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“What if I told you the answer isn’t a command? What if the way in is through the error messages themselves? What they tell you about how the system is organized, what language it’s built in, where the access points are?”
He stared at the screen. She watched him try to see it, really try, but it didn’t click.
He could follow a trail she built. He couldn’t find one she hadn’t. And that’s what was needed.
Keegan’s eyes shifted to something over her shoulder. Cassandra turned. Fallon was leaning in the doorway, arms crossed, watching with the particular stillness that meant she’d been there long enough to see everything she needed to see.
Cassandra turned back to Keegan. “That’s enough for now. Thank you, Keegan. I appreciate your time.”
He nodded and left without saying anything, which she was grateful for. How did you tell someone who was trying their best that their best just wasn’t going to cut it?
Cassandra looked at Fallon. She looked tired. Dark circles, tension in her jaw, the posture of someone who’d been running on caffeine and willpower for too long. Cassandra was sure she looked worse.
“That’s the third one,” Fallon said.
“Yep. And the best of them. But still nowhere near the tech expertise that’s going to be needed inside that lodge.”
Cassandra hadn’t slept. She’d built the practice terminal at six in the morning, right after the call with Ryder, stripping a machine from the network and loading it with dummy files behind a custom security layer.
She needed to train someone to bypass it.
Fallon had brought agents who had natural abilities with computers. The first agent had been competent, methodical, but had locked herself out within twelve minutes. The second? Faster, more intuitive, but froze when Cassandra introduced a variable he hadn’t been briefed on. Then, Keegan. He’d been the closest.
But not anywhere close enough.
Cassandra was surviving on coffee, and not the good stuff from the café. Her eyes felt like they’d been open for a calendar year. A migraine sitting at the base of her skull, not fully formed yet, just tapping on the door to let her know it was thinking about visiting since she kept spending time with strangers.
She kept it at bay, but only out of sheer determination.
Fallon sat on the edge of the desk next to Cassandra’s workstation. “So we’re zero for three. And those operatives were the most computer-savvy we have. I wish Peter Valbracht was in the country. He may not be a trained agent, but he could probably do this.”
Cassandra had worked with Peter a few months ago when Fallon was in danger. He could definitely handle this situation. “Where is he?”
“Somewhere deep in Russia, from what I understand. It would take more than a week to pull him out and get him back. So we’re only left with non-tech-genius agents for you to coach.”
“They’re not going to be able to do it.” Cassandra rubbed her eyes. “It’s not their fault. The system we’re trying to infiltrate is air-gapped. The only way to extract the data is to sit in front of it and figure it out in real time. I can teach procedures all day. I can’t teach someone how to read a machine they’ve never seen. Not when they’ll have such a limited amount of time to hack it.”
She couldn’t teach someone how to look at an unknown machine and understand the logic underneath the design, the patterns in how files were organized, the choices someone had made when they built the security layer and what those choices said about where the valuable things were hidden.
She could do it, but it wasn’t something that someone had taught her. That was just how her brain was wired.
She couldn’t teach operatives how to rewire their brains. It didn’t matter how good they were; it wasn’t something that could be taught.
She’d accepted that about an hour ago. She’d kept trying with Keegan, hoping he’d be the exception, but he hadn’t been.
“It has to be me, Fallon.”
The words came out before she’d fully decided to say them, and once they were in the air, she couldn’t take them back.
Fallon stood up. “That’s not what you signed up for. You’re not an agent.”
“I know. But I’m the only option. Believe me, if there were more options, I’d point you in that direction. But there aren’t, and we’re out of time.”
Fallon began pacing back and forth. “What would you need?”
“Access to the terminal. That’s it. Get me into that room, and I can do the rest.”
Fallon was already working through it. Cassandra could see it happening behind her eyes. “Isaac and Nolan could get you close to the property. Meet Ryder. He would get you the rest of the way in. You do the extraction, he gets you back out.”
