Julie looked around. “I don’t think so. There would be alarms going off all over the building. This is just one and it seems to be coming from there.” She pointed down the hall toward the executive offices. Voices rose as chaos broke out in the office. People came running from all over to find the source of the ear-splitting screech.
Following the siren led her to Charles Quigley’s office. Others already crowded the doorway, so she could barely see Quigley standing in front of his desk, staring at his computer in sheer horror.
She realized what must have just happened.
Dan, Jake, and Stan converged on the opening and pushed their way through the crowd into the office. She followed in their wake.
“Cripes, what’s wrong with it?” Quigley shouted above the screech. “It just suddenly started making this sound and flashing this message!”
Kris Thomas pushed her way in behind them and yelled, “Can’t you stop it? It’s killing my ears!”
Jake crossed the office and yanked the ethernet cable out of the wall, then went around the desk to sit in front of the computer. He glanced up at her, trying to hide his smile, as he grabbed the mouse and used it to turn the sound off on the machine. The silence felt strange when the noise stopped, as though the echoes rang in her head for a few seconds. But the chatter of voices replaced the alarm. At least twenty people had crowded into Charles Quigley’s office, curious about the commotion.
Julie went around the desk to glance at the monitor. As expected it was flashing the message “Unauthorized Access” in large red letters on a background of black and white concentric circles.
“What the heck is all this about?” Quigley demanded again.
“An alarm,” Jake said.
“Obviously. For what?”
“Just what it says. Unauthorized Access.”
“I was just checking out a few things on the internet,” he protested. “Nothing that should set off alarms like this.”
Jake looked up at her. “Control W?”
She and Stan both nodded.
“What’s going on?” Kris Thomas demanded to know.
Quigley looked up and noted the crowd in his office. His face got red and eyes narrowed. “Out! All of you. I have no idea what this is all about, but the show’s over. Get out!” He looked at Jake and Stan. “You two stay.”
“I need Julie,” Jake said.
She nodded. The others filed out after some hesitation, still chattering. Even Kris reluctantly turned to go. “I’ll want an explanation,” she said as she left the room.
Dan remained behind, and no one demanded he leave as well.
“What were you doing right before the alarm went off?” Stan asked Quigley.
“I told you, I was on the Internet, checking some supply sites.”
“And right before that?”
A wrinkle appeared in Quigley’s forehead as he thought. “I checked my email.”
“Ah.” Jake said at that moment. “Here it is.”
They all bent over to look. The screen showed an open email that purported to be from someone in the shipping department with an important document needing to be reviewed.
“You opened this email,” Jake said, “And I’ll bet you clicked on the attachment.”
“Well, of course. It said it was something I needed to review right away.”
Dan sighed loudly behind her. “Give me strength. How many times have I warned everyone to be careful about opening attachments?”
“But this said it was important.”
“But it wasn’t something you were actually expecting, was it?” Dan asked.
“And you didn’t check with the shipping department to find out if they’d sent you this? Or even check the return email address?”
Quigley didn’t answer.
Dan continued. “When you clicked on this attachment, you set loose a virus that tried to invade the network and find some of Julie’s code on the server. She suspected it might happen and set a trap for any hacker trying to get to her files. A trap that was sprung from your terminal.”
Dan looked her way. “Do you think the hacker got the backlash?”
“No way to tell for sure until you check the logs, but I sure hope so.”
“This…” Quigley almost choked on his anger and humiliation as he stared at her. “This was a trap? A trap you set?”
“I’m afraid so. It wasn’t intended for you personally, just for anyone who tried to access the files in my directory on the server. To make sure we knew when someone was trying to get to them. Unfortunately, the intruder was using your credentials to retrieve the information.”
“Without my knowledge or permission. I— I don’t know what to say.” He turned and walked out of the office. “Clean up this mess,” he ordered from the doorway. “And do it quickly.”
Once Jake and Stan had the situation under control, she and Dan left them to work on disconnecting the computer. They’d take it back to the server room for a thorough scouring of its hard drive as well as a deep system scan on the server to get rid of any unwelcome packages the intruder might have left behind.
Julie mock-sighed once they were alone in the hall. “I suppose that pretty much kills any chance of my getting another contract from this company.”
The wry smile curving Dan’s lips wiped away much of the tired shadows from his face. “Humiliating the boss isn’t a great career move.”
The truth behind that caused her a pang. “You’re probably in the same boat with me, then.”
“I told you yesterday whose boat I prefer to be in.”
“Dan, I’ve made—” She would’ve told him her decision, but at that moment Kris Thomas approached and demanded to know what caused all the fuss in Charles Quigley’s office. Julie was happy to leave the explanations to him.
“I’ll talk to you later,” she said, as she walked away.
As usual, once she started work, it engrossed her to the point time passed without her realizing. Maureen tapped her shoulder to say she was heading out for lunch and her stomach rumbled at the same time. She looked around for Dan but couldn’t find him, so she walked down the street to a sandwich shop.
He still was nowhere to be found when she got back, so she dove into the code again. She didn’t see him again for the remainder of the day. She thought he might call and suggest dinner together, but her cell phone remained stubbornly silent, even after she’d gone home.
She didn’t run across him on Friday morning when she got to Spieler, even when she deliberately walked by his office. He wasn’t there.
The phone on her desk rang at nine-thirty. She sent out the next-to-last batch of emails about the beta testing as she picked up the handset and identified herself.
She recognized Charles Quigley’s voice saying, “Miss Harrison, would you please join us in my office for a quick meeting?”
No “Please” or “Thank you.” He just hung up. She had a pretty good idea what would be coming and drew a deep breath before she stood up.
Maureen looked up at her.
“His majesty, King Charles, has summoned me to a meeting in his office. This is probably it.”
“Well drat,” Maureen muttered. “Good luck.”
CHAPTER 18
She deliberately went by the ladies’ room before heading to his office and lingered there just long enough to send the message she wasn’t a wage slave who had to jump when he rang the bell.
Several eyebrows rose among the people gathered in the room when she tapped on the open door to his office. “You wanted to see me?” She kept her tone level and professional.
“Come in and shut the door.” Quigley waved her to a seat.
The usual four, Quigley, Kris, Dan, and Jake, were already there. Kris and Jake had the other seats. Dan stood with a hip propped on a side table. A folder of papers rested beside him. She looked around the room, going from meeting one set of eyes to the next. Charles and Kris both stared at her stonily. Jake gave a small puzzling smirk, a
nd Dan winked.
“Miss Harrison, after some discussion among ourselves and due consideration, we have decided that we will not be buying any more software from your company. We expect you to meet the terms of the current contract until it’s completed, as will we, but since you yourself stated you didn’t need to be here to finish the rest of the work, we ask you to please vacate your cubicle effective immediately. Your access to the system will be blocked, and we will be removing your area on the server.”
She stood, holding her head high and plastering on a pleased smile. “Good! Thank you. After my experiences here in the past few weeks, I really don’t want to have to work with this company anymore. Out of professional courtesy I would’ve given you the option of first bid on the next project, but I’m quite gratified to know I don’t have to. Please don’t forget intellectual property rights for any specifications you have on the next app I proposed belong to J Varner Software, and our attorney will be scrutinizing carefully any similar apps released by this company. I’ll grab my laptop and head right out. I can’t honestly say it’s been a pleasure working here, but it’s certainly been educational.”
As she turned to leave, Dan said sharply. “Please wait a moment, Julie. Sit down again. I have something I need to say here.”
She did as he asked. The others watched him with puzzled expressions. He picked up the folder and looked at a paper within. “Three years ago, Miss Harrison was accused of leaking important proprietary code developed for this company to a competitor. She was forced to resign without compensation or reference. She has always maintained her innocence, and I came to agree. Because I felt an injustice had been done, when she came back to working with this company as part of the C&W acquisition, I began to look into what happened three years ago. A couple of recent hacking attempts gave me the clues I needed to search through the logs to find the truth. It was quite an effort and took a long time to produce results. Last night I found what I was looking for. I discovered who had really leaked the code.” He looked around at the others before continuing. “I’m not saying they did it deliberately. Just the opposite. This person didn’t even know it had happened. But they were responsible for it.”
He looked at each of them. “Kris, three years, four months, and two days ago, you opened an email with an attachment that purported to be a purchase order from a company in China. I have no idea what you actually saw when you opened that email, but I do know what happened next. Without your knowledge, a keylogger was installed on your computer and it recorded your log-in credentials. Those were then used by someone in Romania to steal the code for the app Miss Harrison had been working on. I can’t know for sure how it then got to our competitors, but I suspect it was auctioned off on the dark web.”
Kris’s face turned red and her eyes shot furious sparks. “Are you saying I was responsible for that leak? That’s outrageous. How dare you? This is nothing but hearsay and guesswork. It’s ridiculous.”
“Actually, it’s not,” Dan replied, his calm demeanor a stark contrast. “Hearsay or guesswork. It’s right here in black and white. I printed out the relevant sections of both the activity logs and the email logs for that day.” He held up a quarter-inch-thick stack of paper. “They don’t lie.”
“Can’t they be altered?”
“Only by someone who knows a lot about hacking a system and who has a lot of time to work on it.”
“Like her?” Kris pointed at Julie.
“She might have the knowledge, but she certainly hasn’t had the opportunity or the time to go back and do it. It’s taken me weeks of spending practically every moment of my free time plowing through the logs to find the actual entries, while she’s been completely wrapped up in working on the app.”
Jake spoke up then. “Those log files were downloaded directly from back-ups made at the time. If someone tried to alter them, that would set off all sorts of alarms and I can’t imagine even Julie, the smartest programmer I know, could’ve managed to circumvent those.”
“Well,” Kris huffed. “It’s all water under the bridge now. I guess we’re done here.”
“Not quite,” Dan said. “I have one more thing.” He pulled another piece of paper out of the file folder and handed it to Quigley. “This is my resignation. I’ve come to realize this isn’t the company I thought it was when I started working here six years ago. I don’t share the values or the vision of this organization’s leadership, so I think it best we part ways. I’m willing to continue for up to a month to train a successor if you want, or I’ll leave this afternoon and never come back.”
Even Charles Quigley’s expression changed from its set sternness to surprise and even horror. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am,” Dan assured him, “quite serious.”
“You can’t just leave us this way.”
“I don’t see why not.”
“We won’t give you any sort of decent reference.”
Dan’s smile was a wry, humorless twist of the lips. “I’m not looking for one.”
“What will you do?” Kris asked.
“I’m not sure yet,” he answered. “But that’s my problem. Not yours.”
“This is crazy.”
“No, it’s actually the sanest thing I’ve done in quite a while.” He gathered up the folder. “I think we’re done here. Let me know whether you want me to work out notice or not.”
He nodded to Julie, who stood, and they walked out of Quigley’s office together.
“I think I’m in shock,” she said. “I can’t believe you actually did that.”
“I told you two nights ago I didn’t see my future being with this company.”
“I know, but— What are you going to do now?”
“I haven’t decided yet. But I have time. I need to clean out my office, but then let’s go celebrate. Can I dump the stuff from my office at your place tonight?”
“Of course. I don’t have much to clean out, but I’m going to gather up my pens and pad and take them home along with my laptop. I need to finish up a few details getting the app ready and say goodbye to Maureen.”
“I’ll come get you when I’m ready to go.”
Maureen had clearly been waiting for her return as she turned immediately and asked, “Well?”
“I’m ordered to remove my presence from the premises right away,” she said. “They won’t buy anymore software from me, so I’m free to market it elsewhere.”
“Drat.” Maureen studied her face. “You don’t seem too dismayed, so I guess I’m happy for you. Not so happy for myself, though. It’s going to be a drag working here without you. But— There’s more, isn’t there.”
Julie grinned. “Yup.” She told her about Dan’s actions during the just-concluded meeting.
“Yowzah,” her friend said. “I hope you’re going to make him a happy guy. Even if he is going to be unemployed.”
“He’ll find another job. A better one.”
“Okay. Listen, don’t be a stranger. Please. I suspect I’m going to need periodic doses of sanity after working here for a while.”
“We’ll keep in touch. I promise.”
Dan showed up then, holding a carton full of personal items. He said goodbye to Maureen and a couple of others who’d heard about his departure and came to find him.
They took a cab to her apartment, where they dropped their things and continued on to one of the nicest restaurants in the area.
“We’re celebrating our freedom tonight,” he said.
They sat at the bar for a while, sipping a beer for him and a glass of wine for her. Julie held up the wine glass, swirled it, and said, “Maybe we should celebrate something more. “It’s officially the weekend now, isn’t it? The answer you asked me for? It’s yes. Definitely yes.”
His face broke into the fiercest, most glorious smile she ever seen.
“There’s just one thing I’m unhappy about,” she added.
The expression dimmed a little. “What?”
; “I wanted to tell you yesterday. Before you made your announcement about Kris and her error. Before you slew my dragon for me. I even tried to tell you, after the scene in Charles’s office, but we were interrupted.”
“I remember.”
“I wanted you to know I trust you. That we are good. Because I realized I was partly at fault three years ago, too. My expectation that you would believe me despite all the evidence and back me without reservation was selfish. Of course, you had to take the evidence into account. You’re a living, breathing, thinking human being, and anyone with half a brain would have to at least consider the possibility that I was guilty.”
“I think I’ve got half a brain.”
They faced each other on the barstools at the high counter. “You’ve got a lot more than that. Anyway, I wish I’d been able to tell you before, so you’d know any shadow between us was gone even before you found out how the leak had really happened.”
He held up the beer glass and looked at her over it. “I believe you. I think I’ve known it for longer than you have, but I’m glad you finally realize.” He set down the glass and looked around. “This isn’t where I intended to do this, but I can’t wait any longer.” He reached into his pocket and brought out a small jewelers’ box.
Her breath caught and the hand holding her wine glass trembled. She put her drink down on the bar.
He flipped open the lid, revealing a beautiful ring with a spectacular set of diamonds. Not the same ring she’d returned to him three years ago. “Julie Harrison, will you marry me?”
“Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.” She couldn’t help staring at the twinkling gems.
A sudden chorus of “Say yes. Say yes,” made her look up and around. She hadn’t noticed it had grown quiet in their immediate vicinity until the crowd began to repeat the call for her agreement.
So, she answered loudly. “Yes. Of course. Yes!” Her voice only shook a little though a lump of emotion wedged in her throat.
Everyone in their vicinity erupted in cheers as he put the ring on her finger. A moment of silence reigned, and then someone shouted, “Kiss!” Others followed suit and a new chant broke out.
No Time for Surprises (The No Brides Club Book 6) Page 15