Hacker For Hire (Ted Higuera Series Book 2)

by Wallace, Pendelton

  “Jesus! Where will it print?”

  “Your choice. You’ll see that we have about two hundred printers hooked up to the application. You can print it in Ms. Clarke’s office or in our Moscow branch. It’s very handy for sharing documents. Now for some neat stuff. Close Word.”

  Ted pointed to the little “X” in the top right side of the monitor. He got the “Do you want to save” dialog box. He clicked on ‘No’ and closed the application.

  “Okay, open Excel.”

  Ted noticed he was breathing faster than normal. “Computer. Open Excel.”

  An Excel spread sheet opened in front of his eyes.

  “Open the Cube Data.xls file.”

  “Computer, Open Cube Data.xls.”

  A three-dimensional spreadsheet opened in the air. There were columns and rows, but behind the first spreadsheet was another and another. It must have been twenty-spreadsheets deep.

  “You can perform any kind of math functions across rows, columns and planes. It’s cube computing. This brings super computer power to the local coffee house.”

  “Cat, you’ve got to see this.” Ted took the glasses off of his face. “It’s a full computer, just floating in the air in front of your eyes.”

  “That’s hardly all that Delphi is.” Alison smirked at Catrina. “It’s a cell phone, it’s a GPS, a PDA. It’ll download full movies, play all of your favorite songs without irritating the guy sitting next to you on the bus, display network TV. We’re working on a deal with the cable companies to show cable channels. It has a full interface to the Internet. You can do your banking, make a doctor’s appointment and order a new book while you’re waiting for a red light to change. Doctors can have full access to patient records while they walk down a hallway. We have applications that allow repairmen to be in contact with their offices, get work orders, order parts, you name it.”

  Catrina took the glasses and just stared at them. “When will this be on the market?”

  “We’re still working out some little bugs.” Alison took the glasses from Catrina and placed them on Catrina’s face. She gently brushed back a lock of blond hair that had gotten tangled in the glasses leg.

  “What kind of bug?”

  “Well, they kinda catch on fire.” Gopi had a look of pain on his face.

  “That’s a slight exaggeration.” Alison stopped Catrina from pulling the glasses off her face.

  Ted thought maybe she held Catrina’s hand a little too long. Hmm, is there something going on here?

  “They have been known to overheat a little.” Alison waved away Gopi’s comment.

  “Yeah, tell that to Simmons. He got second degree burns.”

  Alison shot a death stare at Gopi.

  Chapter 17

  “You wouldn’t believe this thing.” Ted flipped the steaks over on the grill and turned back to the kitchen. “It’s like having a mobile computer attached to your belt. The whole thing is about the size of a book of matches and you see the screen through a pair of sunglasses.”

  “Where’d you see it?’ Gina sat on a stool at the breakfast counter, a glass of Merlot in her hand.

  Oh shit. Ted caught himself. “I can’t tell you. Confidentiality and all of that, but man, was it cool.”

  Ted liked where their relationship was going. He could only see Gina when her ex had the kids, but when she was available, she was all there. He liked the sex, Gina was open to just about anything, in fact, she had taught him a thing or two, but what he liked best was the camaraderie. He could tell her anything, share his day with her. She was always interested. She always saw things at a deeper level than he did. She made him think. She made him feel feelings he didn’t even know he had.

  “You know, there’s nothing sexier than a man who cooks.” Gina dangled her black pump off of a toe. “What do you have going for us?”

  “I’m breaking you in gently. Tonight, New York pepper steaks, twice-baked potatoes and asparagus in hollandaise sauce. Once I’ve got you hooked, I’ll do something fancy.”

  Just getting her to give him her address had been a major accomplishment. Gina wanted to keep their relationship totally separate from her family life.

  The single level three-bedroom house in West Seattle fit Gina, small, but well maintained. Her diminutive yard was neatly trimmed and planted with fall foliage. The sliding glass door off the patio opened into a neat, well-stocked kitchen. Glass jars with pasta, flour and sugar sat on the green and black granite topped counter next to the stove. The stove, and all the appliances, were old, but serviceable.

  I need a small sauce pan for the hollandaise.”

  “In the cabinet to the right of the sink.” Gina smiled.

  Who gives a rat’s ass if she’s older? Age was a sore spot for Gina. Ted could imagine himself growing old with this woman, but she was insistent that in ten years, he would get tired of her, dump her for a younger woman. Who cared if she sagged a little here or there, she would still be who she was.

  Ted bent down to get the sauce pan. He opened the cabinet and looked in. There was something whitish behind the pans. It looked like a file folder. He reached in and grabbed it.

  “Did you misplace this?” She wouldn’t store her files in a kitchen cabinet.

  “Oh my God! Give that to me.” Gina jumped up from the stool.

  Ted glanced at the file. It was labeled “Jackson Schmidt.” “What is this anyway?”

  “Ted, you didn’t see that. Give it to me.” She tore the file from his hand and ran out of the kitchen.

  What the hell?

  “Ted, you can’t tell anyone you saw that file.” Gina stood in the doorway, her olive-skinned complexion suddenly white. “You have to promise me.”

  “What is it anyway? You know I can keep a secret. If I won’t tell you who I’m working for, I certainly won’t tell anyone else I saw your file.”

  “It’s dangerous. It’s complicated.”

  “Danger’s my middle name. What is it, Gina?”

  She stared hard at him for a long minute. Then she seemed to make up her mind, she took a deep breath and let it out. “It’s a file I’m keeping on my boss.”

  “Your boss?”

  “Yeah, Jackson Schmidt. Our CFO…he’s cooking the books.”

  Ted sat down at one of the barstools and took a long swig from his wine glass. “Cooking the books? What’s he doing?”

  “He came to me. He wanted me to post some special transactions. I knew they weren’t right, but what could I do?” Sweat trickled down her forehead as she sat next to Ted at the breakfast bar.

  “What were they?”

  “Receipts for work done on his yacht. Airline tickets for a trip to Aruba. The reservations were for him and someone not his wife. And the company paid for it all. He wanted me to post them to the GL.”

  Ted took that in for a minute. Here’s the CFO of a publicly-traded corporation. He’s using company money for his own benefit. That has to be some kind of felony. That’s gotta be a violation of Graham, Leech, Bliley or Sarbanes Oxley or something. “What business is your company in? You’ve never told me where you work.”

  “I work for a large computer manufacturing company.” Tears streaked down Gina’s face. ‘I’ve had to do worse. Once he had me, he could make me do anything?”

  “He had you?”

  She seemed to deflate before Ted’s eyes. He put out his arm to support her. She buried her head in his shoulder.

  “He had me investigated. . . He knows about my . . . joint custody agreement. He knows about my…ah…proclivities for having fun.” The tears and sobs were coming so fast, it was hard for Ted to understand her.

  “Having fun? I don’t get it.”

  “You don’t really think you’re the first do you?” She sat up and stared bullets at him. “Being a single mom is lonely. Sometimes I feel like I just need male companionship…but I can’t let that interfere with raising my kids. I’m not going to be one of those moms who keeps bringing men in and out of my kid
s’ lives.” The look on her face defied Ted to challenge her.

  He waited for her to go on.

  “Mr. Schmidt found out I like to keep an active social life. When Freddy has the kids, I go out. I like to go to single bars.” Her face softened. “You’re the first guy I’ve ever had a second date with. I’ve never allowed anyone in my home before.”

  Ted put his arms around her and pulled her close. “I don’t care about any of that.”

  “How can such a smart man be so naïve? Mr. Schmidt found out about me. About my taste in men. He threatened to tell my ex’s divorce lawyer. If this got to court, I’d be declared an unfit mother. Freddy would take custody of the kids away from me. Teddy, I couldn’t live without my kids.”

  “There has to be a way. What are you going to do with that file? Take it to the Feds, the Security and Exchange Commission?”

  “Are you out of your mind? I made those entries into the GL. I committed the felony. I’d be prosecuted. If I turned that file over to anyone, I’d be fired. I’d never work in accounting again.”

  Ted saw the fear in her eyes.

  “I don’t know what to do with it. What he’s doing is wrong, but I’m implicated. If I blew the whistle, he’d just say that I was cheating, that he didn’t know anything about it. I’d be hung out to dry.”

  Ted reached out and pulled her dark hair out of her eyes. He took her face in his hands and turned her towards him. “Gina, Papa always says that if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. You can’t sit on this kind of knowledge. If the Feds find out about this someday, and they discover that you knew and didn’t do anything, you’ll be complicit in the crime. You could go to jail.”

  Tears streamed down her face. “Teddy, I can’t figure it out all by myself. Mr. Schmidt’s too smart. He covers his tracks too well. This would take a forensic accountant.”

  Ted smiled. “You came to the right place.” Ted pulled his wallet from his hip pocket and fished out a business card. “Allow me to introduce myself: Ted Higuera, Hacker-for-Hire. I can get into his files. As far as a forensic accountant goes, my boss has one on her staff. She uses her to investigate husbands’ finances and discover what they’re hiding in divorce actions. If there’s a fish in the woodpile, Leah can find it.”

  Gina exhaled a deep breath. She seemed to shrink before Ted’s eyes. “Ted, I can’t get you involved.”

  “I’m already involved. Now that I know, I can’t ignore this. Even if you don’t do anything, I still have to find out what’s going on. There’s thousands of stock holders, little guy’s pension funds, their life savings, tied up in that company. If they’re at risk, I have to do something about it. I took a superhero’s oath.”

  Gina stared at him like he was out of his mind for a minute, then threw her arms around him. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “Just one more thing, Gina. You’ve never told me who you work for.”

  “Millennium Systems.”

  ****

  Jonathan Jefferson, a tall slender black man in an elegantly tailored suit, sat next to Ted in the unmatched chairs in front of Catrina’s desk. “Well, that gives us three suspects now.” Jeff was the only other male in Catrina’s employ.

  “Three? Who’re the first two?” Ted felt like he was playing catch up. He thought that the news that Millennium Systems’ CFO was dipping into the cookie jar would crack their case.

  “I’ve liked Terry Metcalf from the start,” Catrina said. “He got booted out of the leadership of his father’s company. He has a hard on for Alison. He’s got plenty of motive.”

  “Here’s what I’ve dug up on Steve Winston.” Jeff tossed a file folder onto Catrina’s desk.

  She ignored it. Ted reached for the folder.

  “Steven Winston, member of the MS board of directors.” Ted read the first page. “CEO of First Washington Bank. Member of the Seattle School Board. Western Washington Boy Scouts board member. He seems like an all-around good guy.”

  “It gets interesting.” Jeff reached over and flipped a couple of pages. “He had a son, Steve Junior. The boy was developmentally disabled.”

  “Retarded?” Ted let the word slip before his brain engaged.

  “We don’t use that word anymore, but yes. He was slow.”

  “Was?” Catrina reached for the folder.

  “It seems that Mr. Winston was a little embarrassed by his off-spring. They put the boy in a ‘special’ home for ‘special’ kids. Junior managed to get himself tangled in an electric cord and strangled himself. The police put the death down as ‘suspicious.’”

  “What does that have to do with MS?” Ted asked. “How does that make him a suspect?”

  “You never know.” Jeff shifted in his chair. “Maybe there’s some connection to his son’s death. Maybe there’s something at MS that Donna Harrison found. Maybe Winston didn’t want that information to get out. Someone with a secret to keep is a prime candidate for blackmail.”

  “I’m not buyin’ it.” Ted turned to Catrina. “Why would he keep any incriminating information on the MS network? If he had that kind of information, he’d keep it on his home computer, or at least on the First Washington Bank network. He has more control there.”

  “Exactly.” Catrina leaned forward in her chair. “That’s why you’re going to hack into his home and work systems. Poke around, see what you can find.”

  Ted felt like he had been hit in the chest with a baseball bat. “No way. Cat, that’s illegal. We may have permission from Alison Clarke to hack into the MS network, but she can’t give permission to hack Winston’s home or business.”

  Catrina smiled at him and spoke very softly, like Ted was a little slow. “We follow the clues where they take us. If he hasn’t done anything illegal, then he has nothing to worry about. I know you’re good enough to get in and out without him noticing. If he has done something, then we’ll plant a little information for the police to find.”

  Ted tried to counter her argument, but nothing came to his mind. This wasn’t right, morally or legally. Felony computer trespass was worth five years, but he couldn’t think of any words that would persuade her.

  “Jeff, what do you have on the other board members?”

  Ted could see that for Catrina, the subject was closed.

  “No much yet, I’m still poking around.”

  ****

  “I don’t like it, Jeff.” Ted poured two cups of coffee and handed one to Jeff.

  “You don’t have to like it, kid. Just keep the boss lady happy.” Jeff’s expensive suit didn’t fit with the secondhand store décor of the break room.

  “How did you get hooked up with her?” Ted stirred a packet of sugar into his coffee. “How come you were the only man working for Flaherty and Associates?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I have time.” Ted pulled out a chair and plopped down. “All I have to work on is illegally hacking into people’s systems.”

  Jeff scrutinized Ted for a minute, as if he were weighing his options. “I was on the SPD. My partner was really good at keeping my secret.”

  “Your secret?”

  “Yeah. It’s no secret now though.” Jeff sipped at his coffee. “My partner and I responded to a burglary at a clothing store. I caught him carrying a leather jacket out to his car. He outted me to destroy my credibility.”

  “He outted you? You mean . . .?”

  “Yeah, I’m gay.” Jeff swirled the coffee in his cup.

  Ted couldn’t tell if he was proud or ashamed of what he just said.

  “Let’s just say that life isn’t easy for a gay man in the SPD,” Jeff continued. “No one wanted to work with me. My stuff kept getting vandalized. I responded to a robbery, the perp took a shot at me, and my backup never showed. I called in ‘shots fired’ and no one responded.”

  “So how does that get you hooked up with Catrina Flaherty?”

  “She’s the Great Saver of lost souls. When she heard I quit the force, sh
e offered me a job. I had nowhere else to go, so I took it. I want to be very clear about this: There is no one in the world that I would rather have my back than Catrina Flaherty.” Jeff put down his coffee cup, turned and left the break room without another word.

  Chapter 18

  The 24 Hour Fitness gym at South Lake Union pleased Ted. It was cool and convenient. Endless rows of exercise machines filled a room with floor to ceiling windows on two sides. Torquemada, the head of the Spanish Inquisition, probably dreamed of a production line of torture machines like this. And people paid to use them of their own free-will. How many souls could Torquemada save with this kind of set up?

  Ted never saw more than half of the machines in use at any time, but the women were mostly young professionals, and hijole, were they hot.

  “So I got assigned to my first case. . . “ Chris spoke easily between breaths as he ran on the treadmill. “You wouldn’t believe my boss on this one.”

  “Who’d you get?” Ted inclined his treadmill another few degrees.

  “They call her the ‘Dragon Lady.’” Chris flipped his long blond hair out of his face. “She’s this Vietnamese chick. Smarter than shit and tough as nails.”

  Ted’s treadmill began to return to level and slow its pace. He breathed hard as he cooled down.

  “Yeah, I’m on my first case too. I’m lookin’ for a leak in a corporate boardroom.” Ted wiped his brow with the towel around his neck.

  “This chick puts in eighty, a hundred hours a week. She expects me to do the same. I’ve gotta say, she doesn’t cut me any slack for the ‘boss’s son’ thing.” Chris stepped off of his treadmill and reached for his Nalgene bottle.

  “What kind of case is it?” Ted’s breathing had just about returned to normal.

  “It’s really not a case yet. This big-wheel chairman of the board type hired us because he expects the CEO to sue him. We’re just gathering the facts before the suit is filed. This guy’s a high roller that my dad lined up last summer on the Star of the Northwest cruise.”

  “Have you met him yet?” Ted plopped down on a bench and took a long drink of water. “Is he another one of those locos who fall all over themselves as soon as they hear who you are?”