Page 54 of Curvy Quirky Omega

I turned left and saw an empty workstation ready and waiting for whoever might need access.

Sitting in the chair, I grabbed the desk to keep from rolling down the corridor, already feeling giddy about digging in to the meat of this place.

The files I was given access to before were detailed and went over every aspect of the company, but they hadn’t given me an admin account.

In hindsight, I was glad they hadn’t. Whoever was deleting data would have seen me rifling through the servers and they would have done everything in their power to make it impossible for me to find out what they were doing.

I entered in the credentials and password Cas rattled off and then chewed on the inside of my cheek as I waited for the system to give me access. I bounced my leg up and down as the account opened, hoping this wasn’t enough to send an alert.

Liam leaned against one of the racks and slipped his hands in his pockets, watching the monitor just as intently as I was. “What exactly is it you’re looking for?”

The second I was in, I went and created a new network admin account that would give me access to everything, including the authentication server. “Do you want the short answer or the long answer?”

“The long answer.” Liam typed in his password when I waved my hand at the keyboard, and he signed over the keys to the kingdom just like that.

I had the power to destroy everything or hold it hostage, and he didn’t seem to care. It was a bit overwhelming honestly.

“Right now I’m creating a new network admin account I can use to access the authentication server without setting off any alerts. They’ll see that a new one has been created and who approved it if they choose to look, but they won’t know who owns the account. With my new credentials, I’m going to be able to see what’s being sent where, and from whom.”

Ideally, anyway.

“I’m going to reroute any alerts to the IT department that I can but if they decide to physically inspect all the servers, they’ll be able to figure out what I’m doing,” I warned him.

Going through the accounts with the highest credentials first, I made a note of those on my phone before going through the rest of it.

“If you set this up right, anything that’s being sent outside your network should be tracked,” I explained. “And if someone sends something somewhere it’s not allowed to go, your network should block it from being sent.”

Thankfully, it looked like their security was pretty decent, but there weren’t enough fail-safes in place considering how the creation of my new network admin account hadn’t sent an alert to anyone. That worked in my favor, but it was something we’d need to fix when all this was over with.

Liam’s credentials might be able to override the current alert system the IT department had set up, but if that were the case, then those at the highest levels could erase anything and no one would be the wiser.

I pulled up all the executive profiles and opened them in sequential order so that whoever dug around in my history could see I wasn’t looking for anything overly specific. I kept them all open and then checked Liam’s and Cas’s credentials first.

As I suspected, they had an override setting.

I opened Gideon’s next and saw the same setting on his account. My leg bounced up and down as I typed as fast as I could, going through his login history. I went completely still when I saw the last time he’d logged in to his account.

Just to be sure, I checked the date and then the date of his death.

Fuck…this was bad. Very bad.

I made a note of that on my phone and then reached in my coat pocket for my flash drive. My stomach was in knots and all the confidence Liam’s presence was giving me drained away.

If I was right…that person was definitely in the building right now.

Chewing on my lip, I installed my various programs on the authentication server first and then set the command to send my programs to the other servers at random the second the upload was complete.

What I needed to find was the IP address of who was deleting data. If I couldn’t find that, I needed the IP address of where that information was being sent. I couldn’t waste time digging around in the servers.

Not when it was going to increase the chances of getting caught.

“It’s definitely someone who works in the IT department,” I whispered as I went through the history on the authentication server around the dates I needed. “No one else would have this kind of access. I don’t know who else would even have the credentials to delete data packets at this level other than the executives.”

Liam didn’t say anything as I followed the trail as quickly as I could.

I could restore the data from here, but I just didn’t have the time and something like that could mess with enough shit the computer nerds would come down here to see what the fuck was going on.

“We’re going to need all the footage from the server room. Going back at least a year, maybe two.” I didn’t have the time or resources to clone these servers either, but if I was lucky, they had backups somewhere.

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