Not to mention the AI kept doing sweeps, and every once in a while, she got a little too close.
"Got the transit log," she said. "But it's mostly metadata headers. The actual content's been stripped."
"Stripped or moved?"
"Stripped. There's nothing behind it." She leaned back and rubbed her eyes. "Whoever maintains this system is thorough."
"Finch doesn’t know dick about software or hardware, but he does know how to build a good team." Gideon winced as he shifted in his chair. He'd stopped holding his side every time he moved, which either meant the pain was improving or he'd gotten better at hiding it. "Go back to the shadow servers. The seventh one."
"We already opened that."
"We skimmed it. I want you to go deeper. Past the routing logs. There should be a secondary cache underneath. The residual data the AI didn't have time to sort before it dumped everything."
Zadie navigated back to the shadow server from her first breach attempt. She dodged under the AI as she did a routine sweep.
Zadie pulled the routing logs and the vehicle coordinates from when they hit the hub. "There’s a missing SUV from this log."
"What do you mean?"
"Scout said there were four SUVs that came to SYN-7, but only three appear."
"Perhaps that explains how Isaac died in a car crash three miles from his house." Gideon glanced in her direction. "Finch had to cover his tracks and I’m sure he’s got IT people that neither nor Isaac knew about."
"It’s just weird because Isaac worked real hard to get noticed by Finch," Zadie said. "Isaac knew Finch was doing bad shit, and he wanted in." She tapped her fingers on three keys at the same time. "There's data here," she said. "But it's fragmented. Partial records. Looks like the AI was mid-process when it panicked and shoved everything into the shadow server."
"What kind of records?"
"Telemetry pings." She frowned. "ETHER transmissions, but the source codes don't match any of the node designations on your network map and it doesn’t run through the corridor like medical would."
"Put them on the wall."
She dragged the data onto the center monitor. A scatter of transmission points populated the topographical map. They were faint and incomplete, like stars seen through cloud cover. Most meant nothing to her. Fragments without enough data to resolve into anything meaningful—not even a location.
But four lined up with specific coordinates.
She sat up straighter. "Look at this." She overlaid the Ramsey vehicle waypoints from the portable drive. The original six pins dropped onto the map in their familiar positions. Two of the four new transmission points landed directly on top of existing waypoints.
"That’s from the scrubbed server?"
She nodded. "And that server just gave me two new locations." She zoomed in on two pins sitting on the map. One further north than any of the Ramsey waypoints. The other east, deeper into the interior.
Gideon stood, slowly, holding his side as crossed to the wall monitor and stared at the eight points on the map.
"ORACLE was tracking these locations." He groaned as he pointed to two different spots on the screen. "There are nodes in these locations. That means data was being sent from those coordinates through my network."
"Data from what?"
"Without source codes I couldn’t even guess." He traced the two new waypoints with his finger. "But it wasn’t a vehicle log, or there’d be a trace left behind like the ones you saw from the other day. This is pure data running through the corridor."
"Those enhanced men were wearing HELIOS devices," Zadie said. "Could it be from those?"
"It could be." Gideon inched closer. "Isaac wasn’t wearing one, which tells me Finch didn’t enhance him, which makes sense if Finch saw him as valuable because Finch knows what those chemicals will do to someone if left in the human body too long." He sat down at his desk and started pulling apart the transmission data. "The AI copied fragments when it built the shadow server, and fragments don't lie." He isolated the transmission headers. "These pings were being collected and routed to a partition that doesn't exist on the public network map. But it’s hard to tell how much of it goes through my network and how much goes through?—"
"Finch's shadow network," Zadie said.
"That’s where everything lives. The compound data. The enhanced soldier records. The Bralorne files. Everything we need to prove Finch is connected to it all." Gideon ran his hand over the top of his head. "That’s what I tapped into nearly three months ago on the day I got fired."
"I knew it." Zadie stood.
