Page 4
R eeni glared at Trevor, who struggled to hold in his laughter, even as snorts of disgust erupted from the others.
“When you say, ghosties ,” Trevor began, “what does that mean to you?”
“It means foreign energy is there, almost as if from somebody who’s not here.… I feel energy that doesn’t belong to anybody else here. I feel energy that’s come from a distance, as if it traveled here.” She spoke in bits and pieces, then, embarrassed, she dropped her head. “I call them ghosties because they don’t leave a footprint.”
“They don’t leave a footprint in an electronic system or don’t leave a footprint on an electronic system?” Trevor asked, looking for clarification.
She smiled. “Most people wouldn’t even think to ask that,” she said, “but in this case I would go with in the system.”
“So, you’re saying that somebody, something, has accessed or has come here and attached itself to this energy.”
“It’s already gotten in,” she declared. “I don’t know how or why. I don’t know if they downloaded something that would have set this off, but what I can say with certainty is that this feels… as if it was planned. It feels like deliberate sabotage, and it feels very much like a ghost.”
“Okay, so that ghost term,” Damon noted, looking over at her puzzled, “I gather that’s a phrase you’re accustomed to using.”
“Yes, I guess so. It’s when you have something that you can’t find any tracks for,” she explained. “I don’t know if you guys understand what I mean.”
“We would use the term ghost for somebody who causes chaos, then disappears without leaving a trace. Something you can’t see.”
“Exactly,” she agreed. “So what you have here is an electronic ghost, but I don’t mean electronic as in hardware. I mean electronic as in software—kind of.”
Bullard’s breath went out in a solid whoosh as he raised one brow and stared at her, then over at Damon. “But that’s our specialty,” he grumbled.
“Inside job,” Reeni muttered, getting another glare from Bullard.
Damon studied her intently. “That’s a fascinating concept, but I’m wondering… if you can see that energy, can you track it too?”
She pondered that and shrugged. “I can see that it’s leaving this building.” She looked around, as if literally seeing something. “I can see that it’s attached to this server base and to that actual disk.” Then she shook her head and took a cleansing breath. “Now, to see it past that point, I’m not so sure,” she muttered, “because there’s…” She hesitated, then winced and looked over at Trevor nervously. “You won’t like this.”
“We may not,” he agreed, with a smile, “but we will deal with it, and we promise we won’t shoot the messenger. Right, guys? Just say it, Reeni. What are you seeing?”
“It’s characteristically male energy, and there’s an awful lot of… I want to say, violence , but it’s more like anger attached to it. I don’t always get emotions, but, in this case, I feel a cold and clinical perception, and then, every once in a while, rage spills into it.”
Everybody stopped and stared at her. Meanwhile Trevor ejected that disk, holding it carefully.
She shrugged. “Yeah, I get it. You don’t like anything I have to say, and it’s hard to believe anything I have to offer.” She nodded glumly at the others. “Why is it that I have such a hard time getting anybody to listen to me about what I see and what I don’t see?”
“It’s a fairly untested field, for one thing,” Damon shared, continuing to study her.
“You’re checking out my energy right now,” she noted, watching him. “Do you see anything that says deception?”
“No, I don’t. Not at all.”
She nodded. “But what you’re also not seeing is anything you really recognize. That’s because I’m an anomaly in your world.”
“I would have said that not too many more anomalies were possible, yet you’re proving me wrong there,” Damon noted honestly. “I don’t have anything against new, different, or unique.” He turned to the others. “I definitely have seen an awful lot more at Terk’s place over these last few months than we ever expected to see. So I’m certainly not discounting anything Reeni has to say, but, because her line of expertise is so nebulous, it’s much harder to prove.” She nodded, and Damon circled back to where they started. “The question now though is this.… Reeni, can you track where this angry energy is coming from?”
She stared at him for a moment. “Do you have a map?”
His eyebrows shot up, and he turned to Bullard. “Do you have any big maps here?’
“Come on.” Bullard walked out of the room, headed off to a different corner of this building, and into a very large office area, with massive electronic screens up on the walls.
She looked at it all and smiled, as a world map appeared. “I do love this,” she muttered warmly. She walked over to the map, closed her eyes, and seconds later stuck a finger almost blindly on the map. “Here,” she declared. As soon as she pinpointed an area, everybody crowded around her.
Bullard stated, “But that’s where we are now.”
She double-checked. “Oh.”
“What do you mean, oh ?” Bullard asked, glaring at her.
“How was I supposed to know?” she replied, “I had my eyes closed.”
“So, how is it that you chose that spot?” Trevor jumped in, seeing the frustration on the other faces.
“Because… I can feel it.”
“So, the energy that you see coming out of the computer server on that one disk, you’re telling us that you can feel the source of it.”
“I can tell you where it’s coming from, and it’s coming from here, this area.”
“Okay, so…” Trevor looked over at Bullard. “Zoom in on this map.”
Bullard walked over to a wall unit, made several clicks, and up came a large map of the building where they stood and the surrounding area.
She walked over and put her finger on a specific point within this map. “Here. I can see it arcing from this point to where we are.”
“Well hell,” Bullard muttered. “I know that apartment building. My brother used to live there.”
Immediately silence came from all around them, as Damon asked Bullard cautiously, “This apartment building can’t be connected to you or your team, can it?”
“I trust my team,” Bullard stated. “So I would never in a million years have thought so. Yet I wouldn’t have expected someone to walk into my house and tell me that I had an electronic ghost either.”
She shrugged. “I just haven’t come up with a better name. Bottom line, somebody is trying to access your system, but he doesn’t need a computer to do it.”
“That’s the part I don’t get,” one of the men piped up. “What do you mean, he doesn’t need the computer to hack the system? How is that even possible?”
Damon and Trevor glanced at each other and then over at Bullard, who still frowned at them.
“God, this will be one of those woo-woo things you can’t explain, isn’t it?” Bullard asked.
“Yeah, it sure is,” Trevor declared, with a smile. “It’s one of those things that none of us can explain in a way that anyone can understand, even among some of us energy workers.”
At that, Bullard glared. “That’s even worse because, are you guys saying we have an energy worker gone bad, one of Terk’s guys gone bad?”
Trevor shook his head. “No way. Not anybody on Terk’s team or even associated with him. Yet you may have someone with some limited energy skills, or with some smoke-and-mirrors deceptions to give that illusion.”
Bullard shook his head. “If it were just you two guys, I would sit here and argue until I was blue in the face, and you would do something stupid and prove to me that I’m wrong.” He was oozing frustration now, and all three of them could see it. “Then I would give in and acknowledge that there’s a lot of shit in this world I don’t want to deal with and that you guys can handle any cases that have that crap. Then she comes along,” he added, turning to glare at Reeni, “and there’s no proof, there’s nothing. What do you expect me to do now?”
She looked at him and asked, “You want proof?” She reached out a hand, snatched the disk from Trevor’s hand, and popped it into Bullard’s hand. “Tell me what’s on it.”
Everybody looked at each other for a moment, then one of the men grabbed the disk and walked over to another computer, and brought it up. “It’s blank,” he said in shock, turning to Bullard.
“What do you mean it’s blank? That’s the server for our satellite.”
Just then all the phone lines rang, and even Damon’s cell phone went off.
“What the hell?” Bullard roared. “What’s going on?” He brought up his phone, and it was Levi.
Levi yelled, “What the hell is going on?”
“What do you mean?” Bullard asked in confusion.
“Your satellite’s going nuts up there,” he bellowed. “It’s about to crash.”
“No, no, no, no,” Bullard cried out. He asked Levi, “Do you have any way to control it from your end?”
“No, I don’t, but, if it’s a computer systems problem, there should be a backup disk.”
“Yes, where’s that damn backup?” Bullard yelled, turning to his men, who were all scrambling.
As all that chaos was going on, Trevor watched Reeni. She stood in the midst of it all, as if a calm ocean. As soon as his gaze landed on her, he looked at her intently and asked, “Can you fix it?”
She looked at him. “I think so. Do you want me to?”
“Yes, damn it. Why don’t you step up and do that?” Bullard snapped, his gaze hard, fiery. “It would give a whole lot more validity to what you say you can do, but do it now.”
“I don’t know what I can do,” she replied, almost irritated by his comment. “As you well know there are no clear-cut answers.” Still, she returned to the server room and pointed. “Put the disk back in the server.”
Without question, one of the men replaced the disk into the server and stepped back.
She closed her eyes, placed her hand over the top, and frowned.
Almost immediately Trevor felt an inner nudge. He walked over and placed his hand on her shoulder, feeling her energy surge into his, with a sense of power he didn’t remember her having control of before. He called Damon over.
Damon stepped up and placed a hand on Trevor’s shoulder, and with the three sets of energy plowing forward, Reeni did something Trevor couldn’t explain, making all their hair stand up as the air filled with electrical crackles. Then their energy surged and stilled, and the weird crackling in the air stilled as well.
Finally silence once again fell over the room.