“I’m okay.”
“Good.” He chose a bottle. “Let’s keep it that way. Food, a little wine.” After opening the wine, he brought it and two glasses to the table.
She’d sat on the damn floor and cried, Eve reminded herself. If she couldn’t admit to having a bad moment, she’d just end up having another.
So she walked to the table, took a seat, then looked down at the plate he uncovered. “Pretty clever to pick one of my weaknesses.” She picked up a fork, then it hit her. “Summerset did that. Jesus, how bad did I look?”
“If you can’t drop the stoic cop face inside your own home, then where?”
“That bad.” Accepting it—what choice did she have?—she wound the first bite of pasta around the fork. “I’m over it—enough,” she qualified, and ate. “So tell me what you got.”
“Not much to work with. It’s a high-security-level swipe, something you might use in a prison or highly sensitive facility. Not a standard level as you’d have in, say, a hotel, a residence, or an office building.”
“It is a prison,” Eve said, and stabbed a fat meatball.
“Agreed. We have approximately twenty percent of the swipe, the lower right corner. The data’s secured under several layers and encoded.”
“You can’t get anything off what we’ve got?”
He gave her a gimlet eye as he wound pasta. “I can tell you, first, a swipe like this would be programmed and developed in a handful of places—if we stick to the U.S. Since most of those would be government contractors, those are most likely low probability.”
“Not out of the question,” Eve considered, “but lower than a private contractor.”
“One of those private contractors would be Roarke Industries, so I’ve started a search there on clients.”
“What kind of clients?”
“Asks the cop.” Roarke broke a hunk of bread in two, handed her half. “Financial institutions, private labs, high-end resorts, security-minded individuals and businesses with deep pockets. And no, we wouldn’t vet a client for this. Why would we? But I’ll be doing that now, and it’ll take a bit of time.”
“Okay. That’s all you got off the piece of swipe?”
He gave her that gimlet eye again. “I’ve got partial codes, which I’m now running on auto through a series of decoding programs. Once I see how far down those can take it, I’ll dig down on that.”
“Wouldn’t you be able to tell if it’s one of yours?”
He picked up his wine, took a long, slow sip. “Eve, we make millions of swipes at this level, design, encode, personalize, after which, any client may add their own layer of programming, and then layer on the data for the individual who’d hold the swipe.
“Smaller companies may ask us to do that final step, with photo ID included. However, consider turnover. Someone resigns, is fired, or simply damages or loses the swipe. So most that want this level have the ability—as, say, a hotel on the lower levels has with room swipes—to erase the previous data and reprogram.”
“So that’s a no.”
“If I had the top portion of the swipe, I’d find our signature coded in. But I don’t have that, and have to work with what I do have.”
“I’m not giving you grief. I just don’t get this stuff.”
“Your master, for instance. If it was stolen, lost, damaged, what’s the procedure?”
“I report same, asap. Ah, they disable it, administer a new one after a big fat headache of paperwork.”
“Precisely. At the level we’re dealing with, the swipe would be automatically disabled when damaged. No doubt, when they discovered it had been stolen, they’d have disabled it, but breaking it? They obviously didn’t have the time or foresight to wipe it—which is a much simpler process when the swipe is in hand—before that level of damage. Now they can’t.”
“They can’t wipe the data?”
“I’m going to say the girl took a hard fall, as the swipes aren’t fragile, and when it snapped, it’s done, you see. It can’t be used, and the data on it simply carries the name of the holder and their clearance level, the company or individual who owns or runs the building where it’s used, the programmer, the manufacturer.”
“Couldn’t somebody access the data—like we’re counting on you to do—then forge a swipe, access those areas?”