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He looked again. “No. Bare.”

“I need you to look at the back of the tower. Not the power cable. Tell me every cable you see and where each one goes.”

Cables? He hadn’t thought that would be part of the process at all, but he didn’t argue. Cassandra knew way better than he did.

He leaned down with the phone’s faint backlight and traced the connections one at a time. “Power cord to a surge protector. Monitor cable. Keyboard and mouse, both USB.” He checked again, running his fingers along the back panel to make sure he hadn’t missed anything in the dark. “That’s it. Nothing else.”

“No ethernet cable? Nothing running to a wall jack or a router or any other equipment?”

“No.”

She didn’t respond right away. The pause stretched longer than the first one. This couldn’t be good.

“It’s air-gapped,” she said.

“Tell me what that means.”

“It means that computer isn’t connected to anything. No network, no internet, no communication with any other system in the building or anywhere else. It’s completely isolated. You could have every tool I own in your hands right now, and none of them would matter. There’s no pathway into that system from outside. Or way to get the info out remotely.”

He looked at the dark screen with its blinking cursor. A machine that didn’t talk to the outside world. Everything he’d trained to do, everything Cassandra had built, everything they’d planned in that lab with the salt shakers and the late-night coffee, was designed for a different type of target.

“The trafficking records are on that system,” he said.

“Yes, that makes sense. They’re keeping their regular business on the networked computer because they need it accessible to their…fellow bad guys. The other machine is where you keep the things that would get you buried under federal prison if you get caught.”

“Can you walk me through how to crack it?”

“No. Every air-gapped machine is custom. I’d have to sit at that terminal and assess it myself, and even then, it could take more than one session.” Her voice was tight. Frustrated. She sounded the way he felt. “One wrong keystroke could trigger a lockout that tells the Diehls someone’s been in their system. I can’t guide you through that blind.”

Shit. He pressed his thumb into the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes.

“Ryder.” Fallon was back. “How long have you been in that room?”

He didn’t know. He hadn’t been counting. Long enough that every additional minute was borrowed time in a house where any one of six people could wake up and wander into the kitchen for water.

“Too long.”

“Then close it down. Both systems, leave them the way you found them. Get back to your room then call us back.”

He disconnected the call then ran the exit sequence on the first terminal. Clearing access logs, closing directories in reverse order, returning the system to sleep. Wiped the chair, the desk, the mouse. Moved to the second terminal and tapped the screen back to dark. Scanned the room. Everything was where it had been when he’d picked the lock.

He listened at the door for a full ten seconds before opening it. The hallway was dark. The common area beyond it was silent. He crossed back along the stone wall, through the kitchen, down the bedroom corridor, and into his room, then redialed.

“I’m clear,” he said into the phone, keeping his voice barely above a whisper.

“Good,” Fallon said. “Plan is for you to maintain your cover. Keep building trust. Stay away from the computer room until you hear from us.”

“Copy that.”

The line went quiet. Then Cassandra’s voice came on again, and something in her tone had shifted. Softer at the edges. Less analyst and more the person dancing around to disco music. He tightened his grip on the phone.

“Your sequences were clean, Ryder. You did everything right.”

“Didn’t get us anywhere, though.”

“It got us somewhere. We know what we’re looking at now. That’s better than where we were an hour ago.”

“It doesn’t help any of those kids.”