Tabby is statue still, in full control of whatever she’s feeling. Not even a muscle twitches on her face. But I know behind that mask of placid loveliness is a storm of biblical proportions.
“Because I think S?ren fed false data points into your software. I think he led you where he wanted you to go. I think he knew he was being traced.”
“That’s impossible,” says Chan.
Slowly Tabby turns to look at him. Pinning him in her icy stare, she asks softly, “Is it?”
For a long moment, Chan says nothing. Except for the sound of a fly buzzing against the windowpanes, the room is eerily silent. Then: “I can’t trust you around a computer.”
From the floor, still cradling his bleeding nose, Rodriguez says bitterly, “Amen.”
When I glare at him, he blanches and looks away.
“I’m not asking for your trust,” says Tabby, “or for anything else for that matter. I understand…”
She falters for the briefest of moments, her voice wavering before she reins it back under that tight, frozen control.
“I understand that what happened is because of me—”
“It’s not,” I say loudly, stepping forward. Without looking at me, she holds up a hand.
“But I’d like the opportunity to try to see if I can find anything that might be helpful.”
“We’ve already looked.”
“I haven’t.”
When Rodriguez realizes Chan is considering it, he explodes.
“She’s a fucking traitor, Chan! She’s a liar! She’s the reason nine good men are dead! Did you know she lived with Maelstr0m? That’s right,” he says when Tabby recoils and several agents utter disbelieving gasps. “I looked through O’Doul’s notes. This”—he stabs a finger in Tabby’s direction—“is Maelstr0m’s bitch!”
Ryan has to physically restrain me from tearing Rodriguez in two. He pushes me back several steps with his hands on my chest while I growl and seethe, straining forward, tasting blood. He murmurs calming, rational words, but to my furious ears, they all sound like kill, kill, murder, kill.
I wonder vaguely if I might need to spend some time on a psychotherapist’s couch when this job is over. My entire body feels like an exposed nerve scraped raw by knives.
“As usual, you don’t know your ass from your elbow, Rodriguez,” says Chan. “And your reading comprehension skills are as shitty as ever. She was victimized by Maelstr0m, which is why she’s assisting in the investigation. She has as good a reason as the rest of us to want to catch this bastard.”
Rodriguez spits a mouthful of blood onto the carpet. He staggers to his feet. “You’re a dope. You were only hired because of affirmative action, anyway.”
Chan doesn’t rise to the insult. He says evenly, “Remind me, which one of us has parents who emigrated illegally to this country?”
“Fuck you!” snarls Rodriguez.
“No, thank you,” replies Chan, ever polite. He turns his gaze to Tabby. “Why don’t you use this computer, Miss West?” He points to the desk where Rodriguez sits.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“No, Agent Rodriguez, I am not. Miss West—sit.”
Rodriguez storms out. In his absence, the other agents seem at a loss for what to do. A few follow Rodriguez, a few sit at their desks, most of them just stay where they are, milling around, lame ducks in a swiftly draining pond. Tabby takes the opportunity to cross over to the empty desk, pull out the chair, and sit down.
Ryan gives me one final friendly shove, says so only I can hear, “Eyes open, brother. Pawns are moving.”
“Don’t I fucking know it,” I say under my breath.
“What’s the system password?” Tabby asks Chan.
When he looks at her sideways, she says patiently, “It’ll be faster if you just give it to me.”
He recites a list of words, numbers, and symbols that sound like some fucked-up form of haiku. Tabby rapidly types as he speaks. “I’m in. Where’s the file?”
Chan points. Tabby clicks. Ryan and I move silently closer, watching everything with greedy, searching eyes.
We stand behind her as she opens a series of windows across three monitors and starts a scrolling view of all the code, stripped to its bare bones. It’s like a scene out of The Matrix.
She’s reading it. Jesus Christ. She’s reading thousands of lines of raw code in real time.
Ryan and I share an astonished glance.
“Here,” she says after a minute, pointing. With a click of her mouse, everything on the screen comes to a halt.
Chan gasps. “Well, I’ll be a baloney sandwich. It’s a patch.”
Tabby grimly nods. “Undetectable by your software because there’s no mathematical pattern. A computer sees it as completely random. It’s technically not even a program. You have to scour the code manually line by line to find it. You have to look past all the noise and focus through the code to see the picture that emerges.”
“Did he know you’d find this?” Chan asks.
“He knows everything,” Tabby replies without a hint of irony.