeated as he scanned the table. “That is in… Huh, that’s weird.”
“What’s weird?”
“That’s for building A99,” he said, surprised, “but that doesn’t follow any of the building numbering schemes I’ve seen for Cape Canaveral or Kennedy Space Center. They’re either hangar-something or have a three-digit number.”
“Huh,” Parkowski said, confused now. “So we go there?”
“We're going there,” he confirmed.
“I don’t think the two of you are going anywhere,” a gravelly voice said, causing Parkowski and DePresti to both jump in shock.
She turned to see Special Agent Hollis Everson, the AFOSI/PJ agent who had visited her at Aering, and two other men, one on either side of him.
In his hand, pointed directly at her forehead, was the largest handgun she had ever seen.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Parkowski opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out.
The new arrival grinned beneath his mustache. “Cat got your tongue?”
“Who are you?” DePresti asked him, stepping slightly towards Parkowski.
Everson laughed. “The young lady here knows me as Special Agent Hollis Everson,” he said with gusto, “but I flew on a commercial flight out here as James Baker. I’ve also spent time as Dmitri Gustavovich, Mohammed El-Farsi, Petr Cenek, and any number of other names. You can guess which one, if any, is real.”
DePresti didn’t respond.
“Go ahead and sit down,” Everson said as he waved his oversized pistol at DePresti and Parkowski. “We’re going to have a quick chat.”
Parkowski, still in shock, did as she was asked to, taking a seat at the conference table. DePresti did the same.
Everson sat down, pistol still aimed at Parkowski, as the two other men stood on either side of the door.
She couldn’t believe that they had let their guard down. They had gotten too cocky.
“So, you want to know what Bronze Knot is,” Everson said softly, gun still aimed at her forehead. He laughed. “You know what, I’ll tell you.”
“You will?” Parkowski asked.
“Sure. It’s quite simple, really. Bronze Knot is a special access program that protects the linkage between the ILIAD mission and an unnamed organization.” He seemed like he was about to say more, but then he stopped himself. “And, that’s really all it is,” he added after a few seconds of silence. “There’s much more information, of course, but that’s all protected in another special program. I’m actually surprised that neither of you was able to figure that part out.”
“Who do you work for?” DePresti asked, a slight hint of defiance in his voice. He wasn’t as scared as Parkowski, or at least was trying better to hide it.
Everson snorted and then smirked at the Space Force captain. “That’s what you want to know? Not, how did we track you here, why haven’t we killed you already like poor Dr. Pham, why are we so interested in your little investigation?”
Neither DePresti nor Parkowski responded. The man holding the gun didn’t seem to care.
“Bronze Knot protects one of our most closely guarded secrets,” he began, “and when our man in the Aering facility told us that you were starting to look into it we weren’t initially concerned. No offense, kid,” he said to Parkowski, “but you’re not the type that I’d have expected to blow this whole thing open.”
She frowned but didn’t respond to the slight.
“But, when you got access to the SAP room at the Aering plant,” Everson said, “it got serious.”
“Why are you telling us this?” Parkowski asked.
Everson ignored her. Even if he had given her an answer, she wasn’t sure she would have liked his answer.
“I had to send a team out to Los Angeles,” the older man said. “And we started tracking you, your boyfriend,” he nodded in DePresti’s direction, “and everyone else involved with ILIAD. We had to prevent a spill, a leak. We had to make sure that the only people that knew what was going on in the SAP were the carefully vetted people who had been read in.”