Lock In (Lock In, #1)(35)

“Worried about what?” I asked.

“A test?” May ventured. “Something that he had to do that he was nervous about. I don’t remember.”

“Okay,” I said.

“When do we get him back?” Janis asked. “I mean, when does he get to come home?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I can check.”

“He needs to be buried here,” May said.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “That’s a promise.”

May and Janis looked at me expressionlessly.

“They handled it well,” I said, after Redhouse and I left the trailer and headed to the car.

“Some of us try not to show too much emotion about death,” Redhouse said. “The thinking is if you go on about it, you can keep a spirit from moving on.”

“Do you believe that?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter whether I believe it or not,” Redhouse said.

“Fair point,” I said.

“Anything on the money order?”

“Serial number and routing information,” I said. “You want it?”

“I wouldn’t mind,” Redhouse said. “I don’t know if the FBI would be happy with you for sharing information.”

“I think my partner would tell me that sharing with the local police is the polite thing to do, unless you hate that cop in particular.”

“You have an interesting partner.”

“That I do,” I said, and got into the car. “Let’s go down to the server farm.”

* * *

“Johnny Sani,” Loren Begay said. He was the head of HR for the Window Rock Computational Facility, as well as the head of several other departments, including sales and janitorial. The staff at WRCF was as bare bones as Redhouse had advertised. “I went to school with him. For a while.”

“I’m asking about something a little closer in time than that,” I said. “His family said he applied for a job here last year. Is that right?”

“He did,” Begay said. “I had to fire a janitor for sleeping on the job. Needed someone who could take the overnight shift. He applied. So did sixty other people. I gave it to one of the other janitors’ sister.”

“Johnny Sani’s family says that you called him back for a follow-up and that’s when he got offered a different job,” Redhouse said.

“I never called him back,” Begay said.

“You didn’t?” I asked.

“Why would I call him back?” Begay asked. “The man’s slow as they come. He could barely fill out the application.”

“You don’t need much of an education to push a broom,” Redhouse said.

“No, but I want someone with enough sense not to touch any buttons he’s not supposed to,” Begay said. “This place isn’t to capacity, but we still have clients.”

“Who are your clients, Mr. Begay?” I asked.

Begay looked over to Redhouse.

“It’s okay,” Redhouse said.

Begay looked unconvinced about the okayness but spoke anyway. “All of the Nation’s governmental departments are in here, plus a few others from nations around the country. Then we’ve got a few private clients, mostly businesses from around here or that do business around here. The biggest of those would be Medichord.”

“What’s Medichord?” I asked.

“Medical services company,” Begay said. “They contract to run the Nation’s medical services. Been doing that for six, seven years.”

“I remember when they came in,” Redhouse said. “Promised to train and promote Navajo medical personnel in return for an exclusive contract.”

“Have they?” I asked. Redhouse shrugged.

“It’s quasi-governmental and confidential medical information, so Medichord keeps all the Navajo data here instead of linking it up with the rest of their network,” Begay said.

“No one else would use this facility to do a job search?” I asked.

“I wish they would,” Begay said. “We’ve got the office space and we could use the business. But no.”

“Do any of the private companies send reps or IT guys here?”

“The companies we got, if they had an IT department, they probably wouldn’t need us so much,” Begay said. “But they don’t need to come here anyway. They can access their servers and data remotely with standard software. What we do is host and act as backup if for some reason what IT people they have do something stupid. Which does happen.”

“Can someone hack into this place?” I asked.

“I should tell you no, but you’re a Haden, so I’m guessing you’re not stupid about these things,” Begay said. “So I’ll tell you that if anything is connected to the outside world, it’s hackable. That said, all the Nation data is on servers that are accessible only from Nation computers that are either GPS-tagged or require two-factor authentication or both.”

“And that includes this Medichord company,” I said.

“It does,” said Begay. “Why are you asking about Johnny Sani?”

“He died,” I said.

“That’s too bad,” Begay said. “He was a nice guy.”