Chapter 12

With an oddly Casey-like grunt, Chuck wiped his damp hands across his pants. Looking around he couldn't help but be impressed with the rack of servers Fulcrum had in place. Bleeding edge was putting it lightly, and he didn't know why he wasn't giddy with excitement to be playing with such a set up. Oh wait, that's right. It was because he was in the middle of Fulcrum substation. And everyone in the building would probably love to crack open his skull and see what was inside, or put him to use taking over the government.

Taking a couple deep breaths, Chuck pulled himself up to the keyboard and opens the console program. Might as well figure out what the problem was before someone put a bullet in his brain. And that woman Elise would be back soon. She'd said something about showing him some pictures of a system she was building at home.

As he executed diagnostics commands and tracked the problem, Chuck's mind was turning. He was in a Fulcrum substation. He did have access to their server rack. Maybe there was an opportunity here. He could write a little Perl script that would echo information from the server to a remote machine, maybe a secure NSA machine. With a slight nod, Chuck cracked his first real smile since he flashed on the two guys in the elevator. This might work. With a grin, Chuck opened a separate console and began to figure out what he'd need. Before he got too far though he swore he could hear a click in his brain. "Crap," Chuck muttered as he pulled out his phone. Sarah and Casey were on their way, and should probably be there soon. And the room he was in was probably bugged, so he had to be circumspect about how he talked to them. Hitting the #1 speed dial he waited while it rang.

As soon as he heard her voice he couldn't help but smile. "Hey honey," Chuck said brightly.

After her question he paused for a moment to think about how to answer. How would a computer guy with a smoking hot girlfriend reply? "Oh, you know how it is. Big corporation gets in trouble and their IT department can't figure out the fix, so they call the Buymore."

Hearing Casey grunt something in the background Chuck held back a smile. Looking at the first monitor he noticed that the first run of diagnostics were almost done running. "Oh things are looking better now. I don't think I'm going to need those flowers after all. It's not as big of a job as I thought at first, but it is still troublesome."

Hearing the chill in Sarah's voice Chuck bit back a sigh. Sometimes he wondered if she had any faith in him at all. "Oh no, not quite. I've got some work to do here still, but things are looking up. It's still troublesome though. You know...troublesome."

Casey's grunted query was enough for Chuck to roll his eyes. Sometimes the guy was so dense. "You guys should probably just hang out, I'll be done soon."

The dead air told Chuck that Sarah had muted the phone so Casey and her could have a quick confab. Casey probably wanted to blow the place up for fun anyway. When Sarah came back on and told him they would take up position across the street he breathed a sigh of relief. "Sounds good. I'll talk to you soon."

As Chuck was moving his finger to the disconnect button the door behind him banged open and Elise said with a smile in her voice "Hey Chuck, are you just about done with this one? I found those pictures I was telling you about; you should come take a look at them! You're going to love them!"

Barely masking a sigh, Chuck pushed the disconnect button and turned towards the woman with a forced smile in place. "That sounds great Elise! Just let me finish up with these diagnostics and then I should have an idea what's wrong here, and will be free to look at whatever you want me to."

With a nod and smile she backed out the door. "Sure thing, I'll be at my cubicle right over there," she said with a gesture to the left. "I can't wait to show you these."

With another forced smile, Chuck turned back to the server console and after looking over his shoulder continued his coding. He stopped typing for a moment when an odd thought struck him. A year ago, hell six months ago, he would have been falling all over himself if someone like Elise had shown him the slightest amount of attention. She was pretty, seemed funny and smart, and obviously liked computers as much as him. But now he couldn't wait to get rid of her. "Guess she just doesn't measure up to Sarah," Chuck muttered to himself as he started typing again.

Ten minutes later Chuck had the basics of a script in place that would copy the backup files and send them out over the internet to a specified address, as well as open up a rarely used port on a tight schedule so he could get back into the system remotely. It wasn't pretty, but he was sure it would work. A couple of the routines he'd coded in were actually very elegant, and he was quite proud of them. Saving the script file he closed out the console window and turned towards the diagnostics window just as the door banged open.

"Sorry Elise, I'll be finished here in just a second..." Chuck began without looking over his shoulder.

"Who are you and what are you doing here?" a bear growled as Chuck heard the slide of a handgun being pulled back.

"Whaaaa?" Chuck turned around to look at the bear that turned out to be a burly man with a high and tight haircut. He felt his eyes flutter as he flashed on the file of one Maxwell Stone, ex-marine assumed to be KIA in Iraq.

"Mr. Stone, Mr. Stone," Elise said as she rushed up to the door. "This is the technician from the Buymore Nerd Herd. We had to call them in to take a look at the server when no one here could get it up and running."

What felt like an age passed in a tense moment. With a grunt the imposing Mr. Stone slid the weapon in his hand back into a shoulder holster under his suit coat. "Finish up here quickly and get him the hell out of here. You know what's going on today."

As the large man backed out of the room and disappeared, Chuck let out a breath he had been holding since he started flashing. "Whoa."

"Yeah, I'm sorry about that. Mr. Stone is the head of security, and he's a hard ass. Ummm...sorry about the whole gun thing...it took me a while to get used to them as well."

Blinking Chuck looked at Elise oddly until he realized she thought he'd been freaking out about the gun. "Oh, yeah, that's alright. Not sure how anyone could get used to those things. Look, I'm almost done here. Why don't I just reboot the servers and then come take a look at those pictures and get out of here before the grizzly bear decides to eat me?"

"Sure," Elise said with a little laugh. "That sounds great. Oh, so what was the problem?"

"Your RAID array had a corrupted volume that was being run as a master. It was slowly propagating through the rest of the array, causing all kinds of problems. Simple fix really, just, ahh, time consuming. I'm surprised no one here caught it."

"So tell me Chuck," Elise said as she stepped right up to where Chuck was seated. "What do you do when you're not saving computers?"