“What’s she doing now?” I asked Cecelia miserably. Cecelia had produced a pair of night vision binoculars from god knows where and was standing in my office and peering into the parking lot. She was ex-special forces, so for all I knew she kept a pair in her big-ass purse.

“She’s still crying in her car,” Cecelia said, offering me the binoculars. I shook my head. I wasn’t going to spy on Zoey.

It had been almost two hours since the ‘conversation’ with Zoey went south. She was still crying in the parking lot at ten pm. Even if she had hacked Durant Industries, I now felt like I was the real criminal. We never should have confronted her.

“I’m not so sure it’s her anymore,” Cecelia said with a frown, “I’m not sure anyone can fake crying like that until they throw up. Especially twice in a row over two hours. Maybe she’s got the flu or something?”

“Great,” I said sarcastically. I couldn’t believe I’d made Zoey so upset she was now sick. She wasn’t the only one feeling ill. My head felt like someone had been testing my skull density with various power tools.

“Maybe you should go talk to her?” Cecelia asked. The fact that Cecelia now felt guilty made me vaguely angry, but not at her. I never should have asked Zoey to come here tonight. This was all on me.

“I don’t think she wants to talk to me,” I told Cecelia, “you don’t know what I did last night.”

Cecelia was my friend as well as my employee, but I really didn’t want to get into something so personal with her.

“I can guess,” she replied dryly.

A knock on the door saved me from having to explain.

“Mr. Breyer, Ms. Salina?” Paul poked his head in the door, read the feeling in the room in an instant, and cringed.

“Hi Paul,” I answered tiredly, “what is it? Also, why are you still here? Your workday ends at five.”

“Victor’s here to see you,” Paul answered, “he says it’s important. Should I let him in?”

That was a surprise. Victor hardly ever came up from the basement. He was strictly an email kind of guy. I wasn’t sure he’d ever been in my office before.

“Yeah of course,” I said, “but you didn’t answer my question, Paul. Why are you still at the office?”

“Everyone’s still here, Mr. Breyer. The whole company, not just the data and IT teams. You’re still working, so we’re still working.”

The people that worked for Durant Astronautics were incredibly dedicated. They were the absolute best of the best in every field. At that moment, I didn’t feel like I deserved to lead them.

“Please send everyone who isn’t working on the data breach home, Paul. With the launch so close, I don’t want anyone overworked.”

Paul nodded and disappeared. Victor lumbered in a moment later.

Victor was what happened when a Stephen Hawking level brain was born into Chris Farley level body. His seething genius peered out of round baby blue eyes in a big pink face, and he grinned at Cecelia and I with yellow peg teeth. Underestimating Victor because of his appearance, while common, was very stupid.

“We made a mistake!” He said happily, plopping down into one of the chairs across from me with a loud thud, “we were totally wrong!”

“Why do you sound happy about that?” I asked Victor, hoping he hadn’t finally lost his mind. He was brilliant, but Victor, who reported to Cecelia and was actually the man in charge of our networks and data privacy, had not taken the news of our breach well. Last I heard he’d been running on Red Bulls and Bugles for the past 24 hours with no rest save occasional forays to the vending machines.

“Because it’s good news,” Victor said, beaming, “we knew what time the hacker accessed the network to disable the security cameras, however, we did not realize that the hacker had actually used a remote VPN to do it. Whoever turned off the cameras wasn’t actually in the building at all.”

VPN stood for virtual proxy network, I knew that, but the only other thing I really knew about them was,

“We don’t have a VPN,” I stated.

“Exactly!” Cried Victor joyfully, assuming that I understood both his point and the significance of it.

“Explain in smaller words,” Cecelia interjected, “you two might be tech geniuses but my background is in physical security.”

Victor rolled his eyes.

“A VPN creates a secure tunnel through the internet from one device to another. It’s a commonly used way for companies to allow users to remotely access their desktops through the server. We don’t use a VPN though. We have a closed network that only allows access with a direct link to our servers. The fact that someone hacked us using a VPN means two important things. The first is that they had to physically install the VPN on a router somewhere. The second is that the VPN, while it can spoof its IP address, can actually be traced back to its real location.”

“Then what you’re trying to tell us is that someone plugged in an unauthorized USB drive to one of our routers and then someone else, or maybe the same person, installed that software and disabled the cameras that allowed access the server room,” I ventured.

“Correct,” Victor said, still grinning, “instead of just accessing data from a machine using stolen credentials, which is what we thought they did, they used our machine as a bridge. It gets even better. We already found the drive that contained the, well let’s call it, other end of the VPN hole.”

He held up a standard flash drive.

“Ok, hold on,” Cecelia said, still confused, “the VPN is a tunnel between our system and the rest of the world. That flash drive created the tunnel. Is that right?”

“Yeah pretty much,” Victor answered.

“Alright,” continued Cecelia, “so the flash drive had to be plugged physically into one of our routers in order to work, is that right too?”

“Obviously yes,” Victor said, getting visibly annoyed that Cecelia wasn’t sharing his excitement yet.

“So, do we know who plugged in the flash drive? Where was it found? And then where did the other end of the tunnel go?” She asked.

“No. Launch control platform. Right here onsite. The code and USB were clearly Russian in origin.” Answered Victor, the news he had actually come up from his dungeon for at last.

“Someone, possibly a Russian someone or at least using Russian technology, plugged the drive into a router in the launch control office?” I asked, and Victor nodded. That was bad. There were dozens of people in there for the press junket and tours. That area wasn’t monitored internally by cameras either since it wasn’t part of the permanent structure of Durant Astronautics. It had been built for the current batch of test launches and would then be rebuilt on a much larger scale if we were successful.

“And then that same someone onsite that day then hacked us,” Cecelia added, coming to the same dour conclusion as me. In the same moment, another thought barged into my brain and set me on my feet an instant later.

“This means it can’t have been Zoey, because she was with me the whole time. Thanks Victor great work. Keep me posted Cecelia. Every five hours. See you tomorrow.”

I sprinted to the stairs.