Page 3 of Vienna Bargain

It didn’t matter. He’d been played for a fool.

One of the last men to enter walked up to him, pushing his visor up.

“Mr. Wagner,” he said in crisp German. “I’m Commander Fischer with RTW. We saw the cameras activate. We have a team on the way to sweep the building, and will discover how she got in and—”

“I brought her in. As a guest.” Alexander made sure there was no embarrassment evident in his words or tone. He knew he was speaking more slowly than was normal, a side effect of thinking through each word before it left his mouth. “I woke up, went to check on her. She wasn’t in her room. I found her in the second floor parlor. She’d made a hole in the floor, into the server room.”

Commander Fischer nodded. “Would you like me to contact Wagner Global’s information security team?”

“Yes. And bring in one of your people. I want outside perspective.”

The commander caught on fast. “You think there is an internal issue?”

Alexander looked at Alena. “I think she’s a spy. The question is, who is she spying for?”

He watched as two techs struggled to reassemble and then access Alena’s device.

The lead tech—a Wagner Global employee—sat back. The device was still in pieces but he’d laid them out in what Alexander assumed was a logical order. A cable plugged in to the biggest chunk ran to a laptop the tech had brought with him. “It’s a hardware protocol analyzer.”

The RTW tech looked from the screen to Alexander and nodded, confirming what the first man had said.

The employee watched the exchange, and outrage pinched his features. He glanced at Alexander, mouth open as if he were about to protest.

Alexander raised one brow. The tech closed his mouth and turned back to the laptop.

“What is a hardware protocol analyzer?” Alexander asked quietly.

“It captures data traffic,” the RTW tech said.

“Explain. Further.” Alexander bit off each word.

“Normally these are used to filter and analyze traffic between networks and computers.”

“Normally.” Alexander was going to shake the information out of this man if he didn’t explain fully in the next thirty seconds.

He isn’t the one you want to shake information out of.

“From what I can tell, this was used, via wired connection, for packet sniffing. Packet analyzers that are used to sniff packets means deep data packet inspection took place.”

The Wagner Global employee looked at the security tech, who motioned for him to take over the explanation.

“This was plugged directly in to our cluster servers, and someone used it to intercept and log all the traffic. Data was captured—copied. All the data on there.”

“She copied everything on our server onto that?” Alexander still didn’t fully understand what the device was, but he didn’t need to. “Destroy it.”

Now the techs glanced at each other.

Alexander suppressed a snarl. “What?”

“We can, of course, destroy the mirrored information, but it looks like all the data captured was already transferred out.”

“How?” She’d been alone in the parlor upstairs for a matter of minutes.

“Wirelessly.” The employee tapped a small rectangle of plastic. “Via this transfer device, and using an encrypted satellite link.”

“Who was the data sent to?”

“We can’t trace that, not with what we have.”

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