He could feel her fury through the fiber optic cable. Dr. Ashford was a legend in the Fidelio network—a provider who filed 99.7% clean claims. But she also had the temperament of a cornered wolverine.
But Mrs. Gableman was in pain.
He logged out of Dr. Ashford’s account. He cleared the console. He wiped the audit trail with a scrubber script he’d written last year for “maintenance purposes.”
This was day three. The system had rolled out “Fidelio Fortress,” a new security update that was supposed to eliminate fraud. Instead, it had eliminated Marco’s sanity. The update locked out every third-party vendor account. The official IT help desk in Arizona had a six-hour hold time. And in the meantime, 1,432 pending claims were rotting in his queue.
He slammed his fist on the table. The teenager two computers down, playing League of Legends , didn’t even flinch.
He appended a base64 string he’d memorized—the hash of a dummy provider account that Fidelio used for internal testing. It was like using a skeleton key made of contraband.
He closed the laptop.
Dr. Ashford: That gives me a 404. A 404, Marco. My patient is crying. Her jaw is the size of a grapefruit. I need a manual over-ride code.
Marco looked at the Fidelio login page one last time. The harp logo gleamed. The two empty fields waited, patient and indifferent.