Dark Target by David DeBatto Read Free Book Online

said. “We’ve been keeping track of everything in the sky for the last forty-five years,
     Agent DeLuca. It’s one thing to have the information and another to be able to use it efficiently. Plus, because of our security,
     Cheyenne is a repository for other government files beyond our purview.”
    “And she had access to all of it?”
    “I don’t believe she had access to all of it,” Koenig said. “At least not authorized access, but she definitely handled sensitive
     material. Major Huston can help you there.”
    “I’ll ask him about that, then,” DeLuca said. “What was your impression of her? Any sense of why she’d be taking documents?”
    “My impression of her?” Koenig said.
    “Yeah,” DeLuca said. “Did you know her personally?”
    “Did I know her personally?” Koenig said. DeLuca noted that this was twice in a row that Koenig had repeated what DeLuca had
     just said to him. Such repetitions were usually followed by lies. He waited. Koenig said nothing.
    “I guess I was thinking that with only 230 people in such close proximity, eventually everybody would get to know everybody
     else, sooner or later. And a girl like her would be pretty hard to miss.”
    “I didn’t know Sergeant Escavedo personally,” Koenig said. “You’re right about the proximity. You see people on the bus if
     you work the same shift, but people are also transferred or rotated in and out on a fairly regular basis. My impression, without
     meeting her and solely from reading her file and looking at her records and awards, would be that she was a good person and
     a conscientious soldier who was probably just trying to do her job better by taking work home on her laptop that wasn’t supposed
     to leave The Mountain. But that’s just an impression and not a fact.”
    “She couldn’t send it to herself?” DeLuca said. “She had to carry it physically?”
    “The firewalls protecting our data systems make the two thousand feet of granite over our heads right now look like eggshells,”
     Koenig said. “But again…”
    “Major Huston,” DeLuca said. “I will definitely ask him about that. I’m just trying to figure out how she got the disks or
     the CDs or whatever it was out. I guess since you don’t search people, she just took them with her in her briefcase. That
     doesn’t seem terribly secure, though.”
    “That is under review,” Koenig said. “That should not have happened. We take the idea of missing files very seriously around
     here, Agent.”
    “This one is more than just missing files,” DeLuca said. “This one’s a missing person. We found her car in the desert, about
     ten miles north of the Mexican border.”
    At that moment, just as the general had predicted, an officer in Navy whites knocked on the door to inform Koenig that (if
     DeLuca was decoding the mil-speak correctly) preliminary telemetry triangulating from the early warning sensors on two of
     the GPS sats indicated space-based lasers, and that a suspect Russian satellite that had turned active a few minutes before
     the attack was already being targeted.
    “Ensign Stern will take you to systems,” Koenig told DeLuca. “Will you keep my office informed if you learn anything?”
    “I will,” DeLuca said. “Thank you for your time.”
    In the corridor connecting STRATCOM to the other commands and centers, DeLuca asked Stern to pause while he examined a row
     of framed color photographs depicting the officers, noncommissioned officers, enlisted persons, and civilians of the year.
     When he came to the year 2002, DeLuca saw a photograph of Cheryl Escavedo, smiling, proud of herself, posed receiving the
     award and shaking the hand of General Thomas Koenig, who had just said he didn’t know her personally.
    Perhaps he’d forgotten.
    He hadn’t asked Koenig, because he didn’t think he’d get a straight answer, why someone with as superlative a service record
     as Cheryl Escavedo would be transferred from Cheyenne