Ghostwalker 04 - Conspiracy Game

codes. Obviously if he were alive, and had planned to disappear but wanted to see what we were doing, he would have left himself a back door to monitor the computers. There are fifteen computers here in this house, counting mine, the ones in the lab, and the ones in his office, as well as his personal one in his room. There are over a hundred at the Donovans Corporation, where both of us worked. Dad was the majority shareholder and now Whitney Trust is.”
    “And you need his data so you can’t very well wipe everything clean, can you?” Logan asked.
    “Exactly.” Lily tapped the end of her pencil on the tabletop. “If someone could access our computers, they would know every move we make. And they could certainly make educated guesses based on data collected on any given move we make.” She glanced at the woman sitting quietly in the back of the room. “Flame brought it to our attention and we all owe her a lot. We’ve been working on the natural assumption that my father planted back doors in the software programs. We assumed he used the main Internet connection.”
    Ian McGillicuddy, a tall Irishman, raised his hand. “I’m not very good on a computer, Lily.”
    She smiled at him. “Actually, Ian, don’t feel alone. I use them on a daily basis, and it was Arly, our security expert, and eventually Flame who tracked this down. Flame? You want to explain to everyone what’s going on? You’re the one who finally figured it all out.”
    Flame made a face and touched the cap on her head to make certain it was in place.
    Raoul Fontenot leaned over to bite her ear and whisper something that made her blush. She smacked him hard. “You’re such a perv, Raoul.”
    “Don’t call me Raoul, Mrs. Fontenot,” he whispered overly loud. “I told you, Gator .
    They have to call me Gator.”

    “Don’t you call me Mrs. Fontenot,” she hissed between her teeth, the color creeping up her neck.
    “You married him,” Ian pointed out with a wide grin.
    “I was tricked.” Flame shoved at Gator to move him away from her, but he didn’t appear to notice, not budging an inch.
    “The computers,” Ryland reminded them.
    “Sorry,” Flame muttered. “There’s a single Internet line coming into the house, a high-speed cable modem. The cable line hooks up to the cable modem. The modem, in turn, hooks to a router, which then distributes the cable signal to all computers. In this case, Dr.
    Whitney used a high-end snazzy, heavy-duty router because he has so many computers. We presumed Whitney,” she glanced at Lily, “or someone who knew about his work, tried to get access to his computers via the Internet connection, through the router. The router has a built-in firewall, as do each of the individual computers. We used the firewall software to monitor any attempted intrusions. There were random attempts here and there that you can expect to find on any computer these days. The attempts were easily rejected by the firewall and didn’t have the kind of systematic pattern I would have expected to see if someone was trying to get in.”
    “Arly and Flame monitored the computers for several days with no luck at all of spotting evidence of my father attempting to break in,” Lily explained.
    Flame nodded. “We kept daily logs on each computer.” She took the notebook Lily slid to her and opened it to a random page. “Here’s the event log for the last week. There were several random attacks from different IPs on UDP port 25601, like this one on Thursday at 10:39:17 A.M. from IP address 152.105.92.65. Or this one on Friday at 5:23:58 A.M. from IP address 59.68.234.64. They were all caught and stopped by the firewall and were all probably SeriousSam gamers looking for playmates—you can tell the game by the port they were trying to enter through.”
    Ian scratched his head. “Sheesh, Flame, and I thought Lily couldn’t speak English.”
    She smirked at him. “And you thought I was just a pretty face.”
    “I thought you were a pain in the ass,” he said. “Now I know you are. You’re going to be holding this over my head, aren’t you?”
    “Darn straight.” Flame tossed the log on the table. “At a certain point we realized someone was reading the key files on Lily’s computers. We found that out by noticing that the last accessed date on several files was very recent.”
    “Wait.” Ian held up his hand. “I’m really trying to follow this. How can you know when someone accessed a