Knox picked up a marker and a whiteboard Sharon had brought in. “Read the letters for me in the first three.”
Quickly, he jotted them down as Pedro read them: HEMAD.
“He mad?” Knox read aloud.
“I think you’d have to be pissed to do this to a company you work for,” Sharon suggested.
“No. There’s more coming.” Belinda ran to the whiteboard and held her hand out for the marker. “That’s not what Cynthia said.” She added three more letters to the board: E, M, E.
The group read, “He made me.”
“That’s it. Look for those next letters in conjunction with the forward slashes,” Pedro ordered.
Everyone flew back to their computers as he checked the time. One o’clock. They had thirty minutes. Peering into his computer, he joined the search.
Ten minutes later, Belinda shouted, “I’ve got it! The financial centers are next. The code is sending everything to an account code.”
“Good job, Belinda. Copy everything up to this point and dump it into the sandbox.” Pedro praised her, being careful to use her name and not Little girl. There wasn’t time to remove all traces of the coding. They’d have to use the backup.
Immediately, she got busy. He watched her fingers fly across the keys with complete confidence that she had this.
“We need Easton, now.”
Four minutes later, he jogged into the room, out of breath. “Sorry. I was helping at the gate. We’ve stationed all the security teams at vital places.”
“It’s time to put the backup in place. We found the code but can’t remove it entirely with all confidence,” Pedro told him.
“What’s the next attack?” Easton asked.
“The Edgewater financial centers are all targeted at transferring the funds to an account somewhere,” Pedro answered.
“Do we have time to get the back up going and preserve the evidence?” Easton asked.
“Done,” Belinda announced.
“Everything is in the sandbox now, sir. We just need your authorization code,” Pedro informed him. “You do understand that you will lose a lot of money and information by dumping everything that happened from two-thirteen until now—almost twelve hours.”
“Show me where to type in my code,” Easton requested. He didn’t hesitate or show any concern.
“I set it up on this computer—just in case, sir.”