his buddy’s opinion, it jibed with what he’d observed. “Yep.”
“You ready to do this?”
Can I gouge my eyes out with an ice pick instead? It sounds like more fun. “As I’ll ever be.”
“I got the data sets ready. We need to account for all the breaches in EM Security’s information, times where the enemy seemed to know shit when they shouldn’t have, and see if we can trace it back to any communication from Tessa, see who it was going to, and how she might have passed the information.”
Zy figured they’d be doing something like that. “So what am I looking for?”
“Anything. Emails, website hits, log-ins to online locations that seem fishy. If I have to drill down to the keystroke level, I will. But let’s see what we can establish without that since months of that info would take more than five hours to comb through.”
“Sure.”
“You take January through March. She was on maternity leave most of that time, so the majority of the emails and communications you’ll be sifting through will belong to Aspen.”
“Oh, god help us all. I’d forgotten about her.”
“I’d like to…” Trees grumbled. “I’ll take April through August and see what kind of patterns emerge. Oh, and be sure to look at any cookies, plug-ins, or other programs she might have downloaded. I compiled a list of EM-approved software.” He set the paper on the table between them. “Anything else is something she would have downloaded without telling the bosses and worth looking at. If you have questions about whatever you find, holler. I’ll figure it out.”
“Thanks.” But Zy wasn’t grateful at all. He didn’t want Tessa to be guilty. He wanted this to be a big misunderstanding that would just go away.
“You’re welcome.”
Then they both dived in. Zy wasn’t terrible with tech, but he wasn’t anywhere near Trees’s caliber. Still, he made his way through the first-quarter emails from the previous year associated with her profile pretty quickly. As Trees said, most of them were Aspen’s since she’d used Tessa’s computer during that timeframe. She had been into some unusual shit, too. Soap carving, competitive cat costuming, and another pastime Zy had never heard of.
“What is toy voyaging? Any idea?”
“No. What the hell?”
Zy looked it up, then gave a dumbfounded shake of his head. “Who sends their toys with strangers so they can be photographed around the world? And why is that a thing?”
“Is it? Really?” Trees looked as confused as Zy felt.
“It is for Aspen. She gave someone this ugly straw hat with flowers to drag all over Europe. The person sent back a bunch of pictures of statues wearing this hat. She seemed really excited. Just before that, she’d been to some resort in Mexico and taken pictures of these weird nesting dolls from Russia and photographed them on the beach, in the jungle, and beside the hot tub.” Zy shook his head. “Apparently, they all got a kick out of that.”
“Because that’s not weird or anything,” Trees quipped.
“Not at all.”
“I hate to judge, but I’m glad we don’t work with her anymore.”
“Same. So here’s a piece of software either she or Tessa downloaded on January thirty-first, exactly one year ago. The location suggests it was installed onto Tessa’s machine. Was she in the office that day?” Zy had no way of knowing since he hadn’t begun working for EM Security yet.
“Let me bump that against a calendar I maintained. I told the colonel I wasn’t a fan of letting the temp use Tessa’s machine because we didn’t know her well, but we didn’t have a spare at the time. So I kept track of who had control of it when.” Trees flipped over to another document on his computer, then frowned. “That was one of Tessa’s last days in the office before her maternity leave. She was supposed to have worked with Aspen the following Monday through Wednesday, as I recall. But she went into labor on Tuesday morning and didn’t come back until the end of March.”
“So Tessa probably downloaded this?”
“Most likely. What is it?”
“Looks like some sort of spyware maybe.”
“Let me see.”
Zy shoved the computer toward Trees, who craned over to study the screen, his face growing more concerned. “Fuck. This is some hand-coded shit that collects every keystroke, but it also enables stealth remote access from anywhere in the world.”
Was he serious? “So whoever installed this could tap into Tessa’s computer at will and could see every time she or Aspen hit a key? And they could access