She grabbed her backpack and ran down the gravel path, her sneakers kicking up tiny puffs of gray dust.
The basement of the county administration building smelled of dry paper and old carpet. My desk sat behind three rows of steel shelving containing land deeds from the nineteenth century.
James, the junior clerk, leaned against my cubicle partition with a half-eaten bran muffin.
“We had a system flag on the state network at noon,” James said.
I did not look up from the screen where I was indexing a 1974 property easement. My fingers stayed flat on the keyboard.
“What kind of flag?” I asked.
“An external query on your old federal employment file,” he said. “The system blocked it because of the red flags on your social security number, but someone was trying to pull the active duty history.”
I rolled my left wrist under the desk. The digital files from my time in the Army were supposed to be locked behind a civil service firewall that required a Department of Defense credential.
“Did they leave an IP address?” I asked.
“It came through a local commercial server,” James said. “A public terminal at the library downtown.”
He set his muffin on a stack of tax assessments and tapped his fingernail on the edge of my monitor.
“Who would be looking for clerical records from a supply depot in Georgia?” he asked.
“Probably a credit agency,” I said.
“They tried three different security bypasses in ten minutes,” James said. “That is not a credit agency, Claire.”
I closed the easement file and cleared the screen. The room was cold, but my collar felt tight against my throat.
“Could you trace the terminal number?” I asked.
“It was terminal four,” James said. “Right by the front desk.”
“Let me know if they ping the server again,” I said.
