Troubleshooter

Chapter 48 - Showtime

SHOWTIME. A lot of preparation and a lot of time from a lot of people had gone into this moment. The Asian Man plugged a USB memory stick into his work desk computer after he had booted it up. To keep up appearances, he made a deliberate round to the coffee maker and made small talk with various coworkers. Young Tom, the intern, was at his desk, buried in paper. Even though he should have been dead by now, a thing the Asian Man still didn't understand, Tom was his usual self. On second look, he appeared to be a little disheveled as if he had had a hard night out.

"Hey Tom, everything okay? You look like hell!"

Tom looked up. He ran his hand through his hair as if that improved his appearance. "Yeah, everything is fine. Thanks for asking. Just had a long day, or night, yesterday. Today."

The Asian Man had to smile. "We've all been there. Take care. See you later at the weekly staff meeting."

"Sure." Tom went back to the stack of paper in front of him.

Just a normal day at the office. Tom was excited after yesterday's actions but depressed at today's boring work. He'd been bored the day before, but today his office-job allergy was even more pronounced. Tom couldn't complain; the last few days had been a hell of a ride with the wound to show for it. The special assignment stuff, weirdly enough including the touch with death, had been like a magic ticket into an action movie—a super scary action movie. Tom's arm hurt like hell from the shoulder down to the elbow, especially when he had to move paper from left to right, but he tried to ignore it. The bandage was hidden under his shirt and jacket, so his co-workers were unaware of his injury. After Amy had dropped him off at his student apartment last night, he had lain awake for a while, waiting for the adrenaline to leave his body. Was he on the right track with his career plans? There were obviously more things to life than preparing presentations, crunching data, and creating reports.

The Asian Man logged in to his computer and ran a program that imitated another computer. This way, he was able to appear as his own self and at the same time login to the Strom Defense computer system under different credentials. That had been one of his ruses: to make the chief engineer Kendall and the Hacker think that it was about a hundred million dollars. In fact, that had just been a cover to get Kendall's login credentials at the right time. The Asian Man smiled at a passing coworker and, with little flourish or ceremony, entered the name and password of the late Mr. Kendall. He had used the credentials every day to check emails and to keep the account active for the last few days, even answering a couple of emails in Kendall's name to avoid alerting anyone with an urgent request.

And it had to be today. Yesterday had been the deadline for the latest automated test runs for the new drone control console. Most of the time, those tests were used to find mistakes in the software or the design, but yesterday's acceptance test was the final one—the test that documented to the military world that the drone console did what it should and that the buyer could run a war with it.

The drone program of the US Army had so far been the most successful one globally—and almost all of that success was due to the excellent steering and control system that Strom Defense provided. The new version was supposed to be much better as it gave increased accuracy and flexibility. However, it would be another two years before the software and the hardware would find their way into the line production of the drones. Add one year of military purchase process and the training of the staff. Those three years would be very beneficial to anyone who had access to the same control system to adapt it for his own purpose much earlier.

And one of the three persons at Strom Defense who had access to the complete software and the hardware schematics of the control system had been George Kendall.