There had been an “executive level” meeting after the end-of-day status, one that DePresti hadn’t been invited to. There were only a few participants, and the military members were higher ranking than him.
Those notes were sparse and full of acronyms that Parkowski wasn’t familiar with. But in a document dated one day before the launch date, there was one that she had seen before.
BK.
Bronze Knot.
The meeting with that reference had notes that stated: “BK MAIN SERVER NODE MOVED TO NASA HANGAR AZ ON CAPE CANAVERAL SPACE FORCE STATION. CONNECTION TO ORLANDO HAS BEEN ESTABLISHED.”
The next day said. “ALL BK DATA CONSOLIDATED AT MAIN NODE.”
That was a lot to unpack.
There was a main server node for the Bronze Knot program. It was likely built into the ILIAD communications pathway, if Parkowski’s theory was correct, with all of the data for the ACHILLES robots flowing through it while the Bronze Knot data was either stripped out or filtered out for use by that compartmented program.
And it was located in a NASA hangar named Hangar AZ.
Parkowski knew that there were several hangars there at the main part of the sprawling facility, built for various missions over the years. She didn’t know which one was AZ, but she had a general idea of where it was located.
Finally, it had a connection to “Orlando,” which to Parkowski meant AFAMS, where the ILIAD environment was physically located.
A lot of pieces started to connect, but they needed to travel cross-country to Florida to solve the mystery.
She looked up at the clock. Five. One hour until DePresti had told her to leave if he wasn’t back yet.
But there he was, walking out of the main OuterTek facility with a dejected look on his face.
“I hope you found something,” he said as he got into the passenger’s seat. “I completely struck out in there. They denied everything and didn’t give me any information that I didn’t already have.”
“Well, I found some pretty interesting stuff,” she said. “Let me tell you about them on the drive.”
DePresti told his story first as Parkowski drove one-handed through the heavy rush hour traffic back towards their current home in Barstow.
“I got nowhere,” he said, always coming back to that phrase. He was frustrated.
“What exactly happened?” Parkowski asked.
He told her what had gone on inside the plant.
DePresti had first tried to pump an old worker and fellow Academy grad, retired Colonel Harris Stein, for some information, but had failed. The man had stonewalled his every attempt for information, laughing at his suggestion that something classified was tied to the ILIAD mission.
He paused. Parkowski used the moment to take in their surroundings. They were on the 605 now going north. Traffic had been picking up slowly since they left and now was choking the roads.
Her boyfriend hadn’t been paying much attention, so she took stock of the cars around them. None of them were suspicious. There was an old, maroon Dodge van a few cars back that seemed out of place, but Parkowski ignored it for now.
Parkowski started to worry a little but kept quiet. It was only one vehicle, not a swarm of them. The level of danger was currently low.
DePresti continued. He had then sought out the Space Force uniformed plant representative, a fellow captain who was assigned to the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA), and asked if he could get into the OuterTek SCIF. To his surprise, the female DCMA officer agreed. She led DePresti into a SCIF, and there they had a brief discussion lasting about fifteen minutes. The plant rep had to go to a meeting so she had left DePresti by himself in the small, windowless room.
He had then tried what Parkowski had been able to do in the secure room at Aering. DePresti had successfully logged onto the internal classified network and poked around on their shared drive.
There, he had thought he had hit the jackpot. He had found a list of all of the different SAPs that OuterTek had people read into. Unfortunately, Bronze Knot was not one of them.
The female captain had then returned. Luckily for DePresti, she had inputted the door code incorrectly multiple times before typing it in correctly, giving him time to hide his activities.
Dejected, he had left the facility and walked out to Chang’s Silverado empty-handed.
Parkowski didn’t want to knock him down too much, but she knew that she had gotten a lot more out of the trip to OuterTek than he had.
She started with the battle to get onto the OuterTek network. DePresti almost slapped himself. “Sorry!” he said to her as they got back on the 105 going east. “I keep calling them highways.”
“It’s what they are,” Parkowski said in agreement. “But it took a while to figure it out. I knew that one of them was wrong, but I had to work through them one by one.”
She checked their surroundings again. The minivan was gone. Maybe she was just getting paranoid.
