He drove away to the sound of the first approaching police siren.
Chapter 11
Spent amid damp rumpled sheets of Egyptian cotton, Lily Randall watched Roger Baxter as he walked, naked, to the bathroom. He switched on the light and stepped onto the black marble floor, pulling the handle on the shower. Water sputtered and gushed. The sound was then muffled when Baxter closed the stall door.
Lily ran still-tingling fingers over where his savage caresses had left her raw. She’d played these rough games before. She didn’t care for mincing or unconfident men. But it wasn’t that Baxter was self-assured, or even that he liked to perform the dominant role. He wasn’t playing at using her. He was using her, full stop. She felt like nine holes at the links. Like wine at a tasting, to be spit out in a communal silver bucket.
But then again, she was also using him.
Lily drew from her clutch the device Shepard had supplied—tiny, squarish, about the size of a dime and with a protuberance that connected to the data slot on a cell phone. This would, upon insertion, install a piece of spyware that would relay all incoming and outgoing communications back to Zeta. As Vice President of Operations, Baxter would be their link to the entire smuggling operation.
She leapt off the bed, walking catlike on the cold hardwood floor, shivering. Baxter liked his room icy.
She found his pants, rumpled on the floor, the belt still threaded through the loops. No phone and no wallet. She tried the jacket next with no luck. Safe was next. She found it in the closet, open and empty. She cast a nervous glance at the bathroom. His phone. Where was the damn phone?
She pulled open drawers in the bedside tables and desk and ran her hands under the pillows. Nothing.
Her gaze returned to the bathroom door. Steam was billowing out, the shower still going strong. She walked to the door and peered in. There it was, on the sink by the shower, on top of a thick leather wallet.
No, you didn’t rise to the position of Chief Financial Officer of Acevedo International by being trusting. Even—especially—of the women you sleep with.
She went inside, barefoot, taking light steps. She reached out for the phone and looked back at the shower stall. Baxter had swiped the condensation off the glass and was watching her. She went for a facecloth instead. He watched, stern and impassive. She blew him a kiss over her shoulder as she wet the edge of the cloth.
She was dressed by the time he came out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist.
“I thought I should get going,” she said.
He grabbed her by the waist and squeezed her to him. She ran her fingers through his wet hair as they kissed.
“So, do I get to see you again?” He would like that, of course. For her to ask. It fed into his fantasy of power.
His phone rang before he could respond. He raised a finger to her lips and reached for it.
“Hey, honey,” he said, right hand moving along the small of Lily’s back. He kept his predator’s eyes on hers and pushed her against the edge of the table. “Yeah, everything’s all right.” His hand moved under her dress, fingertips tracing her thighs. She felt her face flush. “You should be glad you didn’t have to sit through this one. How is Sasha?” Lily ran her tongue against her teeth to keep from making noise. Bastard. But she had to be what he wanted. He had to want her to return. “Bye, honey. Sleep tight. See you tomorrow.” He hung up and set the phone down on the table. He then grabbed Lily by the hair again and brought his eyes level with hers. “Let’s make a couple of things perfectly clear. You are not my girlfriend. You will not be my girlfriend. And you will never be my wife. Keep me satisfied, and I will be good to you. Understood?”
She nodded, whimpering. He pulled her in for a kiss, biting her lip.
“I think we have an understanding then. You may go. I’ll call you.”
He turned his back on her and dropped his towel. Dismissed then, she thought and turned to go. She tasted blood on the tip of her tongue.
Chapter 12
Morgan swiped his card at the gate and drove his Olds down the ramp into the Hampton Building garage. He parked near the forgotten corner lot of the lower floor. He scanned his retinas at the reader hidden behind a panel of circuit breakers. The inconspicuous service door next to the scanner popped open, and he walked into the darkened hallway that led into the subterranean headquarters of Zeta Division.
The corridor lit up when he closed the door behind him. The chamber was bare concrete. In the upper right corner was a black hemisphere containing a high-definition surveillance camera. Ahead of him was a door fit for a bank vault. He scanned his thumbprint now and entered a pass code. The door opened to an elevator, which carried him down to his destination.
He emerged into the Zeta War Room, the heart of their operation. It was about as large as a major corporate conference room, with a large screen overlooking a long wooden table. Opposite the screen, over the door from the garage outside, was the office of the big boss, Diana Bloch. It was a steel and glass cage whose glass could turn from clear to frosted at the push of a button. The decor ran to Bloch’s drab, functional tastes, lit very brightly with a combination of white and yellow light that was the closest approximation to sunlight you could get on the market—this was courtesy of the research of Karen O’Neal, their resident numbers analyst, who had read some study that said that people are more alert and work better under these sorts of conditions.
Lincoln Shepard was huddled over his computer in jeans and a T-shirt that read NERD out of some postmodern self-aware impulse, his straight nose and pointed chin inches from the screen as usual. He had several days’ stubble going, and headphones wrapped around his neck, connected to nothing. His messy black hair seemed to stick out in every direction, like a character from a Japanese cartoon. Morgan thought he might be growing it out, although whether for the style or because he couldn’t bother to get it cut, he didn’t know.
Karen O’Neal was sitting across from him, also in front of her computer. Petite, lean, and half-Vietnamese, she wore her hair short and in a ponytail, bangs hanging over black rectangular glass frames, and followed Bloch’s lead with muted professional attire. Little details, however, betrayed her perpetual anxiety—fingernails chewed to stubs, hair mussed, and eyebrows too thin from overgrooming. But today, her usually frantic eyes were vacant, and her hands were resting on the keyboard, not moving.
Morgan put the laptop case on the table. “Special delivery.”
“Wonderful,” Shepard deadpanned. “You’ve been very helpful.”
He sat down at the table. Neither of the analysts paid him any further attention.
Morgan cleared his throat. “So is anyone going to tell me who this Watson is and why people are invading his apartment at all hours of the night?”
Shepard spoke without looking up from his computer. “Asset. Inside Acevedo. The elevator decided to go kamikaze with him inside. Sorry.”
Morgan was going to ask why when he noticed O’Neal was watching him with a scowl. “He installed a worm for us this morning,” she said. “A worm that should give us access to the Acevedo servers.”
“Designed by none other than moi, thank you very much,” Shephard interjected.
“Did it work?” asked Morgan.
“It should kick into gear any minute now,” he said. “They do a server reboot every Saturday night. Tonight, they’re also doing an update—and along with the update, they’re installing my worm. If Watson did his job right.”
“He did,” O’Neal snipped.
“Then my little worm should be burrowing itself in their servers as we speak, and our backdoor into all their dirty little secrets should be available”—he checked his watch—“any minute now, actually. I have it set up to ping my computer if it goes through.”
“So how do the people who attacked me at his apartment figure into all this?” Morgan asked.
“I have no idea,” said Shepard. “I got the video recordings. I’ll throw them up on the big scre
en.”
The monitor that overlooked the table flickered to life, displaying the video from Watson’s apartment in a grid. Morgan followed as the men came in from outside and made their way to the apartment door. They moved in a clear formation, covering each other, and keeping watch.
“These guys have tactics,” Morgan said. “It’s not police or military. Nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
“Private security?” suggested O’Neal. “As in Acevedo?”
“Maybe,” Morgan said. “Any chance they knew that he was working with us?”
“If they did, they missed the worm,” said Shepard. “I just got pinged. It’s active. Running diagnostics now. Looks like our meathead friend wasn’t as useless as he looked.”
Karen O’Neal stood up from her chair and stormed off.
“What was . . .” Morgan began, but he was interrupted by the click of high heels approaching from the entrance corridor. Lily Randall, the deadly beauty, slinking toward them in a ravishing green silk dress.
“Morgan,” she said with a nod.
“Well, if we count your failure we’re one for two tonight,” said Shepard in greeting. “What happened, did you have trouble sorting out the right end of the cable?”
“I could pop your head right off with my thighs,” she said, sitting cross-legged across the table from Morgan.
“Yeah, but what a way to go.”
She ignored the comment. “Baxter didn’t let his phone out of his sight for so much as a minute. No way I can connect the cable for fifteen. I need something faster, preferably wireless.”
“If I could do wireless, I wouldn’t need you,” he said. Then he turned his screen for them to see. “I present to you the Acevedo company servers.” All that was visible was a command line with undecipherable text on it, but Morgan was sure it must have been very exciting for him. He swiveled it back to him. “Beginning data dump now. And you suckers will see I can do more at my desk than all you suckers running around and blowing stuff up.”
“How have you been able to stand this little twerp for so long?” Lily asked.
“You learn to tune him out. Eventually, it becomes part of the background,” replied Morgan.
“That’s weird,” said Shepard.
“What is it?” Lily asked.
“Shut it. Let me work.” He was typing in command after command, and his computer was returning a noise that sounded like an electronic version of nuh-uh.
He banged on the Enter key. “Why don’t you work?” he screeched.
Karen O’Neal appeared, her face washed, from the inner corridor. “What’s going on?”
“It’s gone,” he said, slumping his shoulders in defeat. “My backdoor is gone. I had it, and now it’s gone.”
“Were you caught by Acevedo security?” asked O’Neal.
“There’s no way those jokers could catch on to anything anywhere near that fast.”
“Maybe you’re just overestimating how good you are,” said Lily.
“Maybe you can shut your stupid face. My code was way beyond their amateur security team.”
“I can vouch for that,” said O’Neal. “Acevedo’s security protocols wouldn’t have caught his worm.”
“Then what happened?” said Morgan.
Shepard closed his laptop hard and let his upper body sprawl against the table. “I don’t know.”
“Hello square one,” said O’Neal. “I thought it might be longer before we saw you again.”
Chapter 13
Simon held his door open so that Alex could take her time getting inside. He lived just down the hall from her—floors were coed, thanks to the university’s progressive housing policy. His room was messy in the way boy’s rooms are messy, with the trash bin overflowing with soda cans and snack containers, books all over the place, and the clean laundry still sitting rumpled in the hamper, the dirty laundry now accumulating on the floor by the bed. The situation was aggravated by Simon’s love of electronics, so that not only was his desk overflowing with peripherals to his laptop, but open hard drives and exposed motherboards and Alex-didn’t-know-what-else covered every available surface that wasn’t the floor.
The best that Alex could say was that Simon’s room had the dubious distinction of not being quite as bad as really messy girls’ rooms—like, for instance, Katie’s side of their shared room, the floor of which was covered in dirty clothes and which had some hidden cache of empty yogurt cups and moldy ramen noodles that gave the space its distinct aroma.
By some fluke of the housing process, Simon had the room all to himself as a single even though it housed furniture for two, so Alex ended up spending a lot of time there—so much that rumors abounded that they were secretly hooking up. Alex had a strong suspicion of who was spreading the gossip, considering that Katie was the resident miller at the local rumor mill.
She squinted against the morning sun filtering in through the bare branches of the trees outside as Simon pulled up a chair for her at the desk. He helped her sit in his desk chair. She felt the heat of his breath as he hovered over her right shoulder.
“All right,” he said. “Show me what you’ve done.”
Alex swiped the touchpad on Simon’s Alienware computer, a sleek black laptop with green lights around the edges like—well, like nothing more than an alien spaceship. It came on under her touch and she navigated on his browser to her GitHub page to the project she had been working on. She downloaded the lightweight program and opened it. The user interface was bare bones—the array of buttons consisted of just boxes with badly centered numbers and symbols—but she had finally ironed out all the bugs late the night before.
“Let’s see here . . .” Simon leaned over her to type, his gray plaid button-down brushing against her hair, and the smell of his Old Spice made her a little nauseous. He tried a few inputs. Some basic additions, into two, then three, then up to ten digits, which was the limit for the display. “Addition’s working okay. Let’s check multiplication.”
Alex looked on, slouched in her chair, as he tested the various functions of the rudimentary calculator she had programmed. Her attention wandered to the posters that plastered the walls—some things she recognized, like Super Mario Brothers and Lord of the Rings, and others that she didn’t, like one with a cartoony girl with long pink hair and—another with a guy in a bowtie standing in front of a blue phone-booth-type-thing.
“Whoops,” said Simon.
“What is it?”
“Your square root function has problems. Either that or reality is getting really screwy in our vicinity.” He hit the 4 button, then sq rt. The program display output–3.
She took over and tried again, with the same results. “I have no idea why it’s doing that. Damn it. I spent so long working on this.”
“No worries,” said Simon. “Let’s take a look at your code.” He opened up the text file containing the source code for her program. “Your documentation is still atrocious, I see.”
“I know what everything does.”
The mock-tension hung between them until it was broken by a frantic knocking on the door. “Guys!” came Katie’s voice from the other side as she pounded on wood. Simon pulled it open and she poked her head in, breathless. “Something’s happening at Shaw. Come on.”
She ran off down the hall. Simon and Alex shared a quizzical look, and then Simon helped her get up and onto her crutches.
“I’ll get your jacket,” he said.
Outside, Simon held his pace beside her as Alex hobbled across the crunchy snow of Pickett residential quad toward the Shaw Memorial Library. Scores of students were streaming in the same direction like lines of the faithful on a pilgrimage.
Alex was busy negotiating the snow under her crutches, so it was Simon who saw it first, when they were within some four hundred feet from the library.
“Alex,” he said. “Look up.”
Squinting against the morning light, she let the image resolve in her eyes. Shaw Library, the stately Go
thic Revival building, with its cathedral-like stone façade, behind which rose the stacks tower, and from the upper battlements, between the tall narrow lancet windows, something was hanging. It looked like it could almost be—
A person. A man, stark naked, hanging upside down, feet attached to a wooden crossbar. Alex stumbled, trying to walk without drawing her eyes away from the bizarre spectacle.
“Alex! Over here!” It was Katie, at the edge of the crowd. People had their cell phones out, taking photos and shooting videos in a din of gasps and laughter. “Can you believe this?”
Alex looked up again. The distant face resolved into one she recognized.
“That’s Jeremy Panagopoulos.” she said. He was squirming, but didn’t seem panicked. In fact, he was groggy, if anything.
“Who?” asked Simon.
“Chief Investment Officer of the university.”
“Not helping,” said Katie.
“He manages the university’s money. He—an article came out a couple months ago about some shady things going on with the university’s investments. Nothing really came of it though.”
Campus police were now pushing everyone back.
Alex’s phone vibrated in her jacket pocket.
“I guess someone felt a little resentful that he got away with it,” said Simon.
“I guess.” All around them, phones emitted short beeps in a cacophonous symphony.
“Hey, did anyone else get this e-mail?” said a male student Alex didn’t know. She pulled out her own phone and found she had a new message. The subject line read:
Verdict: Guilty.
She opened it.
Jeremy Panagopoulos has been found guilty of financial crimes by the court of the people. Judgment has been rendered and his punishment carried out. We do not forgive. We do not forget. We are the Ekklesia.
“This is insane,” said Katie, as Panagopoulos was pulled up by the rescuers on the roof of the library.
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