Claire listened patiently, supportively. Sarah knew her friend to be eminently analytical—the reason she so valued her opinion—and right now she needed a cross-check on her own newly suspect judgement. Once she finished, Claire fell silent for a time. Sarah steeled herself for a rebuke, a heavy dose of, One text and you no longer trust your husband?
What Claire said was, “I admit, it doesn’t sound good.”
Sarah remained still and quiet. Resignation in its human form.
“It’s possible the text was innocent. What concerns me more is that you and Alyssa are both getting bad vibes … that tells me something’s wrong.”
Sarah’s heart lurched. She hadn’t planned on confiding in Claire. Or had she? Either way, she’d gone ahead expecting to be told her worries were baseless. No, Bryce would never do that! He’s totally committed to you! Instead, her fear was being validated, and by a source she unfailingly trusted.
“I don’t know what to do about it,” Sarah said.
“What you can’t do is let it fester—you have to get to the bottom of what’s going on.”
“How? Confront him? Accuse him of seeing someone else?” She went silent for a time, trying to imagine it. “I couldn’t even if I wanted to. It would take time to work through and he’s never home for more than a day. It’ll be that way for months, probably until the convention this summer. Even longer if he wins the nomination. Look, maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned it. It was just one suspect message, a few odd feelings.”
A rigid stare. “You need more information.”
“I’m not going to spy on him.”
Claire’s gaze went distant, calculations being made. “You don’t have to,” she finally said. “I can do it for you.”
“What?”
Claire explained what she had in mind, if only in vague strokes.
When she was done, Sarah sat stunned. “Is that even possible?”
“Unfortunately, in today’s world … yes, it is. Give me a day or two.”
Sarah looked across the table uncertainly. Then she surprised herself by saying, “Okay, go ahead.”
For the first time in weeks, Claire walked into her lab at the TARC building with a mission beyond sealing her project’s crypt. She rounded a stack of empty cardboard boxes at the entrance. Even on the best of days the place wasn’t pretty. The tables and chairs were institutional, and a dozen monitors provided eerie illumination, their flickering screens strobing the walls in patternless confusion. Wiring ran scattershot between tables, heavy-gauge bundles wrapped by cable ties snaking along the baseboards.
Claire loved all of it.
This was the place where her dream had nearly become reality.
She saw her assistant, Atticus, working at a standing desk, twin monitors in front of him streaming digital life. He was his usual overcaffeinated self, bouncing on his heels like a kid on a pogo stick. The rest of the team was gone, let go right before Christmas. Claire’s pathetic attempt at a going away party had all the aura of a wake. Since then, with EPIC’s shutdown imminent, Claire and Atticus had been running every imaginable test scenario. It had taken three years to get the system up and running, and they committed to analyzing as many functions as possible before disconnecting from the ultrasecure DOD network. Her reasoning was simple: she might never again be able to leverage so many highly sensitive networks.
“I ran scenario sixteen-five last night,” Atticus said.
“Which was that? Overseas, Eastern Europe?”
“Yeah. Special Ops product, classified military and civilian combined. Telecoms, financial, municipal—all the compromised databases. High speed analysis, priority two.”
“How’d it come out?”
“In two words … holy shit! I just started making crap up. I tried to locate the Bulgarian foreign minister. Turns out he was at his mistress’s place. Nailed his location from a supposedly secure phone—NSA had a bead on it. Then I found a video loop from the hallway of her apartment that showed him going inside fifteen minutes earlier. Facial recog put the confidence at ninety-nine point five. In real time I got moaning noises from her Alexa audio. If I was a perv, I could have accessed video from the camera on the Smart-TV in her bedroom.”
“How long did all that take?”
Atticus looked at the notepad where he jotted down results—some things were just easier the old-fashioned way. “One minute, twenty-eight seconds.”
“Seriously?”
“Just for fun, I put in a call to his phone from his wife’s number. He didn’t pick up, but the moaning stopped and I heard his mistress start bitching.”
“You’re a bad person, Atticus.”
“Yeah, I know. But this is like … addictive.”
“Do no harm, my friend. We’re here to learn, not to create an international incident.”
“Sorry, guess I got carried away. But it was all in good fun.”
“Not for the foreign minister.”
“Claire, this has got so much potential.”
“I’m the choir, Atticus.”
She paused at a workstation worthy of a jumbo jet.
“How long until we actually have to cut the cord?” he asked.
Claire tapped the keyboard to wake her screen. “It’s executed from our end, so no official deadlines. The general wants us out by the end of the month, so as far as I’m concerned, we run as many scenarios as we can until then. The actual shutdown sequence won’t take more than a day or two. After that, you and I can go through the hard storage. It’ll take at least a month to figure out what worked and what didn’t.”
“Will we still be getting paid at that point?”
“Doubtful. But the more data we gather, the more likely we can get EPIC resurrected at some point.”
“And who’s going to grant that funding? We already got chopped.”
Claire’s first thought was speculative, and she checked it to say, “I don’t know … but if we can prove the concept, there’s hope.”
Her only remaining supporter went silent.
“Listen, Atticus. We’ve been working together a long time, but I’d understand if you don’t want to hang around. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple—you could get a job anywhere with one phone call, and at five times what I’m paying you with stock options to boot.”
He sighed. “Don’t worry, I’ll sell out one day. But you and I put a lot into this—I’d like to see how it turns out.”
“So would I … and thanks.” Claire began logging into the system.
“What scenario are you going to input?” he asked, pulling his coat from atop a disconnected monitor.
“I’ve been thinking up a new one, domestic. I want to challenge the internal restrictions.”
“We have restrictions?”
“I’m not talking about tech constraints—it’s more about our mission guardrails. EPIC would never have been approved without guarantees that we wouldn’t violate surveillance laws.”
“But this is pure research. We’re not actually using any of the data we get—we’re just documenting what can be done.”
“You and I know that, but the bean counters who signed off on our funding insisted on legal protections.”
“Well, that won’t be a problem anymore,” Atticus said sourly. He shrugged on his jacket. “I’m going to Chipotle. You want anything?”
“No, I’m good.”
“Back in an hour.” He pulled out his ID lanyard, carded through the heavy door, and disappeared.
Claire navigated to the main system menu. She knew an hour was optimistic: Atticus drove a hoverboard, meaning Chipotle was fifteen-minutes each way, not counting the time it took to run the building’s security gauntlet. He was a good friend, and a big-picture guy, but right then she’d rather he didn’t see the search she was about to input. Even under their loose operating rules, it would be strictly out-of-bounds. She found herself not caring, the frustration of recent weeks peaking. She and Atticus had been working long hours, challenging the software from every possible angle. EPIC was hurtling toward its climax like a star collapsing on itself: one impending moment of brilliance before it disappeared forever.
Claire reached the screen she wanted, blank fields for dozens of variables. Facial profiles and voiceprints could be uploaded. Documents, videos, IP addresses.
Claire selected the most basic of them all.
She typed in a name, then added a title: Bryce James Ridgeway, United States Congressman.