"What the actual hell? Whose bright idea was it to let them out?"
The person at the computer heaved a sigh and stared at the monitor.
Right after landing in jail, two Gifted without access to Ferry had just walked out. Walked out. Of prison. With no one in the military giving a shit. After all the work they'd put in to put a few Gifted behind bars, they were out again.
"Strike one."
The words came out in a low growl. Now it was time to figure out how the hell it had happened. Who authorized it? Who paid for it? Why hadn't it been blocked? Fingers flew across keys, looking through the data.
Frick. Whoever did it had made an effort to cover their tracks, but there was little doubt it was someone with power. Someone in the upper ranks had authorized it, and tried to make it look like it wasn't them.
The first suspect would be General Evans, or else his daughter. The only issue was that they had no control over the prison. As corrupt as they were, their fingers weren't quite that deep in the pie yet. Yet being the operative world. General Evans sure seemed intent on seizing complete control of the military if his actions after General Jordan's resignation were any indication.
He may have been smart enough to pull it off, but his daughter sure wasn't. And again, they were locked to the Third Division. So someone in the Second or First Divisions.
The new General? McGuire? No, this didn't smell like a general's work. That meant it had to be someone among the colonels or lieutenants. A sergeant or officer wouldn't be able to make the decision, only carry out the deed. And it was obvious this had been pushed through with seemingly all the boxes checked, all the Is dotted and all the Ts crossed.
So what did the Second Division have for colonels? Or would it be better to check the First?
Would a First Division colonel be able to shove it through, though? They shared custody of the prison, but the First was losing power by the minute. A lack of external threats made them seem redundant, and few of them besides Jenkins himself had much real power.
And Jenkins was squeaky clean. Cleaner than any other general in the past seventy years.
So Second Division colonels...
Powers was a suspect. He oversaw the prison, and thus was much more likely than Ward, who mainly focused on the everyday patrols.
The computer dug deeper, looking at all activity done from Powers' computer. Everything that had happened on his account. Was there anything there?
Several minutes later, it could only be concluded that it wasn't Powers.
One suspect down. Now to look at the lieutenants. There was Collier, Lynch, Mack, Munoz and Potts. Of those, Lynch and Mack were mostly in charge of patrol stuff. Potts mainly stuck to paperwork, which left Collier and Munoz in charge of the prison for the most part. Collier took care of higher security stuff, while Munoz dealt with the lower security areas.
That made Collier the next most likely suspect. Several more minutes were spent looking through her activity, turning up nothing.
Next was Munoz. Again, nothing.
With a frustrated grunt, hands slammed on the desk. Where had this shit come from? Would it really be necessary to look into Ward? Or was this from the First Division?
No. It had to be the lieutenants, didn't it?
Calm. Focus. There had to be an answer. Systematically check every damn person in the ANMF if need be. Go in order of most likely, and you'd get there eventually.
Check Potts. He mostly did paperwork, but he could be a possibility, however tangential.
Computer activity. Nothing of note.
Account activity. Jackpot.
Someone was logging into Potts' military account from a laptop in a residential area. Whether it was Potts or not, this was the source of the problem. A bit of further testing could then confirm whether Potts was rotten or if he'd just been unlucky enough to get hacked.
The residential laptop had gone in and made changes to Jacob Hinton and Justin Gates' files. Without any money to show for it, their bail had been marked as 'paid' and they were scheduled for release.
Now to find out if the Angel was behind this or if it was Potts.
Within ten minutes Potts would receive an email from the military maintenance account, stating that his account had been compromised and would be locked until he changed its password using biometrics to confirm his identity. That changed password would shut down any activity from hackers, at least for a while, meaning that if the residential laptop was in fact a hacker's it would stop doing things.
And if Potts was the problem, he'd need to be eliminated.
The no-kill policy would be a small problem, and Darius' new-found sentience was another barrier, but there were ways. Oh, there were ways.
If Baylor Potts was rotten, Odin would make him wish he'd never been born.
