"Dar, you're the chief information officer of the company. I think a lot of other people, like Mark, should have been looking for this stuff. Not you." Kerry replied honestly. "It's ridiculous that you need to be sitting on the floor in some closet trapping hackers, you know?"
A slightly stronger breeze made itself felt, whipping their hair around. Some sea grape leaves blew across the tile floor, one of them ending up on Kerry's foot. She reached down and picked it up, twirling it in her fingers. "Kinda windy."
Dar leaned to one side and looked out at the sea, spotting whitecaps. One eyebrow hiked up. "Don't tell me another damn storm snuck up on us." She checked her PDA, but there were no ominous looking messages on it.
"Mm." A slightly dreamy smile crossed Kerry's face. "Oh, man, I'd love it if it did."
That made Dar smile back, a frank grin of appreciation that lightened her entire face. "I'll take that as a compliment."
"It was." Kerry impulsively reached across the table and fit her hand into Dar's. "Want to go down to the cabin this weekend?"
Without even thinking, Dar nodded agreement. "Yeah."
"I have a meeting on Friday afternoon. How about we do this..." Kerry's mind raced over the details, thinking about their dual schedules. "How about we ride together Friday morning, and I get a ride over to the port, then you can pick me up and...vroom."
"Absolutely." Dar agreed instantly. "We can stop for dinner on the road somewhere and watch the sunset."
Kerry glanced at her watch and sighed mournfully. "It's only Tuesday."
Dar's cell went off before she could suggest something crazy like going after dinner. She took it out and checked the caller ID. "Uh oh." She opened it. "Yeah, Mark. What's up?"
"You in the building, boss?"
Dar glanced around her. "Me? No. I'm home. Why?"
"Shit. Someone's messing around in here and I thought it was you...looked like what was going on this afternoon." Mark cursed. "Okay, thanks. Lemme get back to you. Hey you like...locked that door, right?"
Dar's gaze went inward briefly, as she carefully traced her actions from the afternoon. "Yes. I went up to a meeting on fourteen, then came back down and did a few more scans. I left the closet around four. Shouldn't have been any access after that."
"Gotcha. Bye." Mark hung up hastily, cutting off a yell in the background, and the sound of a buzzer going off.
Dar looked at her cell, looked at Kerry, and then they both got up and headed for the condo at a run.
DAR COULD HEAR the beeping of the alerts as she cleared the doorway into her office and put her hands on her desk, vaulting over it to land near her chair on the other side. "Son of a bitch!"
Kerry forced herself to slow down enough to close the door behind them, making sure not to slam it on Chino's tail as the Labrador bounded in after her, tongue lolling out. She hesitated, then grabbed her briefcase from the dining room table where she'd left it, carried it into Dar's study and took possession of the couch.
As she hit the leather, it started raining, and for a brief second she had a flashback, startling and vivid, of the first time she'd been in the room. But it only lasted that one second, because then she was yanking her laptop out of its case and opening it, waiting impatiently for the machine to boot up. "What's going on?"
"Fuck if I know." Dar's fingers were nothing but a blur on the keyboard. "Something's loose in the network. Jesus Christ I hope I didn't do something stupid and leave something open today."
"The door?" Kerry was rapidly logging in.
"No...no, that I know I shut. Something in the router...I was doing those changes so damn fast." Dar's brow was furrowed. "When I was talking to you, when Mark was seeing the blocks."
"Oh." Kerry called up her network monitor and keyed it, sitting there for a minute as it started registering and lines began blinking red across the screen. "Holy cow." She looked quickly at Dar, seeing the tension scrawled across her face.
Dar hesitated, her fingertips flexing above the keys, undecided on what to do. She hated not understanding what was happening. As far as she could tell random data was flooding the network and she could not find the source of it.
She could shut everything down, and by definition that should stop the flood, but it also would take down everyone and everything using their network including the remote monitoring consoles.
Kerry watched the emotions cross her partner's face, and decided she should do something more productive. She started up her analyzer and grabbed the main switch, opening up the data stream and focusing her attention on what it was showing her.
A lot of garbage. Kerry flipped to her filters and cut off the standard network traffic, keying back to see what was left. "Dar."
"Uh?"
"It's not coming from outside."
"What?" Dar got up and sprawled on the couch arm to peer over Kerry's shoulder.
"It's coming from inside the office." Kerry traced a line with her finger. "Look. Here. I don't know what that is."
Dar blinked slowly, exhaling a little. "Neither do I." She admitted. "Worm? Better tell Mark."
Kerry hit enter on the text message she'd already been composing. "Done. Dar, what would put out that kind of traffic?
Dar slid back into her seat and continued her scanning, slamming filters into place on interface after interface, attempting to staunch the flow of traffic. "Son of a son of a son of a..."
Kerry got up and peered over her shoulder this time, her machine telling her nothing new other than the traffic was continuing to build. "That must be pretty damn close to the core, Dar. You want me to start shutting down the building floor by floor?"
"Might have to." Dar felt herself starting to sweat. She could imagine the calls beginning to come in to the ops center, and speculated on how long it would take before her phone, and Kerry's, started ringing. "What if it's directly in the core?" She pulled up another access list reviewing the results. "God damn it, where is this thing!"
Kerry slowly backed off then went to her laptop, acting on a hunch. "What switch is the conference center in, Dar?"
"Conference center? Ten. Why?"
"Let's just say I smell rotten fish." Kerry logged into the switch and checked the top traffic port. One switch out of twenty seven in the building. What were the odds? "Dar."
Dar scrambled out of her chair and nearly crawled into the seat next to Kerry, her eyes avidly searching the screen. "Bingo. Shut the damn thing off."
Kerry rapidly disabled the port, as Dar jumped up onto her desk and swung the monitor toward her, watching the read-outs in tense silence. The signals jumped for a moment more then slowly settling down to a more even keel.
Dar slapped the desk, and turned her head toward Kerry. "Talk to me."
"Okay." Kerry felt her heart rate slow down, though her fingers were still shaking a little. "Inside the office."
"Yeah."
"Security audit just completed two weeks ago, and it was clean. No new hires since then."
"Right."
Kerry got up and went over to sit in Dar's chair folding her hands together on the desk. "I think this is my fault." She paused, then looked right up into Dar's eyes. "Because I'm the jerk who had four competitors sitting in our conference center with laptops and gear, and didn't ask for a security scan afterward."
Dar's face remained absolutely still for a very long instant. Then she slowly released her breath, her shoulders relaxing as she leaned on one elbow. "Quest's meeting."
Kerry nodded.
"There was a lot going on then, Kerry."
"Don't make excuses for me," she replied. "There is no excuse for that, Dar, and we both know it." She watched her partner's expression carefully, a little surprised to see the strong planes relax, and a faint, almost sheepish, smile cross her lips. "Don't we?"