"I'll take the assignment,"
Mrs Miller was on her lunch break when Riley came into her office. "That's good news," Mrs Miller said. "Have a seat," She gestured to the empty chair by her desk.
"I suppose you've read the file that was given to you yesterday," Mrs Miller asked.
"I have," Riley dipped her hand into her bag and brought it out "Here it is," She handed it to Mrs Miller.
"Have you applied for the undercover register yet?"
Riley nodded "I've started the paperwork. Just need to meet the vetting officers now and I'm sorted. Should take a fortnight at most,"
"Right then, I suppose I don't need to keep you in the dark anymore. You're going undercover as a maid in the target's house,"
Riley was a bit shocked, she'd assumed she'd be going undercover as a corporate staff member at the firm's headquarters.
Mrs Miller glanced at Riley who had a shocked expression on her face "That's how serious it is. Even the Commander is involved so you cannot fuck this up. I know you won't,"
"Of course," Riley gave a worried smile in response.
"Right, the Technical Surveillance unit are sorting your legend as we speak. You know the drill – fake birth certificate, employment history…It'll be ready by the end of the week. Along with your op-phone,"
Riley smiled a bit. She had heard all about the operational phones. They ran on heavily encrypted software that completely bypassed local Wi-Fi and commercial masts. It was proper ghost-on-the-network stuff, amazing much? Not when she had not even talked of its steganographic operating system, the way it hides apps and important data which can only be accessed with a code word. Her colleagues would rip their hair out when they see her with…
"Miss Knox, Miss Knox," DCI Mrs Miller called, but Riley was still lost in a daze of whatever she was thinking "…RILEY!" She called her name.
"Ma'am," Riley snapped her head towards a frowning Mrs Miller.
"Were you even listening to a word I just said?" Mrs Miller asked.
"Yes, sorry. You were talking about my legend, and the op-phone,"
Mrs Miller frowned "What were you thinking of?"
"I-I was just…thinking about the op-phone. You know, if I would take part in its production…"
"Aren't you a TSO? Of course you will. You do know how to do it, right?"
"Yes, absolutely." Riley smiled, things were falling into place perfectly.
"Now listen carefully, because I am not repeating myself again," Mrs Miller then tapped a file on her desk "In your legend, you're currently working as a waitress in a restaurant – The Verdant Plate. It's not really a high end restaurant, but it is 5-star. We'll use the restaurant to test your legend, you'd have to learn to act as a maid, and that's by becoming a waitress. We're happy with that, yeah?"
Riley nodded a bit. Mrs Miller smiled. "That file contains the details of your legend, although it has not been completed yet. You can take it just to review the information in it 'cause the moment your legend is done, we would apply for a waitress position in The Verdant Plate on your behalf,"
"When will the legend be ready, ma'am?"
"Two or three days. Yes, that soon. We reckon the target is going to be looking for new domestic staff very soon. If our intel is right, then we haven't got a minute to lose,"
"In that case, I should probably get down to the lab and help the team with the phone encryption,"
"Yeah, off you go. And don't leave the bloody file behind."
Riley collected the file from the table and stood to leave. "Oh, and Mrs Miller?" she called
Mrs Miller looked at Riley in response.
"Thank you for recommending me for this job," She said and left.
Mrs Miller's smile twisted a little as she looked at the door which Riley was standing at a minute ago, then she scoffed softly and got busy with her desktop.
---[D'Oro's Mansion]
"Dad, about the maid," Melanie said, standing beside her father as he reviewed documents.
She had finally found a topic that might keep his attention. She had read online that fathers were closest to their daughters, and that when they seemed distant, it was usually because of work. She wanted to bond with him, especially since he would soon leave on one of his 'periodic trips,' sometimes lasting over three months.
"I've informed Darryl," Nathaniel said without looking up. "You'll have a new maid soon."
"No, it's not that," Melanie said quickly. "The maid who was fired was the head maid. She took care of me personally. Please be careful when choosing the next one."
"Alright."
Melanie hesitated. "I was also wondering if we could go somewhere together. An outing. Just the both of us,"
She waited.
Nathaniel finally lifted his head and looked at her with rare affection. "I'm sorry, Melanie. I'm very busy. I have important business meetings next week."
Her gaze dropped, but she forced herself not to look disappointed.
"Tell you what," he added, "when I get back, we'll go anywhere you want."
Melanie smiled, though it didn't reach her eyes.
"Okay."
She nodded and quietly left the room.
---
"I told you this wouldn't work," Melanie scolded her lifeless Chucky doll. The doll wore its signature crooked smile, staring into nothingness. "We should just focus on inheriting the family business and studying hard enough to make Dad proud." She quoted what she had watched in a movie.
Melanie refused to cry or beg for attention like most kids. She was a D'Oro. D'Oro's didn't beg for anything. Besides, she was doing just fine on her own.
She sat on her bed and picked up her tablet. She had a plan to use her free time to build an invention- a robot toy Darryl had bought for her. Maybe when she finished, she would show it to her father. 'But that wasn't the real reason she was doing this,' Melanie reasoned stubbornly
'This was for… leisure.'
---
~Digital Forensics Unit, TSU.
Riley had not fully walked into the hardware integration lab when a man barked at her. "What are you doing here? This is a restricted area,"
"I know. I'm part of the TSU," Riley responded, a tinge of excitement in her voice.
"Well I know you, Riley Knox. What I want to know is why you're here, and not in the main office pool filing logs," He frowned, and spoke with a bored tone which made Riley's excitement deflate a bit.
"T-The DCI…the DCI sent me down here, to work on the op-phone,"
"You?" He eyes her, still frowning, "You sure?"
Riley nodded.
"Well, I can't exactly check with the boss right now, but you can join us. Can't say I'm convinced you know your way around this kit, though."
"I can…" He walked away before Riley could finish speaking "…try,"
Riley smiled to cover up her embarrassment, and walked in, after wearing the safety equipment.
They were all gathered at a particular steganographic table, completely preventing from seeing anything. She had to stand on her tiptoes to see what they working on. On screen, the steganographic partition was fully compiled, but the secure handshake log was stuck in a repeating timeout loop.
"It doesn't make sense," one of the tech officers grumbled, rubbing his eyes. "The AES-256 bit encapsulation code is flawless. The baseband firmware is clean. But every time we try to initiate a dummy burst transmission to the Yard's proxy node, the server kills the socket connection. It just hangs there."
The men around grumbled, all offering suggestions. Riley took a better look at the screen, and then she noticed–
Riley cleared her throat before speaking "I think the repeating loop is triggered by a cryptographic desynchronization between the client-side ephemeris timestamp and the proxy node's strict temporal enforcement window, resulting in an automated server-side socket termination to prevent potential replay attacks,"
Everyone turned to look at her like she was speaking gibberish.
"Just check if your server logs throw certificate validity or timestamp errors, then fix it by synchronizing both the client and server clocks to a unified Network Time Protocol (NTP) server"
"Right… okay." The Tech Officer who sat directly in front of the workstation console responded, slightly confused and flustered.
Everyone watched as he did as Riley said, and then he retried. His fingers flew across the mechanical keyboard, punching in the commands to force an NTP time-sync. For a second, the screen held its breath. The repeating timeout loop blinked once, twice... and vanished.
A solid green status bar cracked across the monitor. HANDSHAKE SUCCESSFUL: CONNECTION ESTABLISHED TO PROXY NODE.
The room fell dead silent. The Tech Officer slowly turned his chair, smiling as he looked up at Riley, "Blimey. That was brilliant. Even I didn't think of that,"
Riley smiled, it had been a while someone commended her like this. "It was no issue at all, quite simple when you think about it,"
The rest of the Tech pool drifted back to their working stations, side-eyeing her as they walked past.
"Did she just indirectly call us dumb?" One muttered under his breath
"Please. I knew it was a clock drift issue," another explained to the people walking beside him "She just beat me to the punch, that's all."
"Hang on, it was a date mismatch? I didn't even get a shit about what she said,"
"Yeah, makes two of us, mate."
Riley heard their remarks but said nothing. The Tech at the console gave her a sympathetic look "Don't mind them, it's just bruised egos. Look, if you're not busy, do you fancy helping me with the core software programming?"
"I'd love to," Riley took a seat on the chair next to him