Heart Shot (14 page)

That had been a few months ago and their friendship had blossomed with a healthy dose of competitiveness, too.

Peter came into her office and his large presence filled it immediately. He took the only other chair and sat next to her. Jane forced herself not to fidget. Even with her eyes firmly locked on the screen she couldn’t help but be electrically aware of how close he was. She smelled the light, masculine scent of his aftershave and reminded herself she was in the middle of something. There wasn’t time to turn, stare, and drool over Peter Abrams right now.

“Heaven forbid you grow bored, Peter,” Jane teased him. “No wonder you never made it as a tech. It’s often days of humdrum banality then something like this pops up. I swear this time management has gone a bit far. I know we need to be tested, to be proactive in upgrading our systems. But really…”

“What have you found?” Peter leaned in closer and Jane caught her breath. He glanced at her and once more she found her face heating.

“Well.” She cleared her throat. “I’d only be guessing, but my money is on that new technician, Roger, flexing his muscles. I’m well used to everyone else’s bag of tricks and this isn’t something I’ve come across before. The coding is amazing and convoluted. Well finessed. The target is trying to insert a Trojan into our system and I’m fighting him off, corrupting his code in real time.”

“How do you know it’s Roger?” Peter asked as he peered at the screen with her.

Jane smiled. “Well it has to be someone from in the unit. They were already inside our firewalls and safety systems when they tripped a flag and came to my attention. Every couple of months management tests us like this, sets us against each other to playact duking it out. It keeps us sharp and can be used as a tool to make sure we understand how to follow the Agency’s procedures and fail-safes even when under pressure. It’s an exercise for us, like your physical tests or training courses.”

“But how can you be sure it’s not just a very good hacker?” Peter pressed. “Don’t these exercises usually come with prior notice?”

“Well,” Jane paused, distracted. “Well yeah, usually. We’re never told the date or anything. But a general notice that sometime in the coming month…but, but this can’t be a real attack. They started inside the system.”

She heard herself repeating the last comment like a talisman. Jane stopped typing and looked directly at Peter for the first time that afternoon. Her insides froze as panic threatened. Peter’s cool blue gaze didn’t waver from her and for the first time since she’d met him Jane didn’t have the urge to run her hands through his thick, blond hair.

Jane spent a vital moment mentally casting back over her recent emails.

Peter was right. There hadn’t been a warning that system checks would take place anytime soon. And while a part of her still believed this was just an internal exercise, she couldn’t take that risk.

Jane turned back to her monitor with strengthened purpose. She hadn’t cut any corners earlier, but this time she started double saving everything and using remote locations to back up data. It hadn’t entered her head that this might be a “real” threat. And while the Agency’s countermeasures were good, she wasn’t going to take any chances.

“I need you to get into the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet,” she said to Peter without shifting her focus from her work. “There should be a box with an external hard drive in it. It’s about the size and weight of an old VHS tape.”

Jane heard Peter open the drawer. A minute later he sat back down and held the hard drive out to her. She nodded her chin to the desk.

“Plug it into the power board and connect the USB into my desktop, please,” she said. Dropping her flirtatious manner, she sat forward on her chair. This was pure work and she was focused. “Once I start saving some screenshots and dumping the code he’s shedding onto the external I can maybe distract the hacker and try to back trace him.”

“Shouldn’t there be some sort of alarm you’re meant to activate?” Peter asked as he followed her instructions.

“Sure,” she replied. Jane’s gaze remained glued to her monitor. She touch typed and only occasionally glanced at the jumble of letters to be sure she didn’t make a mistake. A single incorrect keystroke right now could prove disastrous, but unfortunately time was of the essence. As fast as she worked though, her opponent was equally swift. But Jane was no novice and despite the sweat she could feel trickling down her back, she didn’t miss a step.

“The problem is that whoever this is, they’ve gone to great lengths to appear as if they started inside the system. Which was sheer brilliance on their part.” Jane couldn’t help but admire the sneakiness of whoever this was. She fervently hoped it was the cocky new technician, Roger. She’d even admit to his face he’d had her scared. That was far better than the alternative—someone on the outside who had managed to hack in.

That thought made her knees wobble.

“If this really is an attack on us,” Jane continued, “and they’re good enough to get in without tripping any of our catches, then they’ve certainly got the talent to be aware when I sound the alarm. Anyone who knows our system this well will be alerted when I activate our documented countermeasures. I’m hoping to get enough data quickly so I can use it later to track the source, after I’ve locked us down.”

“And how long is ‘quickly’?” Peter asked.

Jane risked a brief look at him. His gaze was intense and focused on the screen, but under her stare he glanced at her. She smiled. Jane mightn’t be the most confident of women around, but when it came to matters inside a computer, she knew she was queen.

“Faster than you could believe possible.” She flirted, but quickly grew serious again. “Besides, once I lock the system down all hell will break loose. No one will be able to work, not the hacker and not us either. It’s never been used in real life before, only in drills, so I want to leave that until the last second necessary.”

Jane focused once more fully on the task she’d set herself and Peter fell silent. The only sound in her cramped room was typing and the odd muttered curse.

The world narrowed until only Jane and her nemesis existed. Code flashed before her and she mumbled as she tried to hack back to find the source. Time stretched on, though microsecond-long glances at the clock on her screen showed only three minutes had passed since Peter walked into her office.

“Son of a bitch,” she whispered. Jane had an inkling of what the hacker’s true purpose was. It made her equal parts angry and afraid.

“What?” Peter insisted. “Jane, explain it to me, your screen seems full of gibberish and symbols. I’m not fluent in…code, or whatever that is.”

“I think we’re in deep trouble,” she replied, though her focus wasn’t on the handsome man next to her, but on what felt like the dark opening into the abyss beyond.

“Have you got what you need?”

“No,” she replied. Lightning fast, she keyed in more strokes, and seconds later flickered her glance down to make sure the external hard drive had finished saving the data she’d logged with it. As soon as the light went off, indicating the device had finished, Jane snapped her eyes back to the screen.

“Unplug the hard drive and remove the USB connection,” she said, haste making her sound curt even to her own ears. “I’m fairly sure locking the system down won’t make us lose more than a few minutes worth of data, but after all this effort I’d hate to have it crash and lose what little I have simply because we were lazy.”

Peter followed her orders immediately in quick, economical movements. Jane saved a few more tendrils of code from the hacker to the memory stick she’d been using earlier—back when she thought this was just a routine drill—and kept part of her attention focused on Peter and his progress.

When he had the backup safely disconnected from everything she took a deep breath and mentally fortified herself.

Each technician had trained rigorously for this moment, yet she’d hoped never to do it. Even in training it had made her stomach clench uncertainly. She pushed the thought that this might be a hacking or terrorist attack out of her mind. Hopefully this was just a surprise test, one she’d pass. Jane had no idea if she should do something as drastic as issue an immediate lockdown, she wasn’t even positive she had the authority to do so.

But if this
was
real—or even meant to simulate a real scenario—Jane knew she couldn’t hesitate.

She typed a long series of letters, numbers and symbols. After the first six characters the rest of the string was hidden by asterisks on the screen—one of many safeguards.

“Jane, it’s taking too long to track this person. You need to initiate our countermeasures now,” Peter urged her.

She wasn’t surprised that he couldn’t differentiate this code with any of the others she’d been typing in the last ten minutes. No one outside of the high level managers and the techs like her knew this sequence.

What most people didn’t realize was even if she stopped typing now, the system would still go into lockdown, but in a far different, more difficult to undo format. Yet another fail-safe, in case an analyst was being forced to act or was under threat of death.

Sometimes her job, safe as it might appear against the other agents who fought for their country, scared Jane silly.

“Jane—” Peter said as the entire power grid shut down.

Lights went off. Phones stopped ringing, computers, faxes, everything connected to the power winked out in the blink of an eye.

In the unnatural silence Jane realized even the air conditioner had stopped humming, something she didn’t think she’d ever been conscious of in the first place.

There was a minute of absolute, complete stillness then a cacophony of noise as people reacted. Shouting sounded all around them as other workers raised their voices. Orders were given and many calls were made simultaneously. Items clattered and there was the sound of moving furniture—and more than a few bangs and swear words uttered as other workers stumbled into things. All throughout their floor carefully controlled pandemonium ensued.

Jane had no doubt the other floors under the Agency’s aegis held similar well-contained pandemonium.

She lifted her hands from the keyboard and swallowed hard, her mouth completely dry. Jane turned to look at Peter. Her office was half dark, as many of them were now. Even though it was midafternoon, Jane didn’t have a window and without the florescent lights there was very little natural light to be had.

“I’m guessing you dropped by because you were bored?” she said in an attempt to be lighthearted. It fell a bit flat, but at least she’d tried.

“Darling, you’re one of the most complex, interesting people I know,” Peter said in his mildly flirtatious way. “And now I know neither of us are going to be bored. Come on, let’s go face the music.”

“This was on me,” she insisted. “Not you. Once my legs stop shaking I’ll track down old Bones and try to explain what I think was going on.”

“Jane, you don’t have to do this alone,” Peter said in an astonishingly soft tone. “I’m a witness to you doing everything conceivable to protect our system. And I urged you to lock it down. That doesn’t rest entirely on your shoulders. Besides, I think we should take this to Preston, not Bones.”

Jane frowned, not sure she’d heard him right. Feeling drained she rubbed her hand over her face in an attempt to make certain this wasn’t some twisted dream.

“Bones is head of IT,” she reminded him. “I work for him, and this was an IT matter. Lockdown procedure can’t possibly fall under anything else. Why would we take this to your boss, to a field manager?”

“You thought this was an internal hack attempt, right?” Peter asked.

She nodded. “I’m still not convinced it’s not some weird new test process they’re keeping secret. Why?”

“Think about it,” Peter urged. “If we have a mole, or a traitor, should we really inform one of the people capable of being behind it?”

“Bones might be a bit old-fashioned, but he’s a patriot. He takes his duty to heart. No way is he behind this,” Jane scoffed.

Peter stood and held out his hand to her. Jane took a slow breath and lifted her gaze to meet his.

“Trust me, darling,” Peter said with conviction. “Let’s at least take this initially to Preston. He might agree with you and call Bones immediately. But I’d rather keep the intel you gathered and what few clues you might have quiet for now. Do you trust me?”

Jane licked her lips and thought hard. She trusted Peter. They’d only been friends for a few months, ever since she’d been promoted to a senior technical level. When she’d moved out of the pool area where most of the analysts worked and into this tiny, wonderful office, he’d started swinging by more and more frequently. She’d known Peter Abrams’ reputation for years though.

He was a solid man, unquestionably honorable. He might have a disarming smile, a cocky attitude and a nonlinear thinking brain, but she’d never had cause to doubt his integrity.

She wasn’t going to start now.

Jane reached out and took his hand. He helped her stand. She pulled the memory stick out of her desktop and dropped it into the pocket of her skinny jeans. With her free hand she collected the external hard drive and looked around the small room, feeling faintly lost.

“This is either the biggest case I’ve ever worked, or I’m about to be demoted back into the group pool and people will be cursing me for months about lost reports and data files,” she said half to herself.