Snow Angel Part 15

Printer-friendly version

Gloria’s boss didn’t take to kindly about her taking off. She was their best Cyber-specialist and didn’t like it when she took time off. They figure she was doing side jobs and that was against company policy. Since her and Morgana had talked about her coming to work for her. She had been putting some serious thought into Morgana’s offer. She liked the fact that she could work when she wanted to and the traveling she would be doing. She knew the money would be a lot better. So, she put in her two weeks’ notice when she asked for a couple days off.

Morgana was true to her word about flying in a private Jet. It was waiting for her when she arrived at the private airport she had been directed to drive to. She parked her Jeep wrangler in a storage hangar and was told to leave the keys in it so if it needed to be moved or transported to her. They could do it. She was given a receipt for the vehicle and an id card.

Her luggage and equipment was loaded onto the plane carefully. She couldn’t believe the inside of the jet. She had traveled before, but never in a private jet. It was nice and after they were in the air she was offer a drink and something to eat. The flight itself only took 3.5 hours. When she landed at the private airport in New York, a chauffeured Lincoln Town Car with mirrored windows was waiting for her. She was informed by the driver; whose name was Robert. That she going to be dropped off at the work site and her luggage would be taken to her hotel room.
Arrangements had been made for her stay. She was given a hotel room key. When she looked at it; she notices it was for a room at The Plaza hotel.

She wonders if the jobs Morgana took were always this generous. She was driven to a non-descript brown building in a nice neighborhood. It looked like it used to be a law office or something. She was told by Morgana by text to let them know when she arrived and someone would let her in.

She texts Morgana to let her know she was right outside the door. A few minutes later a middle aged muscular African American dressed in a pair of black dress slacks, dark gray button-down dress shirt that was partially unbutton open comes to the door. He was wearing a shoulder gun holster with the butt of his gun showing.

Morgana had asked Keven to let her friend Gloria Lagana in. She showed him a picture of her so he knew what she looked like. Him and
Selena had spent the night here last night with Morgana and Troy while they worked. Elizabeth and a girl Keven hadn’t met yet stopped by to check on them. He had asked Elizabeth what was going on and she gave him a short description of the problem they were handling. She had come by to check on them and to ask what they wanted for dinner. Because Shigeko was arranging to have dinner sent to them.

After Elizabeth and Dakota left. A nice dinner had been brought over by a staff member from Shigeko’s boyfriends restaurant. Coffee, tea and soda had been sent as well. Troy had stopped to eat and to take a break for a while, but Morgana had kept on working while eating. The only time he had ever seen any one do something like that was back in his college days with some of the gamers he knew.

Anika said she could send another guard over to protect them if he and Selena wanted to go home. Both had asked to be permanently assigned to protect them. Anika had agreed, but told them to get some sleep. He knew Selena was still sleeping in a room they had set-up. He had slept for five hours and had been woken-up by Selena. She had informed him that Troy was sleeping in one of the offices, but Morgana was still going at it.

He had spotted the young girl standing at the door. She had on a nice looking blue and white dress that came down mid-thigh on her slim frame. Her shoulder length strawberry blonde hair framed her youthful looking face. Her skin coloring had an olive tint to it, making her appear Sicilian. He notices she was wearing a pair of ankle boots that went with her dress. They had a two-inch heel on them. She also had a black rolling luggage chart with her along with her purse.

He unlocks the door “you must be Gloria Lagana?”

“Yep, that’s me. Morgana sent for me.”

“She’s waiting for you. If you’ll follow me, please.” Keven relocks the door and escorts Gloria back where Morgana was working.

Gloria follows Keven and wonders why they were inside an empty office building. They come to a huge storage room and sees several server
cabinets with their doors open and wires running from them to several of Morgana’s laptops that were set-up and running on a make shift work bench. One laptop had satellite data display on it. There was another make shift work bench set-up with another set of laptops opened and cables running to it. She recognized two of the laptops as belonging to Troy Percival. She had heard he had gone freelance. He used to work for the same company she did, but wasn’t in her class.

She was more like Morgana. Computers just spoke to her on a level most people didn’t understand. Even most of the instructors she had at MIT and Northcentral University had a hard time understanding her work. She was a child prodigy and held every computer certificate ever produce and had her Phd at the young age of 19.

“Hey Gloria, just tell Keven how you want your work station set-up.”

Morgana hadn’t even stopped what she was doing when she spoke.

“Mind telling me what I will be doing, before I get started?”

“Sorry.” Morgana stops what she is doing and turns around to look at Gloria.

“All these servers here have information in them from our satellites, Russian satellites and most other countries. The guy we had been hired to
investigate had his crew hacking into every satellite in orbit and was using them to locate and sell information to the highest bidder. He also had planned on doing a lot more to several countries. He basically could send our ships off course and control all communications. So, far I have managed to fix how he got into them, while leaving the original access intact. The problem we have now is finding the plans he has put into play. Troy and I have been trying to find all of them and relay those plans to Ms. Anika and her team to either stop or intercept.”

“Why did this guy do this crap?”

“Power, greed, revenge. Everything we have learned so far from going through every file points to the fact he had several backers financing his
operations. This is just one of his data locations. There’s five more, plus a mobile command center Anika’s team took out. I’ve managed to gain access to three of the five data centers and have all their files downloading to my mainframe at home and Eruptions mainframe. The last two data centers went off-line. I’m watching their locations on several satellites and it looks like they are trying to secure those locations. One is in Crystal City, TX and the other is in downtown Yakima, WA. The one in Yakima is an old bank that Eruption bought and was going to use as a data processing center. The Crystal City location was an old tech school and had already been converted to a data processing center.”

“Sounds like you and Troy have been busy. Let me get set-up and jump in.” Gloria and Keven set-up a work station for Gloria to work at. They set-up all her equipment and get her hooked into the system.

“You said that we have a satellite watching those locations?”

“Yep, Freedom four and a Nasa satellite.”

Gloria logs into the Freedom satellite and look at what was going on in those locations that Morgana told her about. She takes a closer look
with the optic systems on Freedom four and clean-up the image with a specialized software she wrote herself.

“They are hooking up an external satellite unit to those location. The unit looks like a portable unit they use over in Pakistan and Iraq. It looks like they are trying to setup their own connection so it’s not connected to anything we can hack, but they still need a satellite to lock onto.”

Gloria searches through the satellites they have access to and find the one she was looking for. It was a communication satellite belonging to
the NSA. She uses it to scan the frequency the group was using and notice they were encrypting the signal with an encryption code she had come across before.

“Suckers, I know that encryption.” Gloria had seen it before from a North Korean hacking group she had busted when they attacked the US energy grid a year ago.

Keven was impress by Gloria’s skills as he reheated the coffee that had been brought over last night with their dinner. He or Selena were going to have to make a coffee run and grab some breakfast for this crew. He was worried about Morgana. Once she got into her groove, she was completely gone. He had seen that type of problem with a few gamers, when they were gaming. They wouldn’t stop for anything. It was like they were in another universe.

He started to see the same thing happening to Gloria as she went to work. As he was adding sugar to his coffee, his cell phone ranged. He looks at it and noticed it was Shigeko’s private number.

“Hello Shigeko, what can I do for you?”

“Did Gloria Lagana arrive alright?”

“Yep, she’s in her own little world right now just like Morgana.”

“How’s the rest your crew holding out?”

“Selena and Troy are asleep and I’m watching Morgana and Gloria work. We could use some breakfast and more coffee.”

“Alright, I’ll drop by with some food and clean clothes for you four. How much longer do you think your crew is going to need to be there?”

“I don’t know, let me ask Morgana real quickly.”

Keven walks over and taps Morgana on the shoulder lightly.

Morgana snaps out of the groove she was in when she felt a light tap on her shoulder.

“What’s up Keven?” She had a faraway look in her eyes.

“Shigeko wants to know how much longer we will be?”

“We can have all the information downloaded and secure by tomorrow morning now that Gloria is here. I know we still need to access the
computer system on the command center.”

“Alright.”

“Did you hear that Shigeko?”

“Yep, I heard. I’ll pass the information onto Anika. Do you want to remain with them?”

“Yay, Selena and I talked about it last night and we decided that we want to keep our assignment. We could use some heavier weapons and
body armor though. All we have are our personal side arms.”

“Alright, I’ll tell Anika and see we can do for you.”

“Thanks.”

Hour Later:
An hour later breakfast shows up and fifteen minutes after the restaurant personal show-up. Elizabeth and Bart shows up with a few army foot lockers.

“We brought you guys some gear.”

Elizabeth spotted Troy, Morgana and Gloria working on their computers.

Bart introduces himself, before opening the footlockers.

He hands Selena and Keven a complete tactical gear set with satellite phones.

“Save your personal handguns for when you’re working at the company. Here are some Glock 19M we recovered from the bad guys with four magazines for each. Also, here are HK416 assault rifle with four magazines for you guys.”

“Are we expecting a combat squad?” Selena was a little concern as she accepted the HK assault rifle.

“We hope not, but just in case, you’ll at least be prepared for it.”

Bart gives both Keven and Selena a run down on how the weapons work. While Bart was doing that, she went over to see what Troy, Morgana
and Gloria were doing. Morgana and Gloria seemed to be in another zone, while Troy was aware she was there.

“They’re in the zone. Both get like that when they are working on the computer.”

“Isn’t that kind of dangerous?”

“Yep, if a person stays like that to long they lose themselves and their body starts to shut down because of waste buildup in their systems. I’ve
been watching Morgana making her stop and take a break. It looks like I have to do the same thing to Gloria as well.”

“I’ll talk with Keven and Selena and have them give you a hand.’

“Thanks, Elizabeth.”

Elizabeth talks with Keven and Selena about helping Troy and afterwards leave with Bart.

up
251 users have voted.
If you liked this post, you can leave a comment and/or a kudos! Click the "Thumbs Up!" button above to leave a Kudos

Comments

Computers are cool!

WillowD's picture

Which is why I particularly like this chapter. But I hope the Hatter shows up again soon. She's an awesome character.

Computers very interesting -

Computers very interesting - - . All the paper they use and produce not so much. Back in 1968 when I started working with computers (mainframes and mini-mainframes) the comments were paper was going away. Uh Huh. Right. More paper used today than even back then.
Had close friend at work back in the 1990's; who, during his Army Service, had obtained and held every certificate offered by both Microsoft, MacIntosh, and a few other notable systems. He constantly made our City IT people look like 5th graders when it came to computers; they and the Mayor were always after him to come and fix their problems or issues, but they refused to pay him for his expertise in this field; and refused to hire him into the Senior IT position when it came open. So he left and started his own business.
What he could do with computers was beyond imagination.

Always interesting

You have the tech stuff down, pat! Love the ins and outs of this story. Not sure how you do it with all the stories that you have going at this time. Well done Ms Dragon.

Santacruzman

Puppy not your normal dog

Jamie Lee's picture

Maybe Gloria's former employer should have treated her better if she would take a better job with better pay.

The dogs trying to ruin things think the can't be caught. But the big dogs didn't count on the stealth puppies tracking them down, and taking them out.

And with their guardians getting heavier fire power proves how serious things are.

Others have feelings too.

ok too cool for words

I had to stop to say I am loving it

SJH

AIR

As I recall, those 19M Glocks had their serial numbers removed. I think that is against federal law. I know that pretty much any law enforcement agency would find that highly suspicious. The pistols would likely be confiscated pending an investigation by the ATF and the FBI. The FBI lab can sonetimes recover serial numbers from such items and if it came up that they were stolen originally things could get messy, at least for awhile.


"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin