Treasure of the Dead

Chapter 22

Fabi squinted hard at a line on a spreadsheet open on the computer. Beside her, Cassandra was packing up, jingling her keys, shutting down her workstation. The work day was near an end, but since it was her first on the new job, Fabi was eager to make a good first impression. She had identified an anomaly in one of her new clinic’s financial statements and decided to stay a little late to get on top of it while the details were fresh in her mind.

“Girl, you been working all day. Let me show you my favorite local watering hole. Cold drinks, cheap, hot food, cute guys…” Cassandra smiled.

Fabi looked over at her new co-worker and smiled warmly. “Thanks. I really would like to do that, but I’ve come across something I think I can fix in one of the sheets. You know how it is, it’s hard to get back in gear once you leave right in the middle of it. How about tomorrow, okay?”

“They don’t pay us overtime, you know.”

Fabi shrugged. “I know. I guess I’m just a workaholic.”

Cassandra wrinkled her nose and stared at Fabi’s screen for a few moments, then shrugged. “Okay, Fabi. I hope you get it sorted out, but don’t kill yourself. No one expects you to get this whole place running like a top your first day here. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Cassandra left and Fabi got back to work at the computer. She didn’t want to say anything about it to Cassandra, lest she was wrong or — even worse — Cassandra had somehow been a part of it — but it looked as though a substantial portion of the clinic’s budget had been rerouted for the past few months into an obscure special project. She was digging deep into the databases now for more information on this project, but at every turn she hit an encrypted file, a hardware firewall or some other security measure. Finally she got a break when she cross-referenced something she read in a cached email to a data backup log file, which gave her a file name. She searched for that file and found it buried deep in an obscure directory.

Opening the file, it became apparent that the project the clinic’s funds were being funneled to was one called HAITI.

Fabi leaned back in her chair and considered the name. Sounded logical enough, pretty straightforward. Probably it was some charity initiative designed to help low income people. She still wasn’t sure exactly what was going on, but with the project name she was sure she could find out more, both here on the computer network and tomorrow with a little “social engineering.”