Sixty-Two

I approached the security guard at the entrance of the parking lot.

I said, “I’m here to see Mindy Frank.”

The guard held out his hand. “ID?”

I handed him my driver’s license. He compared it to my face. I waited for some hidden mechanism in security theater to kick in and bite me in the ass. For example, they might realize that I didn’t know a Mindy Frank. They didn’t.

The guard handed back my license. “Thank you, sir.”

I walked into the lot and followed the visitor parking down the building as if I were looking to meet up with someone. When I reached the end of the building I turned around the corner, out of sight out of mind. Ten minutes had elapsed. I reached the end of the windowless building and found a side door. The door opened. Uncle Walt beckoned me inside.

Walt handed me a visitor’s badge with an indecipherable picture on it. “Here.”

“What’s this?” I asked.

“It’s a visitor’s badge that somebody threw into the trash.”

I read the badge. “My name is Carmen Hazleton?”

“Sure,” said Walt.

“That’s a woman’s name.”

“No it’s not.”

“Yes it is.”

“Deal with it.”

We climbed a flight of stairs and walked past the military shrine, which honored young people from every branch. Some were grim in their army uniforms. Others smiled. Most had a generic, blue portrait photo background, while some stood in front of flags, and one had his own full-length portrait superimposed behind his head. It looked like a military baseball card. I wondered if a jammed Paladin missile would fail to save one of the kids in the pictures. A picture of a blond girl in a blue uniform caught my eye. She smiled through her nervousness, the smile ending at her eyes. I was going to save Lucy, but Talevi would never get this data.

The facility was huge. I followed Walt past the cafeteria, down the hallways, up a staircase, through a tunnel connecting us to another building, down a staircase, past a convenience store, and through another connecting tunnel. Without Walt, I’d never find my way out. As we walked, people smiled at Walt, greeting him with a “Hiya, Walt!” Walt plastered a smiling grimace on his face and waved at them. The sweat on his bald head ran down his temples in rivulets.

Walt stopped walking and pointed into an empty cube. The name plaque was blank, but a PC sat on the desk. Walt said, “This was Dave’s cube when he worked in Wayland. Can you get his password off it?”

“It depends if they deleted his account.”

“I’ve got whole rooms full of old computers that GDS won’t throw away. They keep everything. I’ll bet the account is still on there. They probably just changed the password.”

I inspected Dave’s PC with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I needed to get his password and find the data that would save Lucy. On the other, I didn’t want to believe that GDS would make it as easy as I feared. I crawled under the desk, looked at the back of the PC, and found a security hole big enough to kill all the kids in those pictures.