Chapter 16

Pamela set her coffee down at her desk and logged into her workstation. Something was bothering her, and she couldn’t put her finger on what. She had a feeling that she was being watched.

Of course, that was silly, she thought. She was within a secure building and inside an especially secure operations center. Only trusted and fully vetted agents were allowed inside this room with its highly customized secure computers and operating systems. A badge and biometrics ensured no person just wandered into their ops center.

But their target had even greater knowledge of how to penetrate such systems. Could he get inside their firewalls?

She pulled out his file once more, looking at the cover companies he had worked at. Two different chip designers, one working in mobile devices and the other in networking gear. She pulled up the public history of those companies and began reading.

A few minutes later, a message popped up on her screen. She locked her workstation and headed out of the ops center.

“You need me, sir?” She asked as she entered Victor’s office.

He motioned to a chair across the desk from him. “Your search on Finn’s prior companies triggered an alert for me,” he said without pre-amble.

She was shocked her own work was being monitored. It must have shown on her face.

“When Finn became a suspect, I had signals set up triggers relevant to him. What he worked on was classified above Top Secret. We can’t risk exposure of his prior work. You understand?”

She nodded.

“What are you looking for?” He asked with fatherly interest.

“It’s just a hunch, sir,” she said. “He was some sort of expert at hacking and getting information from supposedly secure systems. We’re working on supposedly secure systems, but he seems to elude us. I just started to wonder if he had a way to watch us while we’re searching for him.”

Victor Sinclair’s dark skin paled.

“Contact IT and have them pull the specs for every machine, router, and switch connected to your ops room. Send them to me. I’ll work with signals to make sure we’re clear. I should have set up that review when we started. Thank you for bringing the possibility to my attention. I’ll take it from here.”

It was clearly a dismissal and a warning to not dig deeper. Pamela departed. As she waited for the elevator, she thought about what was implied by those instructions. Finn’s hardware gave the agency access. He had worked for a mobile chip design company that made billions of chips. Those chips were in practically every phone in the world. Sinclair had been head of the Technology and Systems Directorate when Finn was active. They were the group inside the agency responsible for developing collection and processing technologies. If what she suspected was true, she understood the classification of Finn’s work. It was a frightening capability.

A few moments later, she was back in the ops center, wondering what to look for next. She picked up her coffee and took a sip. It was so much better than the swill from the break room. She looked at the cup and thought back to the morning. Pamela had felt like she was being watched ever since buying coffee. She thought back to the place across the street. She had never been there before, but yesterday’s overnight shift had mentioned it. Coffee shops were a dime a dozen, and most of her team had picked up drinks from their local shops on the commute into the city, ignoring the place closest to the office.