Wicked Sexy (Wicked Games #2)(58)

I cut right to the chase. “I’ve got something.” I sit down at my computer, enter the password, and hold my breath as I open the traceback program’s compilation report.

Within seconds, I’ve got sixteen FBI agents and two ex-Special Ops badasses breathing down the back of my neck. Everyone watches in tense silence as numbers begin to stream across my screen.

“What’re we lookin’ at?” asks Ryan from behind me.

“Data points,” answers Special Agent Chan. He’s to the right of me, bent over my desk, staring in fascination at the display. “But this report is totally random—how can you tell what you’re looking at?”

“I can’t. Not yet, anyway. This is raw data from S?ren’s system. It has to be converted.”

I sense the general disappointment from behind me. O’Doul asks, “I assume you have another program for that?”

“You assume correctly.” With a few keystrokes, I’ve pulled up the remote access tool that allows me to log in to my home system. I upload the compilation report and hit Send.

“What now?” asks Chan.

I sit back in my chair and release a breath. “Now we wait.”

“How long?”

I shrug. “Depending upon how much data we were able to extract, anywhere from a few hours to—”

I break off mid-sentence and jerk upright in my chair, gaping at the screen.

Instantly, Connor is behind me, his presence calming though I’m in complete shock. He says, “What?”

I point at the monitor. In the upper right-hand corner, the program displays a series of bar graphs, indicating how much time is left on various conversions.

Two of ten bars have already turned from red to green. Then, in rapid succession, all the remaining bars turn green.

O’Doul grunts, impressed. “Pretty fast converter you’ve got there.”

“It never works this quickly,” I say slowly, feeling a cold niggle of worry at the base of my spine. I open the file utility and look at the size. “According to this, there was a few terabytes of data to sort through—”

“Let’s take a look and see what you’ve got!” interrupts Chan eagerly, crowding close.

Everyone is silent as I open the first report. I read through a few lines, stunned, and then read on all the way to the end to be sure I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing.

Finally, I’m convinced. I sag back against the chair and breathe, “Holy. Shit.”

Though he keeps his voice even, I can feel O’Doul’s aggravation. “Please don’t make us keep asking ‘What?’ Miss West.”

I shake my head. “This is… I can’t believe this.”

In unison, O’Doul, Chan, Ryan, and several other agents bark, “What!”

I’m still staring in awe at the monitor, blinking because I can’t believe my own eyes. “It’s S?ren’s malware program. The entire thing. All the code he used to cripple Miranda’s system. It’s all just…here.”

Electricity sparks through the agents. There are a few whoops, a few muttered oaths of surprise, one or two low whistles. Everyone knows what this means.

“Get it on disk,” O’Doul says instantly to Chan. “See if we can get any hits in the database.” To the other agents, O’Doul says, “Everybody get on it. I want to know if we’ve got something ASAP.”

In a daze, I copy the report to a thumb drive and hand it over to Chan. He bolts over to his computer station and proceeds to run a virus scan on the thumb drive. When that comes up clear, he uploads the report to the FBI’s system. The other agents head back to their computers as well, all thoughts of food abandoned.

This is big. Bigger than big. The footprint of S?ren’s malware can now be compared to a million different fragments of software gained from investigations into various computer crimes conducted by government agencies all over the world.

Whatever else S?ren has been up to, the FBI will now be able to discover.

Finally!

“What are the other reports?” asks Connor, still behind me. I turn and look up at him.

“All kinds of digital artifacts from his system. RAM data. Cross-drive analysis—”

“His location?”

There’s something scary in his eyes I’ve never seen before. Something deadly. It’s like I’m looking at another person. He’s wearing the flat, killer gaze of a jihadist.

“If we’re lucky…yes.”

“Thank you for your help, Miss West,” says O’Doul.

I glance at him and notice he’s sweating. His eyes are overly bright.

“Oh. You’re welcome. But we still have a lot of work—”

“Step aside.”

Caught off guard, I blink. “Excuse me?”

“The information on your system is crime scene evidence. Step aside, please.”

It takes a second for me to comprehend him. When I do, I jump to my feet, spin around, and hold my arms out in a protective stance.

“You’re not touching her!” I shout.

“Whoa, whoa,” says Ryan, confused. “Her who?”

“My computer!”

Connor is still wearing his serial killer look. He says calmly, “You must’ve known this would happen, Tabby.”