"NSA." one of the other men said. "What do they want?"
"The NSA's on the way here? Who?" Cutter asked. "This is not their jurisdiction."
Oh Jesus. "Please sit down." Kerry did so, folding her hands on the table. "Suppose you tell me what you need, before they get here and confuse things."
Cutter did. "Listen, Ms. Stuart. No offense but your people here don't seem to know there's a crisis going on."
"They know," Kerry said. "Every single person in this corporation knows."
"Well, then they don't seem to want to cooperate," Cutter said. "We have a surveillance appliance we need to install here, and they won't let us."
"I won't let you," Kerry corrected him. "The people here don't have the authority to either grant or deny that request."
"What?" Cutter stood up. "Listen, lady, who in the hell do you think you are?" I'm a Treasury officer! You've been blocking my men since yesterday and I'm not going to put up with it a minute more!"
Kerry remained seated. "I am the vice president of operations for this company," she repeated. "I am under no legal obligation to allow you to enter this facility. In fact, I have a mandate to not allow anyone unauthorized from entering it, and please don't try to browbeat me." She merely gazed up at him. "Why don't you start by explaining to me what exactly you need to do, and what information you're looking for?"
"I don't have to do that."
Kerry shrugged. "I don't have to continue speaking to you. This facility is secured. There are high level government accounting systems that process through it. If you seriously think I am going to let some people from some agency with some unknown device come in and connect to that frankly sir, you are nuts."
"I can arrest you," Cutter said. "For obstruction."
"You can," Kerry agreed. "But that's not going to get you your information. These people here not only will not help you, they cannot. Our systems are in security lock down mode."
Cutter stared at her.
Kerry gazed back at him. "Would you like to tell me what you gentlemen are looking for? Before you go off arresting me and causing yourself a lot of trouble, it would help to know if what you need is even in here."
"Cutter, sit." The man seated at the far end of the table spoke up. He was tall, and dark, and had a Latin accent. "Ms. Stuart, my name is Lopez." He stood up and came around the table. "I know you have your responsibilities to take care of, but so do we."
Kerry decided this apparent bait and switch was legitimate, and that this was the actual boss of the group. She and Dar played that game sometimes with new companies. "Mr. Lopez." She tapped her thumbs together. "No, I don't think you really do understand what kind of responsibilities I have here." She stood and opened the whiteboard at the back of the room.
Lopez stopped and waited.
She turned and faced them. "I have a quarter of a million employees," she said. "I have two dozen of them missing in New York, and a dozen missing in Washington." She turned and scribbled on the board. "I have most of the infrastructure for communications down in Manhattan. I have an entire secure multipoint structure to restore in the Pentagon." She scribbled again. "I have overseas links down, a major satellite uplink used by the Navy down, bandwidth shifted in gigabits to cover planes in Newfoundland and Vancouver, satellite endpoints to establish, cellular backhaul to rebuild, and last by not least, several hundred major financial and banking customers who are depending on us to put them back in operation and prevent a major financial crisis."
She turned and faced him. "Now explain to me again why I am in this room, listening to you bitch at me for something you won't explain instead of letting me go and do my job bringing this country back from crisis?"
Lopez blinked at her.
"As my late father would have said, put it on the table, or take a hike." Kerry found the irony almost painful, but the quote fit. "I don't have time to play games with you." She could feel an exquisite tension in her guts, and knew she was playing with fire. She could see in Lopez's face that he wasn't a goon, and he could, in fact, drag her ass off to jail and might very well do so.
"This is a matter of national security," Lopez said.
"I have a top secret clearance," Kerry shot right back. "Next excuse?"
Lopez sat down in the chair next to hers. "Okay."
Kerry sat down, and folded her hands.
"Close the door." Lopez looked at Cutter. "Is this room secure?"
"It is," Kerry said. "We had them sweep for security yesterday after you first got here." She paused. "Though, I would still love to know where the NSA fits in."
Lopez frowned. "First things first." He waited for the door to be shut, and glanced up as the air compressed a little around them. "Soundproofed?"
"Yes," Kerry said, quietly.
"Okay." Lopez looked a little more relaxed. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't realize the extent of your company's involvement in all this. I was told you were simply a service provider."
Kerry nodded. "Then I understand your approach," she said. "Please go on."
"This device," Lopez said. "We suspect that the people who planned and executed the atrocities yesterday are still here, still planning, still executing more horrible things. We have to find them. Do you understand how critical that is? We have very little time."
Kerry nodded again. "Okay, what exactly is this device looking for?" She held a hand up when he started to protest. "I don't want to know specifics. I need to know what type of data stream you're hoping to intercept. Are you thinking these people will be trying to attack the government financial systems?"
"They could be," Lopez nodded. "This device analyzes conversations and determines if they are of interest to us."
"Conversations from where? Inside the government?"
"No. From the public."
Kerry sighed. "Then you're in the wrong place," she said. "There's no public access here."
Lopez frowned. "There isn't?"
"No," Kerry said. "These are all closed systems. Isolated."
Lopez turned to Cutter. "Didn't you say they had internet access from here?"
"That's what I was told," Cutter said. "The guys in accounting said they had internet." He looked accusingly at Kerry. "You saying they're lying?"
"No," Kerry said. "They get internet via our secure gateway," she said. "But that's not here. They go out to the internet via three different nodes-in New York, Chicago, and Dallas." She got up and drew a rough circle, with three points on it, then put an X near one edge. "The request goes through two NATS and three different gateways. There's no outside access."
"Shit," Cutter muttered.
Kerry could see the consternation around the table. She almost felt sorry for the men. "If it's any consolation, the systems here are protected. I won't quote my boss and say they're un-crackable because it gets us into trouble, but they are secure. Feel free to run tests against them."
"Shit," Cutter repeated. "We wasted a whole fucking day."
Lopez rubbed his temples. "Ms. Stuart, are you telling us the truth?" He looked up into Kerry's eyes. "People's lives can depend on your answer. We have to find these people."
Kerry gazed gravely back at him. "I'm telling the truth," she said. "If you really want to tap public access, you need to go to the tier 1 providers, and put your appliance there," she said. "We provide our own access for our customers, but the rest of the country uses one of them.
"Tier 1?" Lopez got out a pad and scribbled that down. "Can you give me the names?"
Kerry promptly provided them. "There are lots of smaller companies, but those three form the public backbone," she told him. "Now I will tell you that we maintain a lot of filtering capability on our net access nodes. If there's something, some phrase or type of information you are looking for specifically, I would be glad to put a scanning routine in place and output the results to you."