Addison’s unattended computer was a wide-open door in the pricy firewall Franklin Roh had built. This would be easier than Samuel had thought—almost disappointing.
Samuel meandered back to his cubicle and pulled up the keystroke logging program Franklin had installed. Getting into that was easy enough since he was on the IT staff. The keystroke logger had, of course, recorded all of Addison’s passwords as he typed them in. Two minutes later, Samuel had the one for the S-4 server: “Richrocks1.”
Samuel snorted and opened the utility on his computer that allowed him to take over any other machine on the system. A few seconds later, he had control of Addison’s computer. If Addison had been at his desk, he would have noticed that his monitor had woken up from power-save mode and was acting possessed. Samuel realized that someone walking past Addison’s office might look in and see the same thing. He should have turned off the monitor. His hands froze on the keyboard and for an instant he considered aborting. Then he smiled and started typing again. He felt the familiar adrenaline rush and tightening stomach muscles. He’d forgotten how much fun a little risk could be.
Addison had left open a link to the S-4 server on his computer, so Samuel just pulled it up, typed in Addison’s password, and he was in. The server held a single folder with the innocuous title “Project Docs.” Inside that were two subfolders titled “Financial” and “Operational.” The “Operational” subfolder sounded the most interesting, so he opened that one first. It held dozens of PDFs of various sizes. He glanced around to make sure nobody was watching. Then he took a deep breath and opened the first PDF. Now we’re getting somewhere.
Or maybe not. The PDF was some sort of form in an Asian language Samuel didn’t recognize. So was the second PDF, and the third.
He clicked through half a dozen more files before coming across something in English. It was a checklist titled “6/16-8/16 Winch and ROV Spare Parts,” and it cataloged various machine parts that meant nothing to Samuel. He tried a few more, but nothing juicy—no Navy memos labeled “Top Secret,” no charts marking debris fields from lost Spanish galleons, and no fake executive tax returns. He couldn’t even find a memo that would at least give him some inkling of what this project was about.
The “Financial” subfolder held nothing but a bunch of PDF invoices and a couple of Excel spreadsheets. They were all in English, but it didn’t matter. The invoices were all one-line bills that said “For services rendered” followed by a number. And the spreadsheets were just lists of invoices with totals at the bottoms.
He stopped and rubbed the soul patch beard on his lower lip. The totals were each in the tens of millions of dollars, and some topped $100 million. He’d been in the company long enough to know that all marine engineering and salvage projects were expensive, but that was a lot of money.
He did a quick scan of the rest of the files, but found nothing useful. Whatever the company was getting all that money for, it wasn’t at all clear from what was on the S-4 server.
Now thoroughly frustrated, Samuel got ready to minimize the server connection again and get out of Addison’s computer. Before he did, though, he embedded “Something wicked this way came” as an anonymous tag on one of the PDFs. He also added an image to the PDF: a picture of Franklin Roh’s face Photoshopped onto the body of an obese woman in a bikini.
He finished and looked at the clock in the corner of his monitor. His little adventure had only killed an hour—still two and a half hours to go until he could head out. He stretched, checked his e-mail again, and started reading a twenty-three-page policy memo Franklin had just circulated on appropriate Internet usage while at work. After two pages, Samuel realized that reading the whole thing would just be too painful, so he skimmed it for rules prohibiting use of the ’Net to find pictures of fat chicks who would look good with a supervisor’s head.
Five o’clock came at last. He slung his backpack over his shoulder and headed out. By the time he reached the elevator, he had already mentally left work and his mood brightened. He needed to find a new job—maybe one of his friends was putting together another start-up