“No,” he said, “I just want to get another set of eyes on it.”
He too came up empty.
“I don’t get it,” he told Parkowski a few minutes later. “Why would a special access program, one that is even worth killing over, just be a bunch of fields in telemetry packets coming from a NASA science mission?”
“I don’t know,” she said, reaching out for the laptop. “Let me look again.”
This time, she dove into the packets that she had looked at on her Aering workstation so long ago.
She pulled up five, ten, twenty-five, fifty different telemetry logs. The BKT data was there, but here, on the high side, was clearly identified.
Interestingly enough, every five packets, there was something injected into it from a specific IP address into one of the sensor values.
“Mike, write this down,” she told DePresti. “One-seven-two, dot, one-six-eight, dot, one hundred, dot, fifty-five.”
“Ok,” DePresti said, fumbling in his bag until he got out a pen and a small notepad he had gotten from the motel. “Got it. What about it?”
“Is there any way of telling where this IP address is located?” Parkowski asked. “I remember seeing a list of IP addresses in one of the packets from your launch.”
“Hold on,” he said. He took the laptop and pulled up a document consisting of one large table.
“The IP addresses on the Cape are configured by building,” DePresti explained, “and the first two numbers indicate what building the workstation or server is. What were the first two values?”
“172 and 168.”
“172 and 168,” DePresti repeated as he scanned the table. “That is in… Huh, that’s weird.”
“What’s weird?”
“That’s for building A99,” he said, surprised, “but that doesn’t follow any of the building numbering schemes I’ve seen for Cape Canaveral or Kennedy Space Center. They’re either hangar-something or have a three-digit number.”
“Huh,” Parkowski said, confused now. “So we go there?”
“We're going there,” he confirmed.
“I don’t think the two of you are going anywhere,” a gravelly voice said, causing Parkowski and DePresti to both jump in shock.
She turned to see Special Agent Hollis Everson, the AFOSI/PJ agent who had visited her at Aering, and two other men, one on either side of him.
In his hand, pointed directly at her forehead, was the largest handgun she had ever seen.
Parkowski opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out.
The new arrival grinned beneath his mustache. “Cat got your tongue?”
“Who are you?” DePresti asked him, stepping slightly towards Parkowski.
Everson laughed. “The young lady here knows me as Special Agent Hollis Everson,” he said with gusto, “but I flew on a commercial flight out here as James Baker. I’ve also spent time as Dmitri Gustavovich, Mohammed El-Farsi, Petr Cenek, and any number of other names. You can guess which one, if any, is real.”
DePresti didn’t respond.
“Go ahead and sit down,” Everson said as he waved his oversized pistol at DePresti and Parkowski. “We’re going to have a quick chat.”
Parkowski, still in shock, did as she was asked to, taking a seat at the conference table. DePresti did the same.
Everson sat down, pistol still aimed at Parkowski, as the two other men stood on either side of the door.
She couldn’t believe that they had let their guard down. They had gotten too cocky.
“So, you want to know what Bronze Knot is,” Everson said softly, gun still aimed at her forehead. He laughed. “You know what, I’ll tell you.”
“You will?” Parkowski asked.
“Sure. It’s quite simple, really. Bronze Knot is a special access program that protects the linkage between the ILIAD mission and an unnamed organization.” He seemed like he was about to say more, but then he stopped himself. “And, that’s really all it is,” he added after a few seconds of silence. “There’s much more information, of course, but that’s all protected in another special program. I’m actually surprised that neither of you was able to figure that part out.”
“Who do you work for?” DePresti asked, a slight hint of defiance in his voice. He wasn’t as scared as Parkowski, or at least was trying better to hide it.
Everson snorted and then smirked at the Space Force captain. “That’s what you want to know? Not, how did we track you here, why haven’t we killed you already like poor Dr. Pham, why are we so interested in your little investigation?”
Neither DePresti nor Parkowski responded. The man holding the gun didn’t seem to care.
“Bronze Knot protects one of our most closely guarded secrets,” he began, “and when our man in the Aering facility told us that you were starting to look into it we weren’t initially concerned. No offense, kid,” he said to Parkowski, “but you’re not the type that I’d have expected to blow this whole thing open.”
She frowned but didn’t respond to the slight.
“But, when you got access to the SAP room at the Aering plant,” Everson said, “it got serious.”
“Why are you telling us this?” Parkowski asked.
Everson ignored her. Even if he had given her an answer, she wasn’t sure she would have liked his answer.
