Free The Omega Team: Keeping Karen (Kindle Worlds Novella) by Heather Long Page B

herself or him, gave her a good reason to access his wifi. While Ethan paced the living room, filling in his contact, she opened her laptop, located his wifi, and began running the program to decrypt his password.
    Sixteen-bit encryption could take a while. Four numbers in, Ethan paused behind her, and she tilted her head to meet his gaze. His mouth tightened, but he leaned past her and typed the password in. He then pointed a finger at her and mouthed, Mask.
    Masking the IP was the first rule of any hacking, but she would go a step further and bounce her connection through a series of open servers until she could spoof a different IP entirely. Once she was on the net, she began her hunt. Whomever worked at the bank needed access to all accounts. Most tellers could see what was in an account, and they might even be able to process transactions with the customer present and providing access with their bank card.
    So , she would eliminate that first tier as having the time or access to sit on a transaction. In all likelihood, they were seeking someone in management or… IT. Flipping to the report she hadn’t filed, she reread her information on the skimmer. The program had been uploaded during a server upgrade. It created the worm which began surfing all the transactions, yet it only activated after midnight for a period of about two minutes, during which all the pending transactions from the day before were processed.
    Sophisticated.
    Cagey.
    Distracting.
    “The point, Grey, is someone has to be sitting on that trigger.”
    She didn’t have all the code. Most of it was on the machines the cops had taken into evidence. All she had were the snippets. Scrolling down her report, she reviewed the targeted threads. Each little scrap had been pulled from the main worm, but they included where the money should be sent. Flipping to her email, she scanned for her contact with the bank. He was the head of their internal security auditors. He’d asked for her specifically.
    “Ethan…”
    “Hang on, Grey.” He pivoted to face her. “Yeah, darlin’?” A warm feeling invaded her every time he said darlin’. It was both familiar and all together new in the same instant.
    “It’s someone in their internal security department.” She trusted her gut on this.
    “Okay, why do you think that?” He didn’t dispute her assertion, merely asked for more facts.
    “The head of their internal security auditors hired me to do an independent audit. He wanted me to go over all the code. He has a dozen or more employees all equally capable of doing what I did and probably for cheaper…”
    “He thought it was an inside job, which is why he needed an outside auditor.” Ethan frowned. “Did you catch that Grey?” He said nothing, listening to the person on the other end of the phone.
    “That or he thought they would catch the transfers themselves. I wasn’t supposed to be looking for those. If I didn’t skim all transactions, I might have missed them entirely.” Yet the code she’d found had intrigued her enough to dig deeper.
    “Name?”
    “Angela Kruger.” That gave him pause. The man who hired her had been a woman. “Yes, Ethan. Women can be bad guys, too.” Despite the tightness of his expression, a flash of humor warmed his eyes.
    “Grey, we need everything you can find on an Angela Kruger, and we should probably get eyes on her…”
    “She’s at the Ninety-Nine Club on Connecticut Avenue Northwest.” Scrolling through the woman’s social media, she found three separate check-in programs. “She got there about twenty-five minutes ago.”
    Ethan gave her another look.
    “What? I’m just following her breadcrumbs.” Even if Angela was behind the transfers, that didn’t mean she’d targeted Karen specifically. Of course, she could have pointed those who did right at me.
    “Thanks, Grey. Let me know.” After disconnecting the call, Ethan dropped onto the sofa next to her. She loved the feeling of his thigh