Chapter 9 - The Firewall
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Detective Bell left the hospital twenty minutes later, armed with a newfound sense of righteous purpose. I stayed glued to Nora's side, watching daytime television on mute while my mind raced through endless tactical scenarios.
At exactly ten-forty, my burner phone vibrated. It was Bishop.
“You're not going to like this,” Bishop announced the second I answered.
“That sentence has followed me my entire life,” I replied dryly, walking back out to the quiet hallway. “Give me the sitrep.”
“The university's camera system didn't malfunction last night.”
“I assumed that much.”
“It was manually placed into a system-wide maintenance mode at exactly 10:58 p.m.,” Bishop read off. Nora had been found bleeding at 11:21. The timing was flawless.
“Who had access to that override?”
“Campus security supervisors, top-tier IT administrators, and the university's director of risk management.”
“Give me a name.”
“Martin Vale.”
I knew the name. Not personally, but I knew of his reputation in the private military sector. Vale had previously served as the ruthless corporate security director for Holbrook Dynamics.
Wyatt Holbrook's father's company.
“That's not subtle,” I gritted my teeth.
“It gets less subtle,” Bishop warned. “Vale became Wellington University's director of risk management fourteen months ago. Coincidentally, right after the Holbrook Foundation donated twelve million dollars toward the new engineering center.”
Money did not prove guilt in a court of law. But in my world, it built undeniable pathways of corruption.
“What else, Bishop?”
“Someone tried to permanently delete the archived camera files at 12:06 a.m.”
“After Nora was already in the ambulance on her way to the hospital.”
“Yes. They were cleaning up the mess.”
“Were they successful?”
“Not entirely.”
I stopped breathing for half a second. My grip on the phone tightened until the plastic creaked. “Bishop, tell me we have eyes on it.”
“The university uses a third-party cloud redundancy service for insurance purposes. Whoever erased the local system either didn't know about the off-site backup, or assumed it synchronized less frequently. The data is sitting on an Amazon Web Services server right now.”
“Do we have the footage?” I demanded.
“Not yet. And I’m not touching it without a digital warrant.”
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Nineteen years ago, Bishop would already have hacked the server and handed me the video on a silver platter. The fact that he was waiting told me he had perfectly understood my instructions from last night. We were doing this by the book.
“Send the server IP to Detective Bell,” I ordered. “Tell him to get a subpoena. Now.”
