Chain of Evidence

CHAPTER 45

A dusty image of Haite loomed above Dart wearing a look of concern, and Dart wondered why his first experience of death should be an image of his former sergeant, a man with whom he had never been particularly close. He would have preferred an image of Abby. A conversation with Zeller. A bronzed and naked body, perhaps. Anything but Haite.

He felt as if he were at sea, rocking in a light chop. He found the sensation comforting and pleasant.

“Can you hear me yet?” the sergeant asked loudly.

He remained cloudy, a vaporous apparition.

“Go away,” Dart said, wanting a dream, not a nightmare. “Leave me alone.”

“Stun bombs and phosphorus grenades,” the sergeant explained in an apologetic voice. “ERT toys,” he said.

The rocking, Dart realized, was the stretcher being carried up the stairs by a couple of paramedics with buzz cuts. He still couldn’t see very well.

“Your hearing will come back,” Haite said loudly.

And then the pain hit, a headache like a ton of bricks.

“Your head may hurt,” he heard a voice suggest from behind him.

“No shit,” said Joe Dart. He blinked away some of the pain and tried to identify which orb was the sergeant. He picked the one leaning over him. “Why? Why after all that did you abort? Jesus….” His thoughts trailed off with his voice. Rage surged through him, but without any physical energy to support it, it dried up, defeated. He felt on the verge of tears. Exhaustion. Self-pity.

“No, no,” Haite said.

“For me? You did it to save me? You’ve wrecked me,” Dart said. He wanted Haite to hurt for this; he wanted someone to pay. He wanted to be left alone to cry.

“Ginny solved it,” Haite said.

“She couldn’t download the file as long as it was in the buffer,” a techie’s young voice explained from behind him. It took Dart a moment to identify it as the voice of the command van technician. “When you cut the text, it was captured in RAM. You had to do this to keep the other person attempting access from deleting the files. There it was, this chunk of text, floating in the computer’s memory-but in a buffer, not on disk, not somewhere that Ginny could grab it.”

Haite said, “He should rest.”

The techie added excitedly, “The mainframe was set up to save all buffers to disk in the event of a power failure. Ginny realized this-realized the only thing to do at that point was to cut the power.”

They cleared the stairs, and Dart felt the legs of the stretcher released, and suddenly found himself being wheeled. The bumps hurt every inch of him.

“Later,” one of the paramedics complained to Haite. “Let him rest.”

Ignoring him, the technician continued. “The machine itself is protected by a backup power supply, so once we cut the juice, it dumped its buffers to disk, and Ginny, waiting for it, grabbed the file. It took her a couple of seconds is all.”

Seconds? Dart thought.

“After that,” Haite said, “it was all ERT. We’d lost you on the radio. We weren’t happy campers.”

“We got the file?”

“We got everything,” Haite confirmed. “Ginny’s a fucking genius.”