Dar met his eyes in the mirror. "Do we look like we need it?" she asked, wryly.

"Anyone flying for nine hours needs it." He neatly sidestepped the question. "You a Starbucks or Versailles kinda lady?"

"Versailles, please," Dar had to smile. "I promised my boss here a café cubano."

"You got it," the driver said. "Sit back and relax, and I'll get you right there. I figured you were local."

"Thanks." Dar did, in fact, sit back in her seat. She opened her PDA and looked up a number. "Might as well get this started." She was about to dial, when the phone rang. "Dar Roberts," she answered it, only to have it beep for a second incoming call.

Alastair was already on the phone, waiting for it to be answered. "Does that java come in buckets?" he asked. "I think we're going to need it."


Chapter Seventeen

KERRY FELT A sense of odd déjà vu as she took her bottle of ice tea and settled down in one of the thick leather chairs in the courtesy bus. "Gentlemen, thank you very much for taking time out of your day to talk with me for a minute."

The facilities chief, an older man with a bristly gray buzz cut and a weathered face, dropped into the chair across from her with a tired grunt. "Any excuse to sit down." He glanced up as one of the bus workers approached him and offered a tray. "What's that?"

"Roast beef sandwich, sir," the young woman supplied. "And we have chips and fresh potato salad."

The chief didn't hesitate, reaching over to envelop one of the rolls in a large, callused hand. "Hand them over. First thing I had since dark of the clock this a.m."

Having supplied herself with spicy chicken, Kerry was content to watch as the military men were served, Danny and two of the other techs were already busy at the nearby counter chowing down. She opened her bottle of ice tea and sipped from it, jerking just a bit as her PDA went off. She pulled it out and opened it, unable to repress a smile when she saw the message's sender.

Hey.

We're out of the airport and heading for coffee. Did you know all hell's breaking loose down here? People getting arrested and all that?

Jet lag sucks.

We are going to the office after this. I'm working on your gear. I got two calls from clients up in New York who complained they were down and told them off. I think I scared Alastair. Some guy from the NSA called me, but hung up before he could tell me what he wanted.

Left a message for Gerry. Maybe he can get me up there tonight.

Kerry's eyes widened. "Tonight?"

"Ma'am?" The bus attendant was in front of her. "Would you like a sandwich?"

Tonight? Kerry blinked at the tray, completely distracted. "Uh--no." She held up her tea. "I'm fine thanks. I stopped and had lunch on the way here." She waited for the server to move away, and then looked down again at her PDA.

I need a good night's sleep with you wrapped around me.

"So now, what's this all about?" the chief asked, wiping his lips with a company logo napkin. "You people the computer people?"

Kerry hesitated, then closed the PDA. "Yes, we're the computer people." She fought the urge to go back to Dar's note. "But we work with a lot more than computers. We handle the systems that let you communicate with the rest of the military infrastructure, and run most of the programs that bring in information and send out things like accounting and payroll."

The chief chewed his sandwich, studying her with faded blue eyes. "So what you're saying is you're important."

Kerry shook her head. "No. You're important," she disagreed. "The people here working their tails off to get things back up and going are important. Our mission here is to help you do that."

One gray eyebrow cocked. "Good answer."

The CO, a tall, lanky man with straight, dark hair chuckled softly under his breath. "Ms. Stuart, I've been trying to get hold of your management since yesterday," he said. "You don't need to sweet talk me into pushing to get you what you need."

"Well," Kerry paused, "we had to evacuate our commercial operations center and they took the brunt of that over in Houston. I know they were slammed. I was traveling here yesterday, Dar Roberts, our CIO and our CEO Alastair McLean were in transit back from England."

"Seems like you were putting together a plan to come help us anyway," the CO said. "But then, you people always do. I hate computers," he said. "I wish I could throw the lot of them into the Potomac, but at least you make ours work."

"Most of the time." Kerry accepted the compliment with a smile. "They're machines. They break." She paused a moment. "So what I need-to bring this conversation to a point--is power in our backup core space."

"One that ain't finished yet?" the chief asked.

"Sure," Kerry replied. "We never do things the easy way."

"What's the point of that, Ms. Stuart?" the CO asked.

"Please, call me Kerry," Kerry said. She stood up and went to the side mounted white board and picked up a marker. "Your systems are laid out like this. " She quickly sketched in the five sided building and its rings, putting squares in place rooted out of her memory of Dar's planning sessions. "Each area has a wiring closet, and those closets are connected with a fiber backbone."

She glanced behind her, finding the military men watching her intently. "Eventually, everything has to come back to one place, so we can take it out of the building. In this case, for this facility, we had two central locations for redundancy."

"Ah huh," the chief said. "Remember you all bitching about all that space it took up?" He turned and looked at the CO. "Had to hear that from you for a month."

"You did," the CO agreed. "Thought it was a waste of time until I got told I didn't know my ass from a teakettle and to leave the IT stuff to the IT people."

Kerry eyed him. "Talked to Dar, huh?"

"Certainly has a smart mouth," the CO said. "I was about to kick up when she went off talking for about twenty minutes, and I have to admit to you I did not understand one single word she said. Might as well have been speaking Turkish."

"The mouth goes with the rest of her," Kerry said, in a mild tone. "She's brilliant. Sometimes she goes on for twenty minutes and I don't understand a word."

"Yes, well, I realized that when we went through the plan for the reconstruction of the wing there, and figured out if we hadn't had a spare, we'd have been in a world of hurt trying to work around that. So all's good," the CO said. "But here we are and nothing's working."

"Right." Kerry went back to the diagram. "There is no way we can quickly recover the destroyed room." She looked over at the chief. "I think you probably realize that."

The man nodded. "Find all your folks?" he asked, the tone of the conversation suddenly growing quiet, and grim.

"Not all of them," Kerry said. "We're still missing a few."

The chief studied her. "Might have been in there. Your folks were, a lot."

There was an awkward silence. Kerry folded her arms, gripping the marker in her right hand. "That had occurred to me," she said. "But I hope that's not the case. I hope they're just out of touch and we'll hear from them today."

The CO cleared his throat. "So you need power in this new space," he said. "Chief, can we do that?"

The chief chewed his sandwich thoughtfully as they waited in silence for his answer. Kerry went over to the table and got her ice tea, leaning an elbow on the counter as she gave in and opened her PDA again.

I need a good night's sleep with you wrapped around me.

"I need that too," Kerry muttered under her breath. "Maybe I can call Gerry and ask him."

"How much power you need?" the chief spoke up suddenly.

Kerry glanced over at Danny. "Do you have that handy, or do I need to get it from the master document server?"

Danny stopped in mid chew. "Uh--"

"Ah hah." Kerry went over to where her laptop was resting on the counter and unlocked it. She opened a browser and typed in an address, waiting for the page to display over the satellite link before she entered a request. "Hang on."

She glanced back at the PDA on the counter.

We're driving through little Havana now. There are a lot people on the street talking. Want some café con leche? Alastair's trying a croqueta.

"Okay." Kerry reviewed the list on the screen. "Boy, there was a lot of stuff in there." She ran the calculations. "Ten racks at sixty amps per rack." She looked up at the chief. "Six hundred amps, twenty 30 amp lines."

The chief stopped chewing and stared at her. "In that little room?"

Kerry nodded wryly. "We also need AC."

"Son of a bitch!"

"Can we do it, chief?" the CO broke in. "Who the hell cares how much it is? It's not like we have a budget for it. What does it mean a bigger cable? C'mon now, you know what's at stake here. We're blind without that equipment."

"You don't even have equipment for me to plug in there," the chief turned around and said to him. "I know it ain't here because I heard those IT people talking about it."

The CO looked over at Kerry. "What's the story with that?"

Kerry leaned against the counter. "Dar's working on it," she said. "It'll be here. Our racking vendor is already preparing a truck heading here with the framework."

The chief looked around at her. "We can do it," he said, surprisingly. "I'll have power pulled in there by tonight. That do it for you?"