Alex still screened the temporary hotel rooms for bugs, almost religiously; although it made little sense. No matter how intense the surveillance, the UNSUB wouldn’t have time to bug a room that fast. Alex and Louie picked their hotels spontaneously, and from the reception desk, where they would get the key card in a matter of minutes, they would go straight up to their room to work. No one was that fast. No one was powerful enough to bug all the hotels in Delhi, just in case the two of them decided to show up. Nevertheless, she still swept them, carefully, methodically, just to be sure.
Satisfied, she put the bug sweeper back into her laptop bag and sat next to Louie at the small desk.
“Shoot,” she said, looking at his screen.
“I downloaded a few more modules. I still don’t have everything; I’m missing a few more. I don’t know where they are, haven’t found them yet. They’re supposed to all be together on this staging server, but at least one module is definitely missing.”
“Did you find anything interesting in these?”
“Somewhat,” he answered, scratching his forehead. “Not sure if it’s intentional or just a leftover, but I found a randomizer sub-module in the code. It just generates random numbers if called, that’s all it does.”
“So, nothing to worry about?”
“Not by itself, no. But we keep finding these sequences of code that are not in the spec and shouldn’t exist.”
“Sometimes these software companies reuse code they wrote for some other client without cleaning it up. They mix and match blocks of code from previous projects to maximize their profits. I struggle with this idea though, because I don’t think they’d normally get a lot of projects involving voting. These are pretty rare. If our project were a dashboard, for example, this scenario would make more sense.”
“You know what else doesn’t make sense? If doing sloppy coding work is what they’re trying to hide, do you think that’s worth killing for? I don’t think so,“ Louie said firmly. “I just don’t. Here’s what I want to do. I want us to go see Bal tomorrow and show him what we found, call him on it and watch what he has to say.”
“Bad idea,” Alex replied, shaking her head. “Bad, really bad.”
“Why?”
“Do you think this is a situation where you can play fair, in the open? First, you said you don’t have all the code yet. Second, you’re dealing with a man who threatened me, personally and unequivocally. Something tells me he’ll take the news that you hacked their systems and downloaded their code pretty badly, as in pull out a gun and shoot us both. And finally, Sam said the man who visited a few days ago in that huge limo is a known terrorist. Need I say more? You can’t confront them, not now, not later.”
He blushed a little and stood and turned towards the window to hide it.
“Embarrassing,” he said. “Sometimes I wonder if I have what it takes to do this job.”
“Sure you do, you just need a little more experience, and sometimes you just have to forget you’re an ex-SEAL. Not all fights are open and fair, clean hand-to-hand combat, or your Krav Maga. Most of them aren’t. You still have a misconception that corporate environments are open, honest, and encourage direct communication. Maybe some do, but we’re not usually investigating those. I am sure your SEAL trainers taught you to be covert and think like the enemy. How would this enemy think? What would they do?”
“Well, considering how they keep on stonewalling us, I’d say they’re delaying the moment when we see the code, if we’re ever gonna see it. I’d say they might even present us with a couple of devices with the software already loaded on it, for us to test and sign off on, when it’s already too late to object or ask for anything else. They’re already behind schedule on delivering the software, and that’s what I think they’re planning. That’s why I thought we could approach Bal and make him face the music.”
“Remember why we’re here,” Alex said, sounding almost maternal, which made her smile. “We wanna catch all the bastards, not just Bal and his boss. They didn’t start this on their own; they didn’t think this plan up. Until we know everything there is to know about that code we cannot draw attention to ourselves. They have to believe they had us fooled and that we’re too busy romancing in