Wrong Place, Right Time(64)

“What do you mean you’ve got it covered?”

“Ozzie contacted the police and let them know what we’re going to be up to tonight, so the cops are going to swing by later to make sure everything’s cool.”

I breathe out a huge sigh of relief. “You have no idea how much better that makes me feel.” Most of the phantoms that were haunting me disappear into the night air. I have nothing to worry about. The cops are in on it with us. Phew!

He pauses in the process of turning the door handle to give me one of his big Hollywood smiles. “I thought that might make you feel better.”

He pushes the door in and holds it open for me, but I stand there and give him an awkward look.

“I know you’re being a gentleman holding the door for me, but would you mind going in first?”

“Absolutely.” He doesn’t hesitate for a second. He walks right in and turns on a light. Two seconds later he faces me again. “All secure. You are free to enter.”

Feeling like a total weenie, I come in behind him. I’m careful to shut the door and lock it. I wish I could put a bar across it too.

Time to face the music. I turn around and examine the space around me. We’re in a back hall with a bathroom on one side and a janitorial closet on the other.

“Come this way,” Lucky says. “The offices we’re looking for are down the hall on the right and the left.”

I follow behind him, my eyes scanning side to side. The coward inside me is expecting someone to jump out and attack us at any second. My blood pressure is through the roof, and my heart is beating like crazy. The only good news in this scenario is that I’m probably losing a lot of weight with all the sweat that’s started to roll off my body.

Lucky turns on some more lights. “Do you want to work together in the same room, or do you want to split up?” He turns around and looks at me as he waits for my answer.

I give him my best mom-look. “Are you kidding me?”

He smiles again and hitches his computer up higher on his shoulder. “Same room it is.” He points to the right. “Let’s start in here.”

I stay in his shadow and take the seat next to his. We’re sitting at two computers used by administrative personnel, but there’s no way for me to know who they are or what they do yet.

Lucky sets his laptop down along with his briefcase. I put my purse next to his things. I’m very tempted to take my can of pepper spray out of my purse and set it on the desk next to me, but I don’t. May said that Lucky has a firearm, and I know he’s been trained by Dev and Ozzie on how to use it. I don’t have anything to worry about. The cops are going to be here soon, I’m sure.

Lucky pulls something out of his briefcase and unfolds it. It’s larger than a regular-sized piece of paper. “This is a little schematic of the office and all of the computers in it,” he says. “I thought we could start at the individual stations, and then we could move to the server after.”

I take a look at the diagram and place myself on it. I point to the desk on the schematic where I’m sitting. “This is me here, and that’s you there.”

He nods. “Yes, exactly. So you’re sitting at one of the accounting spots, and so am I. Perfect.” After he puts a mark on the paper over the two computers we’re working on, he turns to his computer. “Let’s fire these babies up and see what we can find.”

I wiggle the mouse at my station, and the monitor goes on. It’s asking me for a username and password. Because I read the file Lucky had sent over, I know that we have access to this information. Before I can even think to say something about it, Lucky is pulling two papers out of a file folder and handing one of them to me. “Here are all the usernames and passwords. A copy for you and a copy for me.”

I nod and start entering the data immediately. The faster I can get this done, the sooner we’ll get out of here.

Lucky starts to whistle, but it doesn’t bother me. It’s better than working with somebody who wants to chat. With this type of work, it’s better for me to either hear some kind of random noise or nothing at all. I need to keep all of my attention on what I’m doing. It’s monotonous, but when I get in the zone, I’m a machine. Nobody can work faster than I can.

I easily maneuver myself into the computer. From there it’s a simple thing to call up the different parts of the different drives and examine their contents to see if anything funny is going on. We were given a full view of their system’s architecture before we got here, and I studied it at length from home while the kids were sleeping last night, so I know what I should be looking at. Anything that’s not supposed to be here will jump out at me.