Troy nodded. “Listen. Don’t open the door unless it’s one of us.”
“Got it,” she said. And gently closed the door. They waited until they heard the click.
Once she was locked in, Troy turned to Axel and said, “Let’s go.”
Chapter 10
Berkley lay in bed but couldn’t sleep. Of course she couldn’t sleep. So much was going on in her world. She waited a good half hour, battling with herself on whether she should contact Troy. Finally unable to sleep within the next half hour, she gave up and sent him a text, asking if he’d found anything.
Nope came back the answer. You’re supposed to be sleeping.
She smiled at that and tucked the phone up beside her pillow. She had just pulled the blanket up over her head when a light knock came on her door. She froze but didn’t answer. When the knock came again, she wished a small peephole was in the door that she could look out.
The third time it was almost a pounding on the door; then she heard a male voice. “Open the door, you bitch.”
She froze and pulled out her phone and put it on video. But all she heard were footsteps walking away.
She quickly texted Troy.
Someone was just at the door. Knocked lightly, then not so lightly, and then pounded on the door and called me a bitch.
The response was immediate. Who was it?
I don’t know, she responded. Now sleep was the furthest thing from her mind.
She had her laptop with her, but, outside of logging in to work—if and when she could get on the system, given the storm—she couldn’t do a whole lot but monitor systems and track the hacker. But needing to do something, she sat cross-legged on her bed, with the blanket wrapped around her shoulders.
She started typing out the little bits and pieces that she knew. She wasn’t very good at handling all these multiple threads in her head, and none of them were making sense. She knew the guys would tell her that they would make sense at some point in time, but she’d always been a note-taker and a list-maker. She always needed to put everything down in order to make clarity happen for her. She loved puzzles for that reason, but, at the same time, this wasn’t her type of puzzle. And with the guys heading down to look and to meet up with the rest of their team, she just wished she understood what was going on.
Three rapes? Were they connected? How could they not be? But were they connected to the sabotage of the rig?
Lionel’s body missing. Seven bodies in the cooler. Sabotage or accident? Were the skeleton-crew guys left here on their own?
Chucky and Winslow—was the freezer an accident or deliberate? The latch was wonky, so it could easily have been an accident but …
Next she started to plot out who was around when Chucky had gotten locked up. The trouble was, everybody was accounted for. The same as whoever had been hacking into her computer. Everybody had been at dinner. Except for the pilot. The only conclusion that she could come to was the fact that somebody else had to be on board that they didn’t know about. And that was one hell of a scary thought.
She sat here, writing down names and wondering if the connection with the C-4 was really a connection or if it was just another nebulous thread. Would any of these threads weave into a pattern?
It occurred to her to question whether Lionel was dead. What if he’d been in the body bag, and he’d been unconscious but not dead? Had anybody checked?
She pulled out her phone and quickly sent Troy a text asking him.
Not sure anybody specifically checked if Lionel was dead. We knew he wasn’t cold like the others, but we didn’t check his pulse. Why?
She added, Wondering if he could still be alive.
Interesting thought. He left it at that.
But she continued her notes on her random thoughts. Troy and Axel had been the ones who had picked up Lionel and had put him into the freezer because they wanted to take his body back in the helicopter. Would he have woken up in there? Or had Chucky seen him, realized he wasn’t dead, woke him up, and maybe an altercation ensued, and somehow Lionel had locked Chucky in? But why wouldn’t Chucky have said anything? No, that wasn’t making any sense either. She sat here, trying to work her way through all this, when another text came in from Troy.
I’m headed your way.
Fine, but you better identify yourself, or I’m not opening that damn door.
She got a happy face emoji in return. She smiled and grabbed a sweatshirt and put it on atop her pajama top. At least now she was wearing bottoms and a sweatshirt.
When a rap came on her door, and she could hear Troy’s voice calling out, she opened it up and let him in. She stepped out in the hallway, looked in both directions. “Where’s Axel?”
She came in and shut the door behind her to find Troy standing in the middle of the room, trying to keep a smile off his face at her outfit. She shrugged. “I didn’t exactly feel like sleeping, and I was too cold to sit up and do nothing.”
He nodded. “Axel’s downstairs meeting with Mason.”
“Right. Has anybody found anything?”
“No, not yet,” he said. “So far, even after a top-to-bottom search, we haven’t found any extra personnel on board.”
“And that’s just stupid,” she said. “It has to be somebody else.”
“And why is that?”
“Because there’s no other way. Everybody was having dinner at the same time, but somebody was hacking into my system.”
He nodded. “That’s one of the questions I wanted to ask you,” he said. “Could somebody do it remotely?”
She froze and looked up at him. “Oh, my God,” she said, collapsing on her bunk. “I didn’t consider that.”
He sat on the opposite bunk, his hands held loosely together in front of him as he studied her. “A lot of guys had phones at the table.”
She nodded slowly. “It’s a real problem sometimes,” she said. “Hell, I think phones have destroyed the family dinner system.”
He cracked a smile at that. “So, is it possible?”
She frowned, thinking about it, and then slowly nodded. “I could do it.”
“Right,” he said, “but what good would that have done?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “They didn’t get into where they were trying to go.”
“But that’s because you had extra safeguards in there, correct?”
She nodded slowly. “Yes.”
“How would anybody know your log in?”
“I don’t know,” she said, with a shrug. “It’s possible somebody was somehow recording my keystrokes.”
“If that was the case, wouldn’t they have recorded any keystrokes as you worked to get through the rest of the blockages you had?”
“In theory, no,” she said, “because I type it manually, so, unless somebody wants to go through a ton of data to find those particular keystrokes and to see that they were different from the code I was working on, it’s not like they would have noticed.”
“Right,” he said. “Because, if nobody else is on board, we have to consider the fact that everybody was there in the mess hall at the time of the hack in question.”
“And, of course, you’ll vouch for all your guys, correct?”