by Marie Astor
***
Dennis Walker turned off his computer and poured himself a scotch. It was eleven o’clock at night and he was dead tired. Irritated was more like it. His eyes were beginning to hurt from his having sifted through tons of meaningless information. Wiring the computers of Bostoff’s employees had seemed like a brilliant move in the beginning, but so far the feedback that Dennis had received from the analysts at the Treasury had not produced any meaningful information. At first Dennis blamed the ineptness of the analysts and chose to bore through the data himself, but he too came up empty-handed. There were hundreds of emails, but none of them had any meat in them: it was as though employees of Bostoff Securities labored under the delusion that they were working for a truly legitimate business, which, of course, could very well be the truth when it came to the worker bees. But Dennis was convinced that the top brass had to know what was going on. He had wired computers of senior executives and those of the Bostoffs. He had expected their emails to be goldmines, but both Bostoffs were surprisingly laconic in their conversations, which left Dennis with two possibilities: either both Bostoffs were extremely cautious, or they had begun to suspect that their computers had been wired. Dennis certainly hoped that the latter was not the case.
In all of his investigations, he had never blown his cover, and he certainly did not want to start now, especially given the fact that his candidacy had been a long shot for the case in the first place. Which reminded him: he needed to stop chatting up Bostoff’s female employees. This morning’s kitchen chat with that recently hired cute lawyer, Janet Maple, had been a glaring lapse in judgment, and yet Dennis could not help smiling at the memory. The girl definitely liked him. She nearly let her oatmeal run over while talking with him, and Dennis, ever the hero, saved Janet from embarrassment by popping the microwave open just in time – well, he saved her from further embarrassment, as the girl was already as red as a beet.
A grin of self-satisfaction glinted on Dennis’s face. Sure, he could be vain when it came to female attention, but it felt good to be admired, and, in his defense, one never knew when a casual acquaintance could turn into a useful ally. Given the results that Dennis had gotten from his surveillance of the Bostoffs so far, he just might need a friendly inside source.
Chapter 5