Present Tense (Out of the Fire #3) - Candace Blevins Page 0,88
still working on a way to get into the offline computer. Your girl there says it’ll either have to be carried out whole, or a hacker will need to go in and sit at the computer to extract the information.”
“We can’t just take the hard drives?” He’d done that before to bring back data for the geeks.
“There’ll be a failsafe on the drives,” Kelsey said, her face buried in his chest, “to make sure they’re booted in that machine. If they aren’t, they’ll self-destruct. With the encryption they use, there won’t be a way to get data off without booting them. Just reading through them on a different machine...” She took a breath and shook her head. “It could take years to break the encryption.”
“Chance said decades,” Mira said.
Eunice stroked Kelsey’s back. “Okay. So we take enough manpower in to pull a desktop unit out.”
Mira shook her head, and Kelsey took a breath and moved a step back.
“She’ll explain it,” Mira told him. “It’s complicated. I need to get back. See you in, what... an hour?”
“Hour and a half, and you’ll have all three of us. Aaron will need to send a daytime guard.”
Eunice figured seeing the live torture shots was probably enough to warrant this level of emotion from Kelsey, but it felt like more.
He walked her to the front porch, turned her to face him, and cradled both her cheeks in his palms. “Give it to me in one sentence.”
“You’re going to have to take a hacker in — someone who can put hands on that computer, get through the booby traps, and extract the data.”
Eunice walked her inside, closed the front door behind them, locked the security system down, and listened to the confirming chirps. He went to the house speaker and pushed the button to broadcast upstairs. “Assholes, I locked our security system down. Need both of you downstairs. Don’t break any ankles, but get your asses out of bed and moving.”
The latter part let them know they weren’t actively under attack, but that he’d just moved them to high security and he needed to let them know why.
“Who can do that?” he asked on the way down the stairs with her.
“Chance could, but it would take him longer than me. I can, but my contract says I don’t have to do anything physically dangerous.”
She went vampire fast the rest of the way down the steps, and she was sitting on her sofa when he entered her room. “I was worried you’d be upset they’d let a girl drive me home.”
“Mira is more than capable of keeping you safe on the drive from there to here. I’d trust her to have my back any day of the week.”
“I think Australians are more afraid of snakes than Americans. I like her, but I don’t think I’d want her at my back.”
“Are there King Cobras in Australia? I had the idea they were from India.”
“Right, but we have plenty of others that can kill you dead.”
“Mongooses are immune. Eunice isn’t as afraid of her as the rest of us,” Fabio said as he walked in. “My cat has a healthy respect for her. I do, too, but that’s because she’s a bad-ass, not because I’m afraid of her.”
“But you are?”
“Maybe a little, but I’d trust her with my back. She’s damned good.”
“I’m guessing we aren’t down here because Mira freaked our tiny vampire the fuck out.” Collosa closed the door behind him, put his hand to the touchpad, and looked over the diagram of the house when it came up on the screen.
“Everything locked, no breaches.” He turned to Eunice. “What’s going on?”
“Moldova. Our girl got into their system. Real time torture, historical video of torture, and she had to go through emails to figure out which accounts to download from their servers for our analysts to comb through.”
Kelsey shook her head. “That’s not why I’m upset. I mean, sure, I had to work hard to keep from crying in front of everyone when the torture videos came up, but...” She crossed her arms and felt cold, which meant she needed to pull herself together. Vampires don’t feel the cold. When she did, it was a trigger to tell her something wasn’t right. Usually, something emotional.
“Their plans, their plots, campaigns, whatever you want to call them — the bastards are smart. They have them on a computer without network access. No hardware on it that can be used to network out. A single USB outlet, boobytrapped so if