our servers without anyone being the wiser?”
“Yep. I begged Aspen to let me scan that computer a couple of times. Every time she said it crashed or she finger-flubbed whatever she’d been typing and ended up somewhere in the computer she shouldn’t be, like at a command prompt.”
Zy sat up. “Tessa couldn’t have had anything to do with this. She’s not a computer whiz, and she definitely doesn’t know anything about writing code, especially something that involved.”
“You think Aspen does?”
Probably not. “Is it possible neither of them did this?”
“Possible? Anything is. Improbable? Yeah. Keep digging. See if you can find any traces of contact in March, around the time we went to Mexico and damn near got ambushed.”
“Getting there. After that software is installed, there isn’t much in the way of sent emails except to the bosses. It’s like…Aspen didn’t do that much.”
“No, it’s not ‘like’ that. She actually didn’t do much. But no fishy communications around the time of our mission?”
“Not that I see.”
Trees sighed. “Then again, with remote access and keystroke recording, all anyone had to do was log in to our server themselves and they could mine almost anything.”
“Do you think that spyware/remote-access garbage is still on Tessa’s computer?” Maybe she had been passing on information without even knowing it.
“No. As soon as Aspen cleared the building, I restored Tessa’s computer back to the factory settings, then carefully rebuilt her profile. I didn’t trust Aspen not to have unwittingly screwed everything up.”
“So the rogue software is gone? And we have no way of knowing who might have been accessing our systems and where the information was going?”
Trees winced. “When you put it that way, I should have looked to see what was on the computer before I wiped it, but I had no idea…”
“You couldn’t have.” But that didn’t help prove that Tessa wasn’t their mole…if they could prove that at all. “You finding anything else?”
“Let me finish. Then…we’ll talk.”
Given Trees’s scowl, that was a yes.
His friend worked in silence, seemingly a lot faster now that he knew what to look for. Zy stood and ambled to the coffeepot, flipping it on. He wondered what Tessa was doing right now and if she’d cried when he’d left…or just shrugged and moved on with her life.
He wished to fuck he understood why she’d lied to him, tossed them aside, and sold him to the enemy for a buck. Then again, he’d never understand that behavior.
“Coffee?” he asked Trees.
“Yeah. It’s going to be a long night.”
Zy glanced down the hall. Laila’s light was still on. “Should I encourage her to go to sleep?”
“You can try, but she won’t.”
With a grim press of his lips, Zy shook his head, made two cups of coffee, and headed back to the table where Trees furiously scribbled notes, peering at the screen, then his list of chicken scratchings growing longer.
Zy was on the last swallow of his java—along with his last nerve—when Trees finally looked up. His friend’s grave expression told Zy he wasn’t going to like whatever Trees had to say.
Fuck. His heart nose-dived to his belly. His throat tightened. “What?”
“There are footprints of communications from what looks like a Gmail account to an external mail host with its servers in Switzerland.”
“Why is that important? Why does the server location matter?”
“Because the Swiss have some of the strictest tech privacy laws in the world. No one is getting their hands on that information. A lot of people use this kind of service. People who don’t like their emails being scanned for key words so that online retailers can market to them, for instance. People who don’t love government intrusion into their personal life.”
“So you have one of these email addresses?”
“Not this particular provider. This one is expensive. But I have one like it. It’s also commonly used by people who have something to hide.”
“Like criminals?”
“Exactly.” Trees shrugged. “Obviously, I’m not saying that anyone who has one of these is up to something nefarious, but I am saying that anyone up to something nefarious probably has one of these email addresses, rather than a simple freebie.”
“Let me recap: Someone with Gmail sent messages to a party with a super secure email address who might be a criminal?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“Because the information packet passed through our server, and I have some goodies residing there just in case, I can read the contents of the emails. But I can’t prove who the Gmail address belongs to.”
Maybe they could figure it out. If they could read the contents