Wire (Pierce Securities Book 2)

by Anne Conley

  But she kept her head buried in her tablet, tapping at the screen, checking emails until everyone filed out, leaving six people around the table.

  Paige had Evan start work today, on meeting day, because he needed to meet the department heads. While she didn’t want The Crimson Lady to be anybody on her staff, logically she knew it had to be an inside job. Not only did somebody have to have access to the servers to load her onto them, but that same somebody had to push the patch with The Crimson Lady on to all the clients. At least, that’s what common sense dictated. She looked at the faces around her—of the people she considered friends—and couldn’t imagine any of them doing any of this.

  She watched Evan listen carefully to the introductions and plotted how she could help him catch The Crimson Lady without actually interacting with him.

  Evan paid close attention as each department head gave reports to Paige, who listened attentively, ignoring him completely. He typed notes into his tablet—possible motives and modes of each person to accomplish the creation and implementation of The Crimson Lady—not feeling any closer to a resolution to the problem than before these meetings.

  Of course, he was flabbergasted at Paige’s behavior. He couldn’t imagine why she couldn’t at least acknowledge him. Did their night together mean absolutely nothing to her? His initial reaction was to be pissed, then he realized that if The Crimson Lady was in this room, which was likely, she may not want them to know of their past. But still, couldn’t she at least look at him?

  When the meeting was over, Evan rose quickly, wanting to follow Paige to her office to talk privately. But when he got there, a man was standing outside waiting for her, looking for all he was worth like a Don Johnson wannabe. The Miami Vice throw-back wore a white linen suit—which Evan’s mother would have said was gauche after Labor Day—with a hot pink shirt underneath. His spray-on tan and bottled streaks in his hair added to the nouveau riche effect.

  The man smirked as he watched Evan watch him, and Evan made a mental note as Don Johnson followed Paige into her office before he went into his own. He needed to find out who that guy was, telling himself he could be a suspect, but knowing the weird lump in his gut was pure jealousy. He was startled to see a young woman was sitting in one of his chairs, waiting for him. She looked familiar, and Evan assumed he’d seen her in the staff meeting, but couldn’t remember a name.

  “Hi, Mr. Rocco. It’s so nice to finally meet you.” She stretched out her hand, and he shook it, her hand lingering in his longer than was polite.

  “Evan, please. I don’t get the impression we stand on formalities here.” He sat behind his desk, still immaculate as he hadn’t unpacked anything, choosing to carry his satchel into the meetings with him. “You are?”

  “Terry. I work in Development. I’m in charge of the characters, and your research into AI has been crucial to my work. I just wanted to come in and gush to you a little.” Her voice was a little breathy, and Evan couldn’t help but wonder if it was nerves or if she was hitting on him. Then her words sank in. Great. Everyone knew his history.

  Feeling the heat rise to his face, Evan countered, “Does everyone here know my past?” He didn’t know if that would help him or hurt him in his endeavors to solve this mystery.

  Terry nodded, “Yeah, but most of them think you’re a living legend.”

  “Who doesn’t?” Realizing how arrogant that sounded, he backtracked, “What I mean is, am I going to have any problems out of anybody here?” Until he could do some digging, everyone at PSL was a person of interest. He needed somebody to stand out from the crowd.

  She shrugged. “Probably. But there are assholes everywhere, right? And since you’re new, so to speak, like not specifically Team Paige or anything, I think you’ll be okay.” She leaned back and crossed her shapely legs.

  “Team Paige?”

  “Oh, you didn’t know about the takeover?” He nodded. “Well, she didn’t fire all the tech people, she let most of them keep their jobs, and some of them haven’t been exactly appreciative.” He knew Paige hadn’t fired most of Patton’s employees and made a mental note to ask her about that.

  “I see.” Her take on it was interesting. “So you think I’m okay?”

  Her gaze dropped to his lips, and he smiled at her, needing an ally. “Definitely. I totally think you’re okay.” She eye-fucked him until it got uncomfortable. The thought crossed his mind that she might be available to use to his advantage. All of her actions seemed deliberate, from the crossing of her legs to the way she licked her lips.

  Paige’s office down the hallway, and Simon’s understandable credo about sleeping with women on the job, surfaced in his mind. He’d need to find a different way. Maybe just being friends would work.

  “Well, I should go. Call me if you need anything. I’ll be happy to help you get settled in.” It didn’t look to him like she wanted to go the friend angle, though. Not the way she licked her lips, eyeballed his chest, and then winked at him. Damn.

  “Thanks, Terry.” She stood to leave, and he called out, “Can you leave my door open on your way out? Thanks.” He tried to ignore the swagger of her hips as she left.

  Opening his company laptop on his desk, he inserted his own drive and downloaded the cloaking software that would keep curious lookie-loos from hacking in and seeing what he was up to. Then he started transferring files from HR to his drive so he could take them home and comb through them.

  After an hour, Evan’s list of people with motives for sabotaging Paige had grown exponentially, and he considered himself completely overwhelmed. Deciding he needed to talk to Paige, he walked over to her office and knocked on the door.

  Silence from the other side of the door was all he got. Her secretary was gone, too. He looked at his watch, noticing it was lunchtime. Evan made his way over to the snack area to see what was in the fridge, vowing to corner Paige at some point today.

  It bothered him, though, that she wouldn’t make a point to see him on his first day there. What did that say about her? Was she going to treat him like a non-entity the entire time he was here? How was he supposed to do his job that way?

  This was a mistake. Paige couldn’t keep the thought away, as much as it messed with her normally positive outlook on things. Hiring Evan Rocco to find The Crimson Lady was going to mess her up. He was already doing things to her, and she had been avoiding him since the meetings.

  Head buried in the fridge, she didn’t realize he was standing right behind her until his smooth voice penetrated her second-thoughts.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  She straightened abruptly, managing not to bonk her head on the freezer. His dark eyes pierced her menacingly, his jaw ticking as he clenched his teeth. He was pissed.

  As he took a step forward, she took one back, bumping into the refrigerator, inhaling his aftershave and cursing herself simultaneously. Jeez, he smelled good.

  “Why the fake name?” She swallowed hard at the raspy tone of his voice. He sounded pissed off, and sexy, and like he was holding on to a tenuous thread of control.

  He was everything she remembered. His full lips, flattened into a thin line across his face, shock of messy hair curled into a nest on top of his head, blood rushing to his face, vein pounding in his temple.

  She licked her lips, totally nervous around him, suddenly a star struck teenager again, and watched, fascinated, as his eyes tracked the movements of her tongue.

  “Um… Meeting in my office in fifteen.” She held up her lunch bag, “I need to eat first.”

  His posture relaxed and he took a step back, exhaling. “Fine. But this isn’t over. We need to talk.” His voice lowered into something sexy, something which reminded Paige of things best forgotten. “In private.”

  It was a promise, and damn if she wasn’t looking forward to it.

  Shaking her head to clear it, she marched herself to her office to scarf down her lunch before her next meeting. It was a meeting with Dan, Alex, and Evan—her top minds
in the company, her only hope at finding out who The Crimson Lady was and stopping her before she destroyed Paige’s company.

  Dan and Alex arrived at her office together. Paige suspected there was a romance brewing between the two of them and didn’t mind. At least some happiness was coming from this mess. Thrusting the two of them together to work on The Crimson Lady was turning into a good thing for them. She smiled absently as she watched Dan pull out Alex’s chair while Alex blushed behind her glasses.

  When Evan came in, all eyes went to him, as he commanded his space. Dressed for success at his first day on the job, Paige eyed his suit, cut immaculately to fit his muscular physique perfectly. It was at odds with the beat up leather satchel he carried over his shoulder, but the stories the satchel told only added to his mystique. That case held the secrets to one of the greatest hacking minds of the century.

  Paige desperately tried to contain the heat building up inside at the vision standing in front of her, but she had to drop her eyes to the table to make it fade. She couldn’t look at him all day and get any work done. She was out of her mind.

  “Evan, you remember Dan and Alex. We meet every Wednesday to discuss The Crimson Lady. They’re my special team assigned to stop her.” Paige managed to find her professionalism somewhere on the tablet in front of her. As long as she didn’t look into those deep brown eyes that spoke of untold delights, she’d be good.

  “Pleasure.” She could see him extend his hand to them out of her peripheral vision. “Do you mind giving me a run-down on how far you’ve gotten?”

  Oh God, that voice…

  Goose bumps popped up across her skin at the memories of his voice that night. Stupid.

  Dan, the mouthpiece of the dynamic duo in front of her, started speaking, thankfully bringing Paige back to the present.

  “Sure.” He tapped the screen of his tablet in front of him. “We’ve found a website where she seems to interact with the kids outside the game. She makes initial contact with them in the game, then sends them here for apparent culling. We haven’t gotten too far into the site, yet. It’s got some sick encryption, but this seems to be where she gets them to do her bidding.”

  “How does she pick which kids will do what she wants?” Paige had to stifle the gasp threatening to escape. She knew Evan was in his element on a computer, but this… This was a side she never knew he had. It fit with the computer coding thing. Evan liked puzzles, solving mysteries, and it became obvious. The interest she saw in his eyes was unparalleled. He was in the zone, ready to get to the bottom of this.

  “That’s the thing. Whoever is behind her must have access to their social media and school records or something. The thing all these kids have in common is they are social outcasts. Like school shooters waiting to crack. She’s very careful to choose kids who seem to have nothing to lose.”

  “How do you know that?” Evan leaned forward, his chin in his hand, making notes on his tablet as he listened intently. It was as if she was forgotten, and the pang that hit her at the thought made her feel guilty. This was why he was here. She really needed to get a grip.

  Dan blushed proudly. “I hacked into their schools. Of course, it was all done after the fact. I have no way of knowing at this point who she’s going to pick next. Only the ones who’ve already done stuff.”

  “Send me that site.” Evan was all business. Paige risked a look at him, and he was focused intently on Dan. “Use this email.” He slid a card across the table to Dan, and Paige focused on his hands—long fingers, elegantly tapered into neatly manicured nails. He was definitely exuding the aura of the confident, professional, corporate type. But she knew he could be so very different.

  Stop it, Paige.

  “What’s your take on her coding?” He tapped on his tablet as he took notes, and Dan was like the kid showing off to his parents—trying to act cool, but secretly tickled at the attention.

  “It’s pretty sophisticated stuff. If it’s a kid, it’s a savant, which is possible, I guess. But my hunch is whoever is behind her has years of experience. And she’s studied you. There’s a lot of your stuff in there.”

  “Yeah, I noticed that. What have you tried to get her out?” Evan blushed a little, seeming embarrassed that this entity was using his tricks.

  “The usual.” As Dan explained what he’d done to remove The Crimson Lady, Paige’s mind wandered. She was at a brick wall with this woman. Everything she’d known to do had been done, aside from taking the game offline completely. Whoever was behind The Crimson Lady knew her board wouldn’t go for that, implying they had working knowledge of Boards of Directors and their penchant for the bottom line. The Crimson Lady had been around a while, but the attacks had started shortly after the takeover. Even so, she didn’t think Roger was behind it.

  The truth was, Paige wasn’t a coder. That had always been Roger and Dale’s thing. She was the persona behind it all, they were the brains. She just had the business sense it took to build a great company, only knowing the basics behind the programming, and The Crimson Lady knew this.

  She watched Dan as he gleefully explained what he had done to stop The Crimson Lady, with little success. And she saw Evan’s careful reactions. He leaned forward, chin on his fist, nodding at various intervals while making noises of encouragement. His dark eyes penetrated Dan, thankfully not focused on her. Every time he looked at Paige, her heart slammed in her chest and took her breath away. Even now, just looking at him, her palms were sweaty and she had to make the conscious effort to breathe deeply.

  She was star struck, plain and simple. For any other woman, having him here would be like having Adam Levine or Gerard Butler sitting in front of them. She had idolized Evan for years, lusted after his pictures, daydreamed about a romance with him. Now that she had him here, she was helpless to think of anything besides those childish daydreams—fantasies about the man three feet away invading her senses.

  Paige glanced over at Alex, to see if she was having the same reaction, and found her silently staring at Dan, her neck mottled with a red blush. Well, that answers that question. If they didn’t already have a thing going, Alex sure did want one.

  She realized the meeting was winding down when everyone looked at her expectantly.

  “Right, um… same time next week then?” Maybe by then she’d have her head on straight, or Evan would have worked his magic and all this madness would be over.

  Dan and Alex gathered their things, but Evan dallied by his chair, straightening his tablet, and pushing in the chairs around the round table.

  When the others had left, he looked straight at her. “Are we going to talk?”

  Thankfully, Mandy interrupted them before she found words. “I’m sorry, Paige. I need to get the final details on the birthday party.”

  “Great! Let’s get this done!” Ridiculously relieved at not having to talk to Evan one-on-one right now, she turned a beaming smile to her assistant. She could have kissed the woman.

  Turning back to Evan, she apologized, “I’m sorry. Today’s not a good day. You get settled and we’ll meet tomorrow.” She winced at the choked sound her voice made.

  It was shitty, and she knew it. She’d hired him to do a job, people were being hurt, and she could barely talk to the man.

  Evan had worked himself into a frenzy and had a never-ending list of possible suspects that had no hope of getting smaller until he talked to Paige. On his way home, his muscle car rumbled as his mind raced through the possibilities. He’d discerned the security sucked at PSL, especially in the server room. Since the whole thing couldn’t have been possible without somebody uploading The Crimson Lady on the servers directly and pushing the upload to clients, he started there.

  He’d uploaded some of his own creations: a cloning program and a keystroke spy software, as well as a cloaking hack so his own moves on the server couldn’t be determined. None of it was foolproof, but it was a start and something he could do to prevent more uploads for the duration of time Paige wasn’t
speaking to him.

  That was something else altogether, and Evan didn’t want to think it had anything to do with The Crimson Lady. He’d like to think she was avoiding him because of that night. Maybe she felt awkward? If she would just let him talk about it, though, he felt confident he could alleviate any fears she had. But he had to talk to her first. Unfortunately, he wanted to do anything but talk.

  At home, he closed his door behind him, dropped his laptop bag on the couch, and went into his gaming room. Yeah, he had one of those. Where most people had a home office, Evan chose to devote his spare room to gaming. His buddies made fun of it, but he made extra cash with the videos he posted on YouTube, and his gaming alter-ego, EmberFalls, was a hit in some circles.

  Realm of Worlds was PSL’s breakout game, the one that made Paige and her company known in the tech circles as a viable force to be reckoned with. With superb graphics, creative storyboards, constant updates, and a popularity among a variety of age groups, including the coveted eighteen to thirty-four-year-olds, Realm of Worlds probably made Paige more money than all of PSL’s other games combined.

  Which was why The Crimson Lady being in that particular game was an attack unlike any other. She probably had contact with millions of gamers worldwide. The fact she was targeting kids in Austin meant this was personal. Someone was out to get Paige. And Evan was going to stop her.

  Logging on, he found his team in the game, having split up in the World of Wolves. RoW was, before this job, Evan’s release—a place where he could go to forget about his real problems and immerse himself in worlds of fairy tales based on the collections of the Brothers Grimm. The game had different levels, where the object was to survive the fairy tale villains—witches, stepmothers, wolves, Rumpelstiltskin—you name it, it was out to get you. Typically, Evan and his team banded together to conquer one world at a time, but on nights like tonight, where one of them was late, the team went on without him.