by Toby Neal
Sophie inserted her key into the lock of the red lacquered door of her apartment after dinner, Alika right behind her. The meal had been simple and casual at a nearby Mexican restaurant, their heads wet from showers and the discussion mostly about her second trouncing of the Brazilian girl with the attitude.
“Brace for impact,” Sophie said, and sure enough, Ginger hurtled into the foyer, colliding with Alika in excitement.
“Sit!” Sophie exclaimed, making a hand gesture that was supposed to signal sitting. Ginger just thrust her nose into Alika’s crotch, inhaling loudly and thrashing their legs with her thick tail. Alika dropped to his knees and rubbed her chest, and the dog stuck her nose into his armpit, snorting in delight. He laughed.
“Two rounds of obedience school,” Sophie said disgustedly.
“She’s perfect,” he exclaimed as Ginger flung herself onto the floor, exposing her belly in surrender. He rubbed the dog’s tummy. The lab’s leg kicked and her eyes rolled back in her head. Sophie had a sudden mental picture of throwing herself on the floor and letting him do whatever he wanted to her as enthusiastically as her dog. The thought made her smile.
She took the leash down off its hook on the wall. “Ginger needs a quick walk, like I said.”
Alika stood. “Sure.”
They got on the elevator and went down, Ginger cavorting but settling down once the doors closed. Alika hooked an arm around Sophie and drew her back against him as he leaned on the steel wall. Sophie let him, her head resting against his shoulder, the length of her body touching his, the leash loose in her hand. She relaxed. She’d touched him often in the ring over the years, but now she was getting to know his body in a new way. She liked everything about it, and shut her eyes.
Ginger turned her head to look at Sophie with a question in her expressive brown eyes as the door dinged, opened, and another passenger got on. Sophie stiffened and tried to pull away, but Alika tightened his arm across her. She settled back, enjoying how they fit, realizing she didn’t mind that a stranger was seeing them together.
Alika was taller than she, broader across every muscled inch. For once in her life she felt just right beside a man because they were equals. She was desired, but also respected—everything she’d never had with Assan Ang.
The other passenger rode down with them in silence. Sophie flicked a glance to the side, registering a dark-haired man around six feet tall, dressed in black, carrying a small duffel. Sophie and Alika got out on the ground floor, but the other passenger stayed in the car.
Night had fallen. Sophie and Alika walked down the still warm sidewalk in the fragrant Honolulu dark, Ginger nosing and smelling and squatting on all her usual spots. Alika took Sophie’s hand and swung it lightly. She liked the feeling, and twined her fingers with his. He lifted her hand, and in the amber light of a streetlamp, Ginger nosing around the base, he inspected her long fingers.
“Such magic you do with these hands. Unlocking all the secrets of the online world.”
“And you.” She turned his palm over and traced thickened skin at the base of his fingers, a hard ridge on the edge of his thumb. “I can see the tools in your hands from these calluses. You don’t just use these hands for fighting. You build things.”
He tugged her against him, her hand still in his.
“Kiss me,” he whispered, as if he knew she had to be the one to do it. She leaned into him, wrapping her arms around the column of his neck and shoulders, drawing his head down to hers.
All was sensation, and light spangled darkness, and the feeling of falling and being carried at the same time, of giving and yet being given to. Finally she pushed away and laughed because Ginger, concerned by this unusual behavior, had wound the leash around and around their legs and now nosed at Sophie, whining.
“I have a chaperone.”
They extricated themselves and when they were back at her apartment building, she opened her mouth to ask him to come up. He set his fingers on her lips.
“Not tonight,” he whispered. “We’re going to take this slow.” And then he jogged away, as if he had to physically remove himself. She watched him go, smiling.
Chapter Seven
Back at work the next morning, Sophie re-engaged her hack on the Security Solutions mainframe. After an hour, she was frustrated at no progress. The team meeting this morning had been cancelled by Waxman, so she called Ken Yamada.
“I need to make a visit to the Security Solutions company headquarters downtown,” she said. “Got the time to go with me? I’m finding some irregularities I want to check out.”
“Sure. Speaking of home visit, Gundersohn and I are interviewing the staff at the Addams’ house. Nothing interesting so far and stories check out, so maybe your security company was the breach after all.”
They agreed on a meet time and Sophie hung up. She stood up, stretched, cracked her fingers, and noticed in the long glass window that it was another postcard-perfect Honolulu day. She’d been so preoccupied on her way into work thinking about the kidnapping case that she’d scarcely noticed.
Sophie sat down and loaded her best decryption software, a prototype she’d traded from a fellow tech agent. It was an off-the-books copy of a program her friend had written, and like DAVID, not a recognized FBI tool.
She’d never known it to fail.
The program went to work, drilling away at Security Solutions’ defenses, and while that processed, she activated Ying and looked into the DAVID cache. It was time to sort through the data from the three “coincidental” cases and find out exactly how Security Solutions was involved.
Sophie pulled up the three files and set DAVID to work cross checking the data input on the cases. More information was available now, entered by the different law enforcement agencies in the intervening days. DAVID’s little skull spun, and while the program was working on that, Sophie opened the cache on Assan Ang.
A good deal more information had collected, including links to Assan’s shipping enterprises and retailers who received from him. Sophie pulled up the bills of lading. Wood for prefabricated “green” construction was listed, along with “textiles” and “assorted household decor.” Most of his goods were warehoused in the Port of Los Angeles, where Assan had his own storage facilities.
Sophie was willing to bet, with the farmers he was contracting from, that at least some of the “assorted household decor” would be filled with opium poppy products.
But did she have enough to call in a DEA raid? And how bad would it be for her to use her connections in the FBI to do so, and have the raid come up dry? It would ruin her credibility, not to mention what might happen if anyone noticed that her last name was also Ang. She’d kept her husband’s surname because she’d paid in blood for that name and wanted to remember the debt owed her.
But knowing Assan, if her ex-husband ever realized she was going after him, the world wouldn’t be a small enough place for her to hide.
She was going to need some boots on the ground physical evidence before she made a move against Assan. In fact, even if she shut down Assan’s import/export business in the U.S., how was that going to stop his abuse of a new child bride? Right now she didn’t have anything to move on or an effective plan.
She needed a break to think.
Sophie set her security codes on her rigs with the key fob and left the IT lab, changing into exercise clothes in the locker room. In the elevator to the top floor of the building, she tried to calm her anxiety by shutting her eyes and controlling her breath.
The doors opened into a locked, bulletproof sally port. Sophie swiped her keycard, the pneumatic door opened, and she was on the roof of the building. She walked to the waist-high parapet surrounding the great open space, bare except for the big red X of the helipad. Near that, an open metal-roofed shelter held rows of bolted-down steel benches and tables for those awaiting transport or eating lunch.
She couldn’t sit down anywhere right now.
Sophie broke into a jog around the tra
ck painted around the edge of the building. She wasn’t the first to decide exercising outside was a good option. She’d use the company showers and locker room before returning to work.
The incredible vista of Honolulu, spread below in a 3-D patchwork quilt of color, movement and shape backed by the lush green Ko`olau Range, lifted her spirits in spite of her tension. As she lapped the hundred-yard circumference of the building, she took in the ocean view on the other side.
Towers of cumulous clouds, brilliant in the sun, blew across the cobalt sea like so many majestic galleons. Closer to shore, the water merged into shades of cerulean and turquoise. A sailboat as white and tiny as a child’s toy tracked the edge of the horizon.
Gradually Sophie calmed as she ran, mulling over her dilemma.
She couldn’t disclose the “simultaneous” cases and their connection to Security Solutions without disclosing DAVID’s involvement, when she’d been specifically directed not to use the program just yesterday.
So what made the most sense was to keep working the straight end of the case as it pertained to Anna’s kidnapping and see what she could see about the company with the full resources of the FBI brought to bear on it through the investigation. As things unfolded, she could use what they found to uncover the how’s and why’s of the “coincidence” cases.
Whatever happened, she couldn’t talk about DAVID, or run the risk of losing her program forever—which reminded her that she needed to follow up on the patent application she’d started.
Sophie did one more lap, sorting through the threads of information and coming to the same conclusion once more. She stopped in front of the ocean view and bent to stretch, exhaling over her knees in long slow breath, and inhaling as she stretched high, filling her lungs with great breaths of moist, salty air warm from the beaches of Waikiki.
DAVID and the gift horse cases would have to stay her secret for a while longer, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t find some way to use a digital can opener to get inside Security Solutions and find out what the connection really was. She couldn’t wait to go to the company’s Honolulu office with Ken and see what she could dig up.
Sophie jogged on, her mind going back to Dr. LaSota’s observations about her exercise habits.
“Screw her,” Sophie muttered in Thai. She followed that with a string of other invectives. “Deformed daughter of a pox-ridden whore! Eater of Buddha’s offerings! Demon-hag-witch who kisses the devil’s backside!”
She was brought up short by Waxman’s voice.
“You’re pretty angry with someone,” he observed.
“Sir! You startled me!” Sophie exclaimed. Waxman was wearing exercise clothes. He moved up to flank her.
“I’m wondering who it is that’s kissed the devil’s backside?”
“It sounds better in Thai, but it’s Dr. LaSota.” Sophie stopped, put her hands on her hips. “You might as well know, since my psych report probably went across your desk.”
Waxman threw his head back and laughed. It was so full and rich a sound that Sophie found herself smiling. Waxman was younger than she’d assumed, with his silver hair. He’d always reminded her of the journalist Anderson Cooper.
“Nuff with the ‘sir.’ Call me Ben.” Waxman dabbed his eyes with the edge of his shirt. “LaSota can indeed, be the deformed daughter of a pox-ridden whore at times. I’ve thought so myself. But she has her uses. Now what are you doing out here?”
“I needed to ventilate my brain. I’ve got a lead. I think.” She might as well tell him about Security Solutions; he was going to have to know about the visit she and Ken had planned. She filled him in on the Security Solutions connection to the kidnapping case. “We’re doing a scouting mission today.”
She left off the ‘sir’ but felt it vibrating in the air between them. He was something more than a boss, it was true. He’d given help, encouragement, and support over the years. He was attractive. Sometimes she wondered what lay under his suit. But Waxman was her superior, and she was concealing a lot from him.
“Okay then. Remember, no more ‘sir’ in private. And let me know right away what you find.” Waxman squeezed her shoulder lightly and she lifted a hand as he jogged on and she went into the sally port.
Her boss’s hand on her shoulder reminded her how seldom she was touched. Except for Alika, last night. She smiled, remembering, as she stepped onto the elevator.
After a quick shower and change, Sophie sat down at her desk and donned her headphones. Her rogue program had broken the Security Solutions firewall.
“Excellent,” she muttered, leaning forward, fingers flying as she surfed through various areas of their mainframe. Data began streaming across her screen, but without programs to define it, it was meaningless gibberish and wouldn’t tell her anything. It was time for phase two of her breach, physical penetration. She hit the intercom button. “Ken? You ready for our field trip to Security Solutions?”
Chapter Eight
Ken and Sophie rode up on the elevator of the elegant downtown high-rise where Security Solutions’ Honolulu headquarters was located. She followed Ken into the offices and they held up their cred wallets at the gracious front desk.
“We’d like a tour of your computer lab,” Yamada told the receptionist, a mixed-Hawaiian woman in a fitted sheath dress with a spray of jasmine tucked in a sleek bun.
“May I ask what this is regarding?” The woman’s glossy smile twitched like a tic.
“That’s a matter for your management,” Ken said.
“Let me get hold of our vice president of tech operations, Lee Chan. Perhaps he can help you.” She depressed a button on the phone and turned away with the receiver of the phone, muttering into it. “He’ll be right out. You may take a seat.”
Sophie frowned. Lee wasn’t going to like seeing her in this capacity after her fishing expedition of yesterday. The reception area was designed to project wealth and authority, with its curved reception area, keypad door into the inner recesses, and deep-piled, silky beige carpet. Blond Danish furniture and an amorphous metal sculpture added to the modern mood.
“To what do we owe the honor of an FBI visit?” Lee Chan opened a door that led into the back, smiling, but that smile faltered as he recognized her. “Sophie?”
“Hello, Lee.” She stepped forward, shook his hand. “It’s great to see you again.” Lee was wearing all black, and a collarless, button-less shirt that reminded her of photos she’d seen of Amish farmers.
“I take it you aren’t really looking for a job,” Lee said with a touch of acid in his voice.
“No.” She turned and gestured to her partner. “This is Special Agent Ken Yamada.”
Ken gave a disarming grin. “Perhaps we could speak privately?”
“Certainly. I’m eager to hear what brings you here.” He turned and swiped a keycard through the combination door, leading them down a luxurious hallway covered in that beige carpet that didn’t wear well but testified to the company’s willingness to spend money on cleaning and upkeep. “What made you call me yesterday, Sophie?”
“I wanted a little informal background on the company. I didn’t know, when I called you, that we’d end up having to visit in a formal capacity. I apologize for the subterfuge.”
Sophie could feel Ken’s vigilant attention on her as Lee came to a halt in the middle of the hall, turning to face her. His nose was shiny with stress. “You didn’t need to lie to me. I’d have said the same thing to you in an official capacity as I said to you yesterday,” the young man said.
“Again, I apologize. Your company is providing security for a family whose child was kidnapped. We rescued her, but are trying to find out how the kidnappers were able to take her undetected. Perhaps there was some breach they were able to take advantage of?”
Sophie thought Lee’s color got a little waxy as he turned away. “I can’t discuss individual clients’ services without written consent from them, or a warrant.” He resumed walking down a sound-deadening hallway rarified
by classical Muzak piped in from overhead.
“We don’t have that in hand, though we can easily get it. Can you just—show us around? Orient us on what you provide?” Ken interjected.
“Okay.” Lee sounded sullen as he ran his keycard at another door and used a thumbprint lock.
“You were so enthusiastic about the company yesterday,” Sophie said, trying to regain her former classmate’s trust. “Tell us about it.”
He opened the door for them. Inside, organically curved bays undulated around the room with tech people seated in them, headsets on. The lighting was low and the temperature cool. Sophie felt immediately at home.
“I imagine you did a little homework on us,” Lee said. “In fact, I know you did.”
“Just the basics,” Sophie said, trying her most charming smile on the young tech. “You made the Fortune 500 this year. You’re expanding your operations overseas and brought down some significant profits even in a rough year for the economy.”
Lee gestured to the bays where the operatives were diligently working. “We have a lot of surveillance and alarm systems. We also provide personnel as needed throughout locations in the United States. And you’re right. We’re expanding, going global.” His voice had warmed. He was getting over their initial setback, Sophie hoped. “We have a really unique surveillance monitoring system. It analyzes patterns in the home or business and can be set to send alerts wherever desired of anything out of the ordinary.”
“We heard about that from the family who experienced the kidnapping,” Ken said. “Kind of an artificially intelligent nanny-cam.”
“Well, that’s one way to put it,” Lee said.
“All that must take a lot of memory. Where’s your server farm?” Sophie asked.
“This way.” Lee led them to another locked door, opened it.
Significant cold bathed them in a douse of refrigeration as they stepped inside. A tall steel rack filled with black, humming computers blinked with tiny red lights. Yards of blue cable wound like arteries around a heart.