White-Hot Hack (Kate and Ian #2)(65)
He was on his feet immediately, coming around from behind the desk to sit down beside her and gather her in his arms. “Kate, I’m sorry. I know you wouldn’t.”
His apology only made her cry harder, and he rubbed her back as she sobbed.
“I don’t know why I can’t stop crying,” she said.
It wasn’t like her to get upset like that, but the tears were probably a delayed reaction. She could downplay it all she wanted, but the security guard’s actions had undoubtedly scared her more than she was letting on.
“I’ve got you,” he said, holding her tightly in his arms until she quieted.
When her sobs finally tapered off, she lifted her head from his chest and he looked into her eyes.
“Listen to me. There’s brave and there’s dumb. And you don’t do dumb, sweetness. You never have. So can this not be about bravery or equality or any of the other things you’re thinking it’s about? Can this just be about me not wanting any harm to come to the person I love most in this world?”
“Okay,” she said softly as he wiped her tears. “Please don’t be upset with Rob. I know he blames himself, but it wasn’t his fault. I went where he couldn’t see me.”
“I’m not upset with Rob. I’m glad he was there.”
“I’ll be right back.”
When she hadn’t returned after ten minutes, he went looking for her. Maybe they could compromise so she wouldn’t have to quit entirely. The bathroom door was half-open, and Kate was standing in front of the sink, looking down with her back to him.
“There are plenty of things you can still do from home. E-mail is just as effective for getting malware onto a target network. There’s phishing and spoofing, not to mention all the things you can do over the phone. And there may be other assignments we can do together. I’d be okay with that as long as I was with you.”
She turned around, and there were tears on her cheeks again. Had she gone to the bathroom because she wasn’t done crying but didn’t want him to see? He was afraid she’d taken the news of her retirement even harder than he’d thought until she grabbed his hand and placed something in his palm. It was a pregnancy test, and there was no mistaking the result.
“A baby?” he said.
“I thought my shirt seemed a little tight in the chest when I put it on this morning, and I seem to be in the midst of some sort of hormonal shit storm, because I cannot stop crying to save my life. So I started thinking maybe I should pee on a stick while I was in here.”
“A baby,” he said again. Kate was going to have a baby. His baby. Their baby.
She appeared to be laughing and crying when she said, “I guess you knew how to make them after all.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Ian went into his office after breakfast. Charlie had been privy to an almost endless stream of the hacktivists’ online chats, but they’d failed to yield enough specific information to shed light on their agenda. They would assume the FBI was listening in and would therefore be cautious about the types of things they shared. Charlie felt certain that high-level members of the group were chatting on another channel, but so far he hadn’t been able to wrangle an invitation to join them. The task force had spent hours in their meetings analyzing the conversations in their possession, but whatever the hacktivists were planning remained just beyond their reach. They knew something was heading their way, but what?
They’d theorized that the words dark and darkness that appeared in the first transcript Charlie shared with the group referenced a future denial of service attack. And while there had been a series of additional attacks on various websites, none of them had been particularly damaging. But lately Ian had been pondering a different outcome because when he combined dark and darkness with another word from the transcript, he thought they might be looking at a more literal interpretation.
Dark and darkness and power.
Dark and darkness and the power grid.
At first he’d dismissed his hunch because he considered it too unlikely to be taken seriously, but he hadn’t put it out of his mind entirely and told himself there was no harm in gathering enough data to explore it further. He’d tracked down the person in charge of monitoring and collecting information regarding attacks on the power grid. The information was compiled daily and reports were issued quarterly. The last report, covering October through December, showed only slightly higher than normal activity, which seemed to disprove his theory. However, Ian didn’t want to wait another month for the next report at the end of March; he wanted to see if there had been any recent changes. He could have asked Phillip to approve a request to run the report a few weeks early, but that would take time and Ian had never been known for his patience.
There were three major sectors of the power grid—the Eastern, Western, and Texas Interconnections, and they could be compromised in many different ways. The most alarming scenario would be an electromagnetic pulse, which would be the most devastating because it was one of the only things that could take down all three interconnections simultaneously.
The grid was also vulnerable to physical threats like the sniper attack that had occurred on a substation in California, which had left parts of Silicon Valley in the dark. The unsolved case had been the most noteworthy attack on the grid by domestic terrorists to date.