Chapter 5

I went home in an absolute funk. We'd worked hard to keep Claiborne secret. But now it might all come unraveled. We'd hidden the code and modules, but if these people were as good as Jared thought, that wouldn't do any good.

I lay in bed that night, the window open, listening to the traffic on US 101 and the sound of the waves. Those can be very soothing sounds, but right now they didn't bring any sleep. Maybe I dozed, maybe I didn't, I'm not sure. But one thought managed to worm its way to the top: had this happened before?

I got up and started digging into the history of Claiborne. I spent most of that night and the next digging as far as I could. In the end I had three names that were somehow connected to the early days of Claiborne: Cheryl Travis, Hannah Gibbons, and Greg Lemuir.

All three were Senior IT Managers. The file I accessed said Ms. Gibbons and Mr. Lemuir were a pair, and Ms. Travis lived by herself. Somehow those three had created Claiborne. Their names weren't easy to find, either. They were buried in layer after layer of meaningless drivel. But an intradepartmental org chart confirmed that they still worked for The Construct.

I sent them emails, but through the secured internal servers, and all I did was ask that they make some time for a presentation. It was Irene who figured out how to access their calendars and get a request to be put on them.

I wanted the meeting to be done with video-conferencing, just like we had with the others. I didn't expect I would get a summons to the school office two days later.

The four of us were directed into a conference room that I was pretty sure hadn't existed, and probably wouldn't exist after this meeting. I'd have to try that for secure meetings; it's hard to put a spy eye into something that doesn't exist, and it took 24 hours lead time to get permission, access, and use a spy eye.

There were two women and a man in the meeting, all dressed. When I stepped through the door I felt the clothes on me, believe me, a girl feels the clothes she's wearing. I hadn't expected it, you get used to the feeling of being nude all of the time, and that threw me for a bit of a loop. People who could do that on such short notice either had an awful lot of clout, or they had skills and access that I couldn't even dream about.

We took our seats rather hesitantly. The woman in the middle, with light brown hair and an oval face, gave us a friendly smile.

"I'm Hanna Gibbons. This is Cheryl Travis on my left, and Greg Lemuir on my right." She glanced at them and smiled. "In many ways, we're the creators of Claiborne. Cheryl did the core programming and most of the original modules—"

"But Hanna and Greg tied them all together," Cheryl Travis said. She had dark hair and wore a long-sleeved dark blue blouse. "I'm afraid I didn't consciously write a module for Claiborne until a couple of years after I left the school. Have any of you been over to the town? That's what I did."

That had to be Travis, the town we'd gone to when the school had had a formal. I'd bought my gown there, and still visited it from time to time. She'd named it after herself, which was interesting. That made me wonder where 'Claiborne' came from.

"So what problem did you want to see us about?" Greg Lemuir asked. "Your emails didn't really say."

"Emails can be read by outsiders using Discovery," Alex said. "We don't want that."

The three looked at each other. "Discovery," Cheryl said, "as in the legal process where someone basically turns their files over to outsiders, who get to pick and choose what they want to prove that the file owners were wrong, knew about it, and were culpable? That Discovery?"

"Their looking for Claiborne," Jared said. "We've spent most of the last few months hiding it, but we're running out of ideas. We thought you might be able to help us."

"What all have you done?" Hanna asked. "We might have some ideas, but if you've already tried them, then it wouldn't do any good to try them."

We looked at each other, and then I started explaining. The others chipped in from time to time with what they'd done. We got a lot of nods, and when I told them about accessing the recording program of the spy eyes, they smiled.

"I encountered some of that," Cheryl said softly. "I like your solution. Go on."

Jared described the latest threat, more perceived than with concrete evidence. "We think this is another investigation, but we can't quite put our finger on where it's coming from, or who's conducting it."

"It's either Legal Affairs or Corporate Audit," Greg said at once. "You don't even know you're being investigated until it's over. We've had them before on other projects. They have no sense of humor, and very little imagination."

"I think we should talk this over among ourselves," Hanna said. "Plus we'll need to do some digging."

"So you think this threat is real?" I asked.

Hanna nodded. "It's probably very real. Often the best time to do an investigation is just after a previous one. The people you've been checking on relax, and let things slide back to normal. You'd be surprised what you can find at times like that."

"We'll get back to you by the end of the school day," Greg said.

That was a hint, and we got up and left. The clothes vanished as we stepped through the door. After a few steps I looked back; the door we'd come through was gone, and the clock on the wall said only a minute had passed.

"That was slickly done," Irene said. "Anyone tracking us wouldn't have any 'missing time' to track."

"And it was a casual demonstration of their programming skills," Jared said. "They grafted on a meeting room with almost no effort at all. I bet we weren't even in Claiborne, but in some cyber room that they created just for the meeting."