Parkowski started to wonder if the lack of results for the two words together was deliberate or unintentional. The SharePoint site’s search function seemed pretty intelligent, and considering how many results were there for the two words separately, she thought they would have appeared together, but that was not the case.
She left at three in a funk. Parkowski felt like she wasn’t really getting anywhere unraveling this mystery.
DePresti was coming to her place tonight for dinner. He had a meeting at OuterTek in Hawthorne and Marina del Rey was a much shorter drive than Hermosa Beach during rush hour. Plus, her roommate was at her own boyfriend’s apartment up by UCLA, so she had the place to herself.
Hopefully, her boyfriend was coming with some good news.
DePresti showed up, late, at six. “Sorry, a meeting ran really late.”
“It’s ok,” she replied. “I got started late, so it’s just ready now.”
They sat down at the tiny kitchen table to eat the chicken, rice, and mixed vegetables Parkowski had cooked.
“So, how was your day?” she asked DePresti after they got settled.
“Fine, how was yours?”
“Pretty quiet,” Parkowski said.
There was a brief, almost awkward pause.
“Did you look into ‘Bronze Knot’ for me?” Parkowski said quietly.
DePresti gave her an odd look, then smiled. “I did,” he said, taking a bite of his chicken. “And before you get your hopes up, I found out very, very, very little, mostly by elimination, but let me walk you through what I did do.”
“Ok,” Parkowski said. She stood up to get a glass of wine, a little dismayed at DePresti’s status report. “Thanks for looking though.”
“No problem,” her boyfriend said. He leaned back a little in his chair. “First, I took your advice and did some searches on the two main SAP networks we use. I figured a couple of queries wouldn’t trip any logging software. There were no results for ‘Bronze,’ none at all. I checked files, SharePoints, documentation pages, and anywhere where you might see a reference. No joy.”
“Got it,” Parkowski said. She poured her wine and sat back down.
“Then,” DePresti said, “I went to a guy I know, a retired O-4 who is one of the support contractors on base. This dude used to be part of SAPCO, which is the Department of Defense Special Access Program Control Office.” He said that last part with a flourish. “He knows
“And what did he say?” Parkowski asked. This might actually be going somewhere.
“So he said he had never heard of it,” her boyfriend replied, “and he told me that was the truth — if it was an unacknowledged or waived SAP he’d tell me if he did since you and I had no idea what it was in reference to; it wouldn’t be a security violation.”
DePresti took a deep breath. “But, he asked if I had looked around internally at all, and I was honest with him, I had searched on our networks. He did tell me something interesting, if I was looking for a SAP name, or a name that had been or would be protected by a SAP that wasn’t on the network, the internal search features wouldn’t even perform the search. They would just return a null result as part of the protection features of the system.”
Parkowski was about to ask a specific question on the topic of the network but the Space Force captain spoke first. “So, then I went back and did the search again,” he said, talking quickly, “and compared it to a different search term. And the system actually searched for the other term — it told me the search took 0.36 seconds — whereas for ‘Bronze Knot’ it just spit back ‘0 results’ without giving me a search time.”
She thought for a moment. “Meaning it’s some kind of protected term.”
He nodded.
“And that was it?”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much all I can do on my end without asking too many questions or getting myself in trouble,” DePresti told her. “Sorry.”
“No, actually, that was really helpful.” She finished off her glass of wine. “I know exactly what I have to do next.”
Parkowski almost skipped into work on Tuesday morning.
She had spent the rest of the night formulating a plan to get a hold of her logs again and see if any other references would help her unravel the Bronze Knot mystery.
Parkowski knew she had to get into the “NASA room” as Pham had called it, but she didn’t have access. She would have to get in somehow.
More than anything else, Parkowski needed to figure out this mystery. Her promotion — and satisfying her own innate curiosity — depended on it.
That being said, were she to be caught, all bets were off. She’d be lucky to still have a job.
