Catalyst (Breakthrough Book 3)(63)
She didn’t recognize the room. How long had she been asleep? Days? Weeks? It felt like a long time.
It couldn’t have been that long, she decided. Her muscles would have been even weaker.
She reached up with her right hand and tapped a small silver bell with her fingertip. A low “ding” sounded.
A minute later, a doctor leaned in. Upon seeing his patient awake, he smiled and entered.
“Hello, Li Na. How do you feel?”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Dr. Lee.”
She blinked, then remembered his question. “I feel better.”
“Good.” He stood at the foot of her bed, touching her toes through the blanket. “Can you feel that?”
“Yes.”
He nodded and removed his hands. “Can you move your toes?”
She complied. Satisfied, Lee moved to her right side and inserted the tips of his stethoscope into his ears. “Can I listen to your heart for a moment?”
“Okay.”
He placed the round diaphragm lightly against her chest and listened. The beats were stronger and more regular.
“Squeeze for me,” he said, placing his right hand in hers.
She squeezed.
“Excellent. Are you in any pain, Li Na?”
“A little. Not much.”
“Good.”
The doctor gently raised her arm and slipped it through a blood pressure cuff. He then held the diaphragm of the stethoscope against her vein and pumped several times, staring at his wristwatch.
He was stunned. A few weeks ago she’d been days away from death. Then her condition began to improve. Her body seemed to be strengthening. And now, she was awake.
He’d seen miracles before, but not like this. Li Na’s heart was beating twice as strong as it was before, and faster. Her temperature was back under thirty-seven degrees Celsius, bringing a huge sigh of relief from Lee and his nurse. And it all happened after her father’s final visit.
Barring a relapse, Lee was growing increasingly confident the young girl would survive. Which meant fulfilling the promise he made to her father. And soon. Because the one thing General Wei had repeatedly pressed was that if his daughter did survive, there would soon be people searching for her.
34
M0ngol’s dark eyes sifted methodically through the computer logs of one of China Mobile’s system servers. The giant file was one of several that contained the company’s geolocation metadata for most of its customers in the greater Beijing area.
However, what M0ngol was searching for was not Wei’s phone number. He already had that. The geo data tracked signals from the SIM cards of each cell phone and more importantly logged the signal strength of each signal as it was polled. Comparing the strength against multiple towers allowed him to discern in which direction a unit was moving, such as General Wei’s just before it had been turned off.
What he’d found in the older logs showed him more of the same: a northbound direction prior to the tower losing the signal, then reestablishment of that signal days later, traveling south.
M0ngol’s thin lip curled as he copied the last piece of data. He started to close the window on the server and reached for his phone but abruptly stopped, his hand frozen on the mouse. Something had caught his eye as he was looking away, and he stared back at the screen carefully. The directory of computer files was sorted by date and time, along with several other columns of information.
What M0ngol noticed was that some of the log files had a slightly different time stamp than the rest. It was a very subtle difference few would have noticed.
After studying the screen, he opened a new window and brought up the server’s audit logs. He manually scrolled through the giant list. What he was searching for wasn’t there. All other audit activity was listed, except for the six time-stamped files he was looking for.
M0ngol slowly leaned back in his chair without taking his eyes off the screen. He knew exactly what he was looking at.
Deleting audit logs was easy. Much easier than trying to change a file’s time stamp. Doing that would require temporarily changing the server’s clock, which would create a huge ripple effect that could take hours to fix. Instead, the files were opened and closed at almost precisely the same time but twenty-four hours later. And it was done to make the time stamp difference as subtle as possible.
Someone else had been looking through the cell tower files.
Wil Borger was now typing feverishly on his keyboard. Manually finding a small medical building within a thousand-mile radius would take forever. He needed a faster way.
The new ARGUS satellite didn’t have the right path to give him an aerial view of Beijing. But there were two other satellites that did. He didn’t need a live feed like he could get from the ARGUS either. He just needed one with a good enough resolution, and both of these older birds could still read a T-shirt from space. More than strong enough to spot a car.