In the hallway, Rachel whirled around, trying to turn back.
“No!” growled Williams, taking her by the shoulders and continuing forward while she attempted to wrest herself free.
“What the hell is going on, Perry?”
“Quiet!” he cautioned.
“Then let’s—”
“No! Arguing will get us nowhere. We have to calm down. You have to calm down!”
He twisted her around and marched her toward the elevator. Upon reaching the familiar double doors, he slammed his palm against the call button.
The doors opened almost immediately, and Williams pushed her inside, hitting the button labeled L.
Masten and Lagner remained at the table.
“It seems we have a new problem,” she said.
Masten nodded in agreement. Still fuming.
His phone rang, and he retrieved it. Almost slamming it down onto the oval table in front of him. He put it on speaker.
It was Duchik.
“Someone is in your system.”
“Excuse me?”
“Someone,” he repeated, “is in your system. Someone else.”
“Are you sure?”
“My team just notified me.”
Masten turned to Lagner, who immediately reached for her satchel on the chair beside her and yanked her laptop out. Flipping it open, she began to log in.
“What are they doing?”
“Going through things,” said Duchik’s voice. “Everything. Including the grant and financial records.”
“Those are encrypted.”
“And yet somehow they’re unencrypting them.”
Lagner was now in, looking for signs of activity. “I don’t see anything.”
There was a pause on Duchik’s side before he spoke again. “They’re tunneling through one of your internal systems. I have the MAC address.”
Lagner pulled up a digital map of their network, displaying hundreds of different connected devices or nodes. “Give me the last four digits of the MAC.”
“4DR2.”
She typed them in and hit the Enter key. An icon was immediately presented with both the identified device and its name.
She turned her laptop, showing the screen to Masten.
It was the computer in Williams’s office.