Come and Find Me A Novel of Suspense - By Hallie Ephron Page 0,36
to you—”
“Or to anyone else, for that matter. Believe me, I’m well aware. It’s just that . . . I don’t know what I’d do if . . .” Diana couldn’t bear to even finish the thought. “I don’t know what I’d have done without her and you too, Jake. I know I don’t say so, but I appreciate your sticking with me.” She brushed away a tear.
Jake cleared his throat. After an uncomfortable pause, he rushed on. “You did a great job on the Vault proposal. Very impressive.” Diana remembered how hard it had always been for Jake to accept gratitude of any kind.
He continued, “I made a few changes and left it for you. Go ahead and send it. And I invoiced MedLogic. For the hours we worked, plus a little extra for the insult—”
“And time wasted,” Diana added. It seemed like weeks rather than just a few days ago that MedLogic had cut them loose.
“I analyzed that log that came back from their hackers.They’re using a server named Volganet.”
“I saw that.”
“It’s somewhere in Eastern Europe. Probably Russia.”
“Russia? But . . .” Diana remembered Volganet hadn’t been set to Eastern European time. “You sure about that?”
“One of their ports was vulnerable and I got in.”
Jake had been able to penetrate further than she had. Maybe the hackers had adjusted their system clock to mislead outsiders.
“Did you get a chance to check out the stolen data file?”
“I’m working on decrypting it,” Jake said.
She almost blurted out, Decrypting it? The file she’d opened had most certainly not been encrypted.
Chapter Sixteen
After Jake’s call, it took just a moment for Diana to find the copy of the stolen file that she’d saved to her hard drive. She opened it. The first line began:
WXlDyktaADlUe+PywKwS3KdKlahCteEKxi
Diana stared at it in stunned silence. That pure gobbledygook was definitely encrypted data. Unless she’d gone completely around the bend, it had looked nothing like that when she’d opened that same file on Saturday.
What the hell was going on? She checked her firewall settings. They were all up-to-date and set for maximum protection. She opened the firewall log and began to scroll down. After scanning the hundreds of events when an outside computer had tried to connect to hers over the last forty-eight hours, she found nothing beyond the usual chaotic noise of the Internet.
She opened the stolen data file one more time. Could she have imagined that it was now encrypted? It made no sense. But there it was. She’d never have mistaken these random letters and characters for what she’d seen earlier.
Then she remembered, she’d made a copy of the file when she attached it to an empty e-mail message and left it in their shared e-mail account. She opened the mail program and clicked on DRAFTS.
There it was—no addressee, no subject line, just an empty message with a file attached. She opened the file.
All she needed to see was the first line.
D3S1358. D7S820.
She pulled her fingers away from the keyboard as if they’d been singed. She hadn’t imagined anything. The original file had contained regular old text, exactly what she remembered seeing before—data that meant something to someone, not a complicated code that had to be transformed into meaningful information with a decryption key.
But how? Data didn’t spontaneously transform itself. Someone had to have broken into her computer and encrypted the other data file. Diana plugged a flash drive into her computer and saved a copy of the unencrypted data file and its encrypted doppelgänger. For extra insurance, she forwarded copies of the files in an e-mail to Ashley. “Do not delete” she put as the subject line.
Seconds later, an e-mail came back. It was from Ashley. Then Diana read the subject line.
RE: DO NOT DELETE
Finally! Diana clicked it open.
Sorry, I’m out of the office at an offsite meeting until Monday. If you need to reach me, call me on my cell.
If Ashley had come back and gone to work, the first thing she’d have done was turn off that automated reply. It was the kind of thing she was meticulous about . . . just like she was meticulous about her belongings.
Diana remembered Ashley’s clothing neatly folded in Lucite drawers and hanging by color and season in her closet, her spices lined up from allspice to vanilla. The only notes of disarray had been the boots in the front hall, the jeans and T-shirt crumpled on the closet floor, and the mail heaped on the coffee table.