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Danielle Montreau knocked on the door of Kipling Research for five minutes before she heard the first stirrings from inside. Spider opened the door, managing a brief hello before walking back into his lab.
“Don’t let me bother you. I just need a quiet place to work,” said Danielle, as she followed Spider, with her laptop bag over her shoulder. Gripped tightly in her hand was the ICARUS mirrored hard drive.
“Sit wherever you want,” said Spider, over his shoulder. He stopped, turning around. “Unless you want to have sex again?”
“Not funny. Go back to work.”
“I wish I could. I’m a mess, thanks to you.”
Spider walked back to his lab. Tough shit, thought Danielle. She had enough on her plate without worrying about Spider’s mental health. Big deal, they had sex and rekindled some old memories. She had moved on. Was she so wonderful that men lost all ability to function after a roll in the sack with her? It was not her problem.
Danielle sat down in the conference room, because it was the only place in Kipling Research with decent chairs. She unpacked her laptop and connected the mirrored drive of Patricia Masters. She booted up her machine and opened the ICARUS files, flipping to the account access information and logs of activity recorded over the last few days.
She noticed Patricia Masters had changed her password yesterday evening, around six pm. Presumably, she had already been dead a few hours, so the killer changed the lock on the account. It was a feeble attempt, if one knew the capabilities of ICARUS.
When her laptop requested the account ID and password, she entered the new one from the ICARUS log. She was in her boss’s world, unsupervised. She was breaking about a hundred Archer security protocols, but she didn’t care. She didn’t consider herself an Archer employee anymore; Kip and Spider book-ended her world, the three of them against the ghost trying to kill them. Danielle would break every rule to get an advantage for the team.
The wings of ICARUS appeared on her screen, flying higher and higher towards the sun. Patricia had designed the start-up cut-scene after login, while the system loaded. It was a comfort and a warning, just as she had intended. To Patricia, ICARUS was her son. She was the architect, and her son was always flying too close to the sun. Eventually, it would melt and begin a death spiral.
Now the architect was dead, and the son was falling out of the sky.
Danielle had to override the network connections, to run a local version of ICARUS. The system was not happy being cut off from the host, but it obeyed. Danielle wondered how long she could ignore these warnings, if there was a limit to how long ICARUS would permit a local version to run in isolation. She couldn’t link up or risk being shut down completely. She surfed through the logs, tracking the activity of the killer masquerading as Patricia Masters, the Daedalus of Archer security.
The killer had started searches of ICARUS files. She called up the list of keywords driving the searches:
The list confirmed her suspicion about the ghost. He was one of Novak’s shadow assets, with knowledge of the inner workings of Archer. What she needed was a pattern of operations, something to reveal the ghost’s identity. Danielle wrote the list on paper and copied it to her flash memory stick.
She switched her scanning to list the files retrieved from the search list. The ICARUS mirror would store a copy of any file on the hard drive. She started at the top of the list, clicking on the first file. It did not open. An error message flashed on her screen: “file deleted”. She tried the second file, then on and on down the list. She was wrong. The killer didn’t want Patricia’s laptop and ICARUS account to access files. The bastard wanted in to delete files, to erase the past.
Danielle skimmed down the logs of activity until she found requests for Iron Mountain. Shit, the searches went into the archive. The killer knew enough to wipe not just the active directories at headquarters, but also the archive files in their back-up center in Utah.
Danielle had no choice now. The mirror drive wouldn’t help her. She inserted the network cable into her laptop. ICARUS automatically connected to the host and started synchronizing data. It didn’t take long for the system to raise alarms. Patricia’s account activity would trip alarms all over the system. ICARUS would act to close the breach.
Danielle hoped she could retrieve something from the list, some scrap of information remaining about the killer, using Patricia’s all-powerful account. She entered ‘Witch Doctor’ into ICARUS. No hits came back. She tried ‘Novak Witch Doctor’ and got one hit.
“Yes!” she said, dragging the file link to her memory stick. The system chugged for a second and the copy window flashed on the screen, showing progress in a creeping horizontal bar.
“Come on, finish already!” she said to her machine, as the copy chugged on for what seemed forever. Then, as if ICARUS heard the urgency in her voice, Danielle’s screen went blank and her laptop died.