“Huh?”
“Gunnar’s name is spelled with an A and not an E.”
“Yeah, remember how our mom was about me being called Rembrandt and not Remington? She insisted Gunnarhave the Scandinavian spelling of his name to honor her grandfather. My dad didn’t care how the name was spelled.”
“I’m an idiot. I tried emailing when I found the list, but it kept bouncing back as I spelled his name with an E. I’m an idiot and should have checked to see if it could be spelled another way.”
“Nah,” Remi said. “Your brain would have registered his name as spelled incorrectly if you saw it with an A.”
“I’ve been seeing it with an A all week, and it didn’t look wrong to me,” she grumbled. “I never even made the connection until I saw it written as an email.”
“Happens to the best of us,” Remi replied. “When your brain is computer-focused like ours is, we make our connections in a format that makes sense to us. Code or emails.”
She’d never looked at it like that before. She still felt stupid, but not as stupid.
“Grizzly at XXXX dot com will get to him too, and Zipper for me. You know, just in case you ever want to use it.” He paused and added on, “Or need to.”
“Thank you. I’d normally make a sticky note for myself, but I’m not home to stick it on the dining room table where I work.” She turned over the page then remembered something else. “Do you have a copy of the email the orders came from, including the headers?”
Remi smacked himself on the head. “Why didn’t I think of that? KISS.”
“What? Have you lost your mind?” He better not try to kiss her for some unknown reason, because… ick. “I should have brought the baseball bat in here. Do I need to go get the bat, Remi? Because if you think I’m kissing you, you’ve lost your mind.”
“No, no.” Remi moved closer to the door as if he expected to get a wallop from her. “I swear that’s not what I meant. Imeant K.I.S.S. as in, keep it simple stupid. I know you are Gunnar’s.”
Oh, he did, did he? She wasn’t even sure if she was Gunnar’s or not, although she wasn’t opposed to the idea, never mind Remi knowing. “I’m not going to beat you.” She pointed to him with her pen. “But if you try any stupid shit like kissing me, I’m not keeping that promise.”
“Fair.” Remi smiled like he was ridiculously pleased by what she’d just said and scooted back to his computer. He printed out the email she had asked for. “The email with the headers.” He handed it to her. “I’ve got to be comms for some stuff to get the guys in the air. You search that.”
“Okay.” Having something to do was way better than sitting here scratching her butt, and Jorja got to work, scanning down the lines of code. After finding the IP address, she cross referenced it with the one on the list website. Unease filtered through her as the numbers were only out by a digit or two. “I’m clear to check something online, right?”
“Yeah. We’re not at mission level yet.”
“Thanks.” She had no idea what happened when they were at mission level, but she figured Remi would let her know when the time came. “These IP addresses are pretty damn close; I just want to check something.”
“Well, shit.”
“Agreed. It’s not good, that’s for sure.” She pulled up the side and carefully typed in the IP and hit search, then copied the information it spat out and pasted it into notes before doing the same with the second email, then studied the info. “Both of these senders were using the same VPN through Seattle.”
“Shit.”
“It might mean nothing more than two people using the same VPN server.” Searching for information like this was enough like her day-to-day work that Jorja settled into ithappily. This stuff was her jam. “Chill, I’ll look deeper. You keep doing your thing.”
“Okay. If you fin?—”
“I promise I’ll tell you as soon as I do.” She got comfortable on her chair and ran her pen under the lines of code in the headers, looking for any alternate IP. Only finding one, she switched to the other set of email headers and searched for the same number, muttering to herself when she didn’t find a match. She searched for the information on her program and copied the information into notes again. At least it might save her time searching if this information was needed in the future.
“I can’t find any other match aside from that first VPN IP.” She printed out her notes file, and Remi picked them up from the printer. “When you get a second, can you look through in case I missed it?”
“Sure.” Remi scanned the pages. “I can’t find it either.”
“Ugh.”
“If the information is there, we’ll find it,” Remi reassured her. “Do you know why they call me Zipper?”
“No.” And she was curious as all get out about it. “Why?”
“Because I find the gaps in the intel and zip them shut.”
