Her eyes slid to Brady, and he gave a short nod. She had looked to him for confirmation that these guys were good. She’d only known Brady for a short time, but she trusted him. “Okay. Then hack away.”
She took a seat at the end of the table and watched as Dime and Stanley started the sequence to break into the system with the information she was looking for. Chase tapped the table next to her, and she glanced over and met his gaze.
“Do you want to help us look into bank records? Once we get the list of attendees, we’ll start digging.”
She nodded. “Sure, I’d love to help. Anything to keep my mind busy.”
Krank touched her shoulder, getting her attention. “So this thing that they wanted done, the missile to strike DC, is it possible?”
“Fuck,” Brady said under his breath.
She must have hesitated just long enough with her answer that these guys realized it was possible. “The official answer is no, it’s not possible.”
“What needs to change to make it impossible for that to happen?” Krank asked.
She glanced over to Brady. He stood and moved to her, pulling up a chair and sitting next to her. She trusted him and knew that he trusted these men. Having him close made her feel better, though.
“It’s more than just a piece of code. That would be simple. The vulnerability is multi-pronged. I could send out a patch, but not everyone would deploy the patch at the same time because in California, it’s midnight while it’s daytime in Italy. We might think it would be deployed at the same time, but for that, we’d have to schedule it. If it’s scheduled a long time out, like long enough to make sure everyone who can do the operational procedure is at the location at the exact same time, that would give the person who wants to take advantage of the vulnerability enough time to study the code.”
“What happens if they study the code?” Stanley asked.
“They could figure out how to get around my fix.”
Krank wiped his hand over his face as he shook his head. “That’s bad. That will take a while to fix.”
“Yes, it will. If I start going to these places and accessing the systems, I’ll reveal what is going on. I can’t do that until we figure out who is behind the plan. I don’t want to give the truth away before the main instigator is behind bars.”
Brady shook his head. “If we hadn’t gone in to get you back, like if another group that wasn’t focused on stopping terrorism had gone in, you would still be at risk. This could have taken years for a fix to be in place, or they could have figured out how to get a missile into the air aimed at DC.”
“Exactly. There is no way I would have told anyone about this, trusted anyone with the information, even if I thought I could trust them.”
“We’re in,” Stanley said.
“Good, download the rosters, and I’ll start looking at photos of the people and determine who attended my session and who was just at the conference. With a list, we can cross-reference anyone who attended multiple sessions.”
“It will take time to gain access to all of their photos,” Chase said. “Why don’t we start looking at bank records until we have the photos?”
Garnet was glad to have something to occupy her mind. She’d already excluded four people by the time they had access to the photos to go with the names of people who attended the first conference.
The task of eliminating people would take a while, but this was the only way to figure out who wanted to use her to destroy the nation. With the help of Brady’s friends, it would be easier.
She glanced over and met Brady’s gaze. Heat slid through her. She needed to get a grip on her desire. Brady was just being nice to her because they needed to solve this problem. She needed to keep that thought at the front of her mind so she didn’t do something stupid and embarrass herself.
Chapter 21
They keptat it for hours. At one point, someone brought food in, but they kept sorting through, looking for who was behind the treasonous actions. She had gone from looking at banking records to looking at photos, picking out people who’d come to her sessions.
So far, she had found fifty-four people who’d attended one of her sessions. She remembered which session forty of them had attended and made a notation about the date and time of the session they attended.
Stanley ambled over as he stretched after sitting down for a long time. “Wait, you remember which sessions those people attended?”
She nodded. “Yes. I don’t understand why, but I can remember people by the date and location I met them at. So if I met you in Phoenix, Arizona, back in twenty fifteen, I’d remember. I’d also remember which color clothes you were wearing and if you were carrying anything.”
“That is a very useful skill,” Stanley said.
“Thank you. If I met you and you were a child, I might not recognize you as an adult. Some people I do recognize, but it depends on how much their facial structure changes.”
A few of the guys sighed and stood, stretching their arms over their heads. Brady came over and squatted beside her. “We should take a break in a bit, get some dinner. We can come back for a few hours, but then we need to get some sleep.”
