Chapter Fifty-Seven

“Mr. Slocum, I’m Darren Allen with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” The man flashed his badge. “You have two people in your hospital; a Jason Wright and an Ellen Frank. These two people are of interest to the government. We’re here to ensure their safety.”

“Please, sit down gentlemen,” said Arnold.

Allen whispered to his partner who immediately went to the door and disappeared. “I trust this office is private. And for the record, Mr. Slocum, this conversation doesn’t leave this room.”

Nodding wearily, Slocum said, “Of course. So this is murder then.”

“Attempted murder.”

“Unfortunately, Agent Allen, it’s murder. Jason Wright died hours ago. Ms. Frank is still in the operating room.”

“I see. Mr. Slocum, I’ll be putting personnel in your hospital for the next few days to guarantee the safety of Ms. Frank until she’s well enough to move. I also want all records concerning her removed from your computer system immediately.”

“Well, Agent Allen, I’m not the person you need discuss this with. Our Chief of Surgery will speak to the possibility of moving Ms. Frank, and our System Architect will have to discuss removing her records from our system with you.”

“We need to speak to them immediately.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible. Dr. McIntyre is still in surgery, and as I understand it, Ms. Haverty has a broken foot. She was a patient, but she’s been released. I’m not sure she’s still here.”

“Find out, Mr. Slocum. I want them both up here as soon as possible.”

***

“Mark,” yelled Leah over her cube wall. “Would you load a CPU, monitor, keyboard and cables on a cart for me, please?”

“Sure,” he yelled back. After a new minutes, he rolled the computer laden cart into Leah’s cube. “Where we going?”

She smiled. “To my office.”

Looking puzzled, Mark said, “Aren’t we in your office?”

“Slocum gave me an office on the executive floor.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Because he wants a technical presence up there before he hires his new CIO and staff so people will get used to the idea. I don’t know that I’ll ever use it, but I promised him we would install a machine. You ready?”

Motioning toward the elevator, Mark waited for Leah to lead the way, and then followed behind her, pushing the cart. “Do I get to hear about your foot, Chester?”

“No. And don’t call me Chester.”

When they arrived in the executive office, Mark placed the computer on the desk, and then got down on his hands and knees looking for the outlets. Once he found them, Leah dropped his end of the cables over the back of the desk and plugged the other ends into the computer.

Both looked up when Arnold’s secretary entered the office. “Ms. Haverty, I thought I saw you up here. Mr. Slocum needs to see you in his office. It’s urgent.”

“Urgent?” She looked down at Mark, still on the floor. “I hope The Committee didn’t change their minds. Would you test this machine when you’re finished, Mark? I shouldn’t be too long.”

He nodded, and Leah followed Slocum’s secretary to his office, smiling suspiciously at the man standing outside his door. “You look like one of mine,” she said, chuckling as she entered the office. She stopped when she saw the second man in Slocum’s office dressed in a black suit and white shirt. “Mr. Slocum?” she asked, tensing when she heard the door close behind her.

“Please sit down, Ms. Haverty,” said Arnold. “We’re waiting for Dr. McIntyre to join us before we start.”

“That could take awhile. He’s still in surgery, and when he’s done with his part, he’s observing Dr. Applebaum and Dr. Fry.”

“How do you know what he’s doing, may I ask?”

Slocum leaned back in his chair. “Ms. Haverty, this is Agent Allen with the FBI.”

“FBI?” she said, looking back over her shoulder. She turned back toward Arnold who was making a call to the surgery suite. Picking a piece of string off her skirt, she flicked it onto the floor, speaking to Allen with her back turned to him. “I hate to tell you this, Agent Allen, but everyone in this hospital knows what that team is doing. Most of us saw the victims on television when they were brought into the hospital, and none of us thought they’d survive. What those surgeons and nurses are doing down there is the stuff miracles are made of. If you’re goal is to keep this quiet, you’ve already lost.” Allen’s eyes bore into the back of her head.

“McIntyre’s on his way,” said Slocum. He looked at Leah. “He’s not happy.”

“I don’t suppose he is.”

Hospital employees asked him how surgery went as Trapper moved swiftly down the hall to the elevator. It wasn’t that he was ignoring them, more that he was about to explode. The agent at the door of Slocum’s office grabbed at his arm to stop him from entering, but Trapper jerked it away and stormed into the office. “Arnold, someone had better be dying on your floor.” He stutter-stepped when he saw Leah sitting in a chair in front of Arnold’s desk. Approaching her, he asked, “What is going on?”

Jerking her thumb to the back of her, she said, “The Feds are interested in your patients.”

“Why are you here?”

She shrugged. “It wasn’t my idea.”

“Dr. McIntyre, I’m Darren Allen,” he said, flashing his badge.

“FBI,” said Trapper, moving his hands to his hips and looking down at the floor. He took a deep breath before he looked the man square in the eye. “I understand why you’re here, but you’re not doing the patient any favors by interrupting her surgery.”

“Dr. McIntyre, I appreciate what you and you’re team are doing, but just as soon as she’s stable, she’ll be moved to a military hospital.”

“No, she won’t. She can’t be moved. It will kill her.”

“I assure you, we’ll have the very best of our military doctors to ensure her move doesn’t kill her.”

“Your military doctors can’t guarantee anything, and neither can I. You have to understand the woman is patched together. She has over a thousand sutures inside her, and by the time our orthopedists are finished, probably fifty times that amount on her outsides, not including all the hardware they’ve used to try to save her arms and legs. We’re not even moving her to an ICU room for awhile. One small jostle could tear any number of those sutures.” Trapper raised a hand and pointed his finger at Allen. “You need whatever information she had on Xanda. If she dies because you move her, your case against Xanda is gone. Leaving her here is your best chance.”

“McIntyre, we have to get her to a secure location.”

“You try to move her, and I’ll pull every string I can to stop you.”

The two men glared at each other in a stalemate for a tense moment until Agent Allen turned his attention to Leah. “Ms. Haverty, you will erase all records for Ellen Frank from your computer system.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

“Then I’ll have my own people do it.”

“No, you won’t,” said Leah, standing and facing him. “The functions of this hospital are tightly regulated by the computer system; a system required by regulations of the same government you work for. The doctors can’t order her medication or the equipment she’ll need in the ICU room. They can’t reschedule her for surgery, if required, without it. They can’t even order a piece of gauze without that computer system.”

“Then your own computer system could be putting her life at risk.”

Leah crossed her arms and looked away. “I doubt that.”

“Look, you two. These people were thrown into a garbage compactor. Whoever did that didn’t plan for them to come out alive, and if they’re that intent on shutting them up, they’ll be here in your hospital, and you won’t even know it.”

“Then why don’t you take care of security, Agent Allen, and let us take care of the patient?” asked Trapper almost yelling.

“Ms. Haverty, what happens if you change her status to expired?”

“A dead patient doesn’t require medication or anything else. Her doctors won’t be able to get anything for her. But what we can do is enter her records under an alias.”

Agent Allen puffed up. “Surely, your tightly regulated system won’t allow that.”

“It will flag the record when eligibility isn’t found. It’s not a fatal error because we do get people in here from other countries who have no social security number. That notification goes on a report to be worked manually in the hospital’s business office. I can intercept those reports.”

Trapper sat on the side of Arnold’s desk, and the two men watched the antagonistic conversation between Leah and Agent Allen continue.

“Who in the hospital has access to the records?” asked Agent Allen, looking for hole he could exploit.

Looking stoically at him, Leah crossed her arms. “Everyone who works with a patient as well as the business office. I can restrict access to everyone except key personnel.”

“The chance of someone breaking a password increases by the number of key personnel.”

“A person trying to break into the system would need more than a password. They’d also need a passkey which only the owner of a user ID knows. I’m the only person who can override a passkey.”

“I don’t think you understand, Ms. Haverty. Passwords…passkeys…they can all be broken.”

Leah looked down at her feet, breathing deeply before she looked back up. “Then we can limit access to Dr. Applebaum, Dr. McIntyre, the attending nurse and myself. I can change our passkeys to sixteen by sixteen bit encryption. Even if someone has a password decoding device, I can program the system to detect it, and if the first three or four strings are decoded, the system will regenerate all sixteen strings, and they’ll have to start over. The system will page me when it has to regenerate the strings, so not only will I know that someone has tried to hack in, I’ll know where they tried. I’ll also be able to provide the new encrypted passkey to whoever got hacked.” She gave him a condescending smile. “I know the government is familiar with the use of decoding devices, but the difference is that while most decoding devices available decode decimal numbers, my encryption is binary. One whole number in decimal is the equivalent of a byte in binary. Each byte is made up of eight bits, and that is the level that I create my encryptions.”

Trapper and Arnold watched the exchange and glanced at each other with raised eyebrows and smiles at Agent Allen’s sudden discomfort.

“You can do that?”

“I wouldn’t offer to do it if I couldn’t.”

“Do you realize that once the bad guys figure out you’re the key to the computer system, your life could be in danger?” Agent Allen positioned himself between Trapper and Arnold at the desk and Leah, addressing Trapper. “All of you could be in danger in the beginning, but once they figure out they can’t get past the passkeys, they’ll turn their attention to you, Ms. Haverty.”

She folded her lips into a tight line and exhaled loudly. “Ellen Franks can’t be moved. I don’t see another choice.”

“Now wait a minute,” said Trapper, standing and glaring at Leah, then looking back at Allen. “What difference does it make if they find her records? Can’t you protect a single room in a hospital? How desperate are these people to keep her quiet?”

“Dr. McIntyre, what she knows could close Xanda down. They’re only work is government contracts, many of them defense contracts specifically dealing with nukes and nuclear waste. Xanda does have competition, so the government has choices. Without those contracts, a billion dollar corporation fails and takes all the suits employed there with it, and some of those will go to prison.”

“Answer the second question; can’t you protect a single room in a hospital?”

“We can, but you know as well as I do the government always has contingencies, Captain McIntyre. So what we are going to do is change Ms. Frank’s hospital record to show that she’s dead, we’re going to establish a record under an alias with only her ongoing treatment, and we are going to limit access to those records using Ms. Haverty’s encryption programs to secure them.” Agent Allen moved his jacket back to place a hand on his hip. He pointed a finger of the other hand at Trapper. “And if you give me any problems, I’ll bring you back to active duty. Then if you decide you don’t want to obey orders, you’ll face a court martial.”

“What’s the military got to do with this?” yelled Trapper, stepping into Agent Allen, who stood up straight to face him.

“They’ll be providing your protection,” he yelled back.

Moving next to Trapper and squeezing his arm, Leah said quietly, “Nukes, Trapper. It’s not Xanda failing that has the government scrambling. It’s the disposition of the nuclear material.”