False Idols - Published Version

Chapter 25

                  

The breakthrough happened suddenly.

Sarah and Michael had spent countless days trying to find any evidence of Laura's crimes. They had painstakingly investigated and reinvestigated the bombings of the Aeon satellite and Nick Lal's parents' car. As with the Hurricane Reactor disaster, they could find circumstantial evidence that an Aeon like Laura was probably involved. Yet they could never find any hard proof.

Sarah knew in her gut that Laura had committed all three crimes in cold blood. The Hurricane Reactor blowout had killed scores of civilians and started a severe economic depression. Conveniently, Laura had founded Sparkwise just months before the Hurricane disaster, putting her in a position to capitalize on the ensuing energy shortages. She had repeated the trick by buying up pipelines weeks before the Five Mile Creek blowouts that destroyed most competing transport capacity.

The bombing of the Aeon satellite had cost Laura a fortune and incinerated a team of engineers that were working for her. These losses would seem to put her beyond suspicion. Yet Laura had smoothly used the event to convince the other Aeons they were under attack. Maybe Laura valued their obedience above all else.

Most cold blooded of all was the murder of Nick's parents. Laura had clearly devised the bombing to remove Dr. Aakar Lal, who was working to weaken Sparkwise's grip on the nation's energy resources, and was the last remaining counterbalance against the weight of Laura's influence over Nick. Nick's injury in the bombing had no doubt seemed like icing on the cake to Laura, who had taken the opportunity to "rescue" him from an intensive care unit.

Sarah's hatred of Laura grew stronger every time she thought of the pain that Laura had intentionally brought to Nick. The prospect of uncovering Laura's misdeeds to discredit her in Nick's eyes had become a new motivation for her.

But no matter how hard they worked, she and Michael never found any evidence solid enough to prove Laura's guilt. Nor could they find any clues as to where she might strike next. Sarah and Michael both believed the answers lay in the secure servers of Sparkwise, which had recently been relocated to Sanctuary. Michael had even found hints that the memory address of the most secret files began with the letter "D". But the holes that Michael had found in the Aeons' systems had long since been plugged, and they had never been able to find a way back to those servers.

Until this morning.

"The construction firms working on the Sanctuary facility just installed a landline phone system around the worksite. They think this is more secure than using wireless signals to coordinate their work. But there's a good chance the landline installation was sloppy, and the temporary phone lines intersect with the data wires serving the internal servers," explained Michael. "There's no way to be sure, and we'll have to manually search the phone system line by line, but it's our best bet."

"Let's go, Ghost 2," said Sarah. Since Willy had given their small unit the name Ghosts, they used the call signs Ghost 1 and Ghost 2 whenever they were in the ether spying on the Aeons.

In a moment, they were within the main phone switch of the Sanctuary development site.

She looked around her surroundings. She was standing in a giant, perfectly spherical room whose shimmering white walls were evenly lit with bright white light. The curving walls were honeycombed with dozens of narrow, dark pipes leading in all directions.

Michael followed her gaze around the spherical room. "My theory depends on how they've wired their systems together. If they're smart, they won't have allowed any intersections."

"Let's hope they're not smart."

Michael flashed an imitation of one of Willy's winks. "Let's do it, Ghost 1."