Code of Conduct (Cipher Security Book 1)

by Smartypants Romance

  “You ready?” he asked in the barely-there voice that sent a shiver across my skin.

  “Yeah,” I whispered back.

  He kissed my head. “Go,” he said, and I moved quickly, before I could think about how much I missed the heat of his body next to mine.

  Gabriel slid around the Tesla and crouched down low while I ran to the back of the house. The only sound I could hear were crickets in the yard and the whooshing sound of blood in my ears. I slipped along the wall, dipping below a window I remembered was a bathroom until I reached the laundry room window I’d gone through before. I hoped it was still unlocked as I’d left it. I removed the screen quickly and found the crack under the window with my knife, wedging it up until I could work my fingers in. Then I raised the glass by inches, moving as swiftly and silently as I could, until there was enough room for my body to slither in.

  Inside the laundry room I stood motionless for the length of time it took my eyes to adjust to the dark. I knew I could use my phone for light if I needed to, but that light would be even more suspicious-looking from the street than an overhead light would be. When the silence remained absolute, I stepped out into the hall and turned right, past the powder room, to the door that had to lead to the garage.

  A creak upstairs stopped me in my tracks, and I froze to listen, frantically trying to remember the floor plan. One of the master bathrooms was overhead, and my heart slammed in my throat as I waited for more footsteps. I reached for the deadbolt on the garage door, and it turned with a quiet click.

  A toilet flushed, and I quickly opened the door, hoping the sound upstairs would mask the noise I made. It was pitch black inside the garage, and the scent of motor oil, cement, and something that smelled suspiciously like feces assaulted me. I pulled out my phone and hit the button to illuminate the screen just as a text came through from Gabriel. Light on upstairs, it read. I shone the light into the garage, which was empty of anything but a pair of eyes that glowed yellow in the dark. I barely stifled my scream as a creature yowled and flew past me into the hallway.

  “Cat?” a male voice called from upstairs.

  “Shit,” I breathed as I got the hell out of the garage, shut the door behind me, and flung the deadbolt closed.

  I darted back into the laundry room as footsteps stumbled down the stairs, and Quimby’s voice murmured, “Damn cat.”

  I slid out the window, and a hard body wrapped around me from behind.

  I took a breath to scream, and the arm around me tightened. “Shhh, there’s a neighbor out front,” Gabriel whispered into my ear. He must have sensed my panic, because he spun me to face him and then pulled me down to sink below the edge of the window as the light went on in the hallway.

  Gabriel held my face in his hands and locked his eyes onto mine. My panicked breath and racing heart began to calm as if by the force of his will, and I gradually realized his fingers stroked my hair as he whispered hushing sounds.

  I nodded to let him know I could be trusted not to scream. The sound of Quimby’s voice carried through the still-open laundry room window. “Where the hell have you been, dumb ass? You haven’t touched your food in days.”

  I swallowed a gasp. Had the cat actually been locked in the garage for days? Hopefully Quimby had mice. Lots of them.

  When the hall light went out and the sounds of Quimby’s mumbled conversation ceased, Gabriel reached up and inched the window closed. I studied his face, still so close to mine, and his gaze left the window’s progress and returned to me. One of his hands still cupped my cheek, and I became aware that he’d pulled me across him, as though to shield me with his body.

  I touched his face, felt the planes of high cheekbones and a strong jaw under skin rough with the day’s stubble. His gaze dropped to my lips, and a flush of heat spread through me.

  My mouth opened, to say … something, I didn’t know what. But then his thumb slid to my bottom lip, as though he couldn’t help touching it. He stroked it softly, gently, and I watched him study the contour of my lips until wanting him was unbearable. I closed my eyes and savored his touch. I felt adored, and protected, and desired.

  He groaned and pulled me to him. His lips met mine, and then he kissed me as though starved for the taste of me. My hand wrapped around his neck and slid down his back, drawing me closer to him.

  He groaned again, deep in his throat, and I pressed myself into him. His heartbeat became mine, my breath became his, until our lips, our tongues were the source of us. I felt so light, like the only thing tethering me to the ground were his arms around me. Nothing existed outside of us, nothing mattered, nothing counted except the feeling of our mouths tasting, exploring, demanding each other.

  When our lips finally parted, I rested my forehead against his and just inhaled him – eyes closed, fingers clutching his shirt, pulse pounding. I gradually opened my eyes to find him watching me. His gaze felt like a caress, and I wanted to wrap myself in it.

  So of course I did the logical thing and pulled away.

  “We need to go,” I whispered as I peeled myself off his lap. My muscles resisted – my skin didn’t want to let go of the contact – but my brain stubbornly refused to give into the impulse to seek more of his touch. Timing … location … everything but the company was a bad idea.

  Gabriel exhaled, then nodded and held a hand out to me. I was confused for the barest second, because he was still on the ground and I was rising to my feet, but then I took his hand and pulled him up with me.

  He grinned at me. “That’s a first,” he whispered.

  “Being helped up by a woman?” I was irrationally disappointed.

  He gave me a strange look. “No, Kendra and I help each other up all the time.”

  Oh. Right.

  He put his finger to his lips, and we peeked around the side of the house. The road was deserted, so Gabriel took my hand then pulled me in close to him for the walk back to the car. Looking like lovers seemed like the best way to cover our presence on the street at that hour. Feeling like lovers seemed not safe at all.

  “What’s a first?” I asked when we were in the car.

  Gabriel gave me a quick look, then looked away and seemed captivated by the top of the steering wheel. He finally spoke, playing absently with the leather bracelet around his wrist, still not meeting my eyes.

  “When my mum gave Kendra and me the talk about sex, she sat us down together and made us each listen to both sides – male and female,” he began.

  Whatever I’d been expecting, it certainly hadn’t been this conversation, and I was pretty sure my mouth fell open as I stared at him.

  He looked sideways at me, caught my expression, and gave a self-deprecating scoff. “Yeah, that’s exactly what we looked like while Mum talked. I suppose she thought we could ask each other questions about girlfriends or boyfriends later, which was, of course, the last thing either of us wanted to discuss with our sibling.”

  “I can imagine.” I actually couldn’t imagine, and even trying to was like standing at the edge of a chasm looking down into the nothingness.

  “Do you have a brother?” Gabriel asked with sudden interest.

  “Oh no you don’t. No deflecting,” I said, totally deflecting. “You were saying something about a first?”

  He sighed and smiled. “One of the things Mum told us was that there are different kinds of kisses. There are the cheek kisses for greeting friends, goodnight kisses for family, goodbye kisses for loved ones, foreplay kisses and sex kisses—”

  Gabriel was back to watching his own hands, as if the conversation was making him shy. That almost made me laugh out loud. The idea that this imposing, confident, magnetic man could ever be shy was almost too cute for words, and I felt an ache of tenderness in my chest.

  He took a breath, as if steeling himself for saying something out loud. “And she talked about flying kisses and falling kisses.”

  I raised an eyebrow, and he stole another sideways glance at me. “Flying kisses are ones that make
your insides feel like you’re accelerating to reach altitude, and the moment you begin to soar, your chest can fill with air again, and your body floats free. I never had a flying kiss and always thought Mum was talking romantic nonsense.” He took a deep breath, looked back at his hands, and smiled. “Apparently, it wasn’t nonsense.”

  He started the car and pulled away from the curb before I could formulate the words to respond to that breathtaking statement.

  I watched him drive for a long time, and then when he looked over, presumably to gauge my reaction, I looked away. We rode in silence, and the longer we said nothing, the bigger the silence grew, until it was an entity in itself, filling the spaces around us and swallowing all the possible words.

  When Gabriel parked his car in the lot reserved for our building, he turned to me and faced me full-on for the first time since we’d kissed. “I’d like to know you, Shane. Will you allow me to try?”

  “What’s a falling kiss?” I blurted, maybe so I didn’t have to answer the questions he’d been asking all night.

  He held my gaze for a long moment, then finally looked away. “I don’t know. I’ve never had one.”

  28

  Shane

  “Today my brain asked, ‘ne yapiyorsun?’ – what are you doing? in Turkish – and I couldn’t answer it.” – Shane, P.I.

  I was freaking out, and it pissed me off.

  I spent most of the night watching my favorite Turkish TV show just to avoid the inevitable toilet spiral that my thoughts had become. It didn’t help, because the main romance of the show kept getting cock-blocked by everything the two leads didn’t say to each other. Not to mention all the kisses they almost had. And of course, there was a whole soaring albatross element to the Turkish story that was definitely not helping me block thoughts of flying kisses from my head.

  GAH!

  The worst thing was that I knew I was doing a number on myself – no one was sitting me down to tell me “don’t get involved, it’s not going to work, he’s just going to leave anyway.” That was all me and my twisty brain.

  It was going to be a bad day if Turkish TV couldn’t override twisty-brain.

  I finally gave up trying to sleep and dragged myself out for an early morning run with Oscar in a fairly futile attempt to clear the noise from my brain. Jorge was doing pull-ups from a conveniently-positioned bar in the courtyard when we got back, and Oscar danced in excitement to see his friend.

  “You went for a run?” he asked, after giving Oscar the greeting he demanded. “I mean, aren’t you afraid you’ll incinerate in daylight or something?”

  “You’re just lucky I’m too tired to bite,” I grumbled.

  “How’s the new gig?”

  Since Jorge was probably smarter than me and Gabriel combined, I tossed him a question while I stretched. “Know anything about a guy name Alex Karpov or heard of a company called ADDATA?”

  He shook his head as he wrestled with my dog. “No. Should I?”

  I gave Jorge the bare bones outline of the connections we’d drawn between the data-scraping they were doing with online personality tests and the data sets the programmers were setting up for the political think tank.

  “Politics, huh?” Jorge asked, and I nodded. “So it’s probably safe to assume that the data they’re harvesting is going into whatever propaganda machine they’re running,” he continued.

  “Theoretically, yeah. Although I took one of ADDATA’s personality quizzes. There are places to write in a unique answer, and they can’t possibly collate that kind of data into something useful.”

  “Sure they can,” Jorge said. “Data scraping like that just requires Crystal Report or SAS and a sequel back-end.”

  “In English, please.” I finished the last of the water in my bottle while he dusted the dog hair off his hands.

  “It’s just about how the information gets processed and turned into something useful. The problem with a personality quiz is that only a really small cross-section of the population will even see the link, much less click on it. Unless, of course, there’s a social media algorithm deliberately putting it in people’s feeds.”

  “I read the terms of service for the quiz,” I said.

  Jorge scoffed. “I thought I was the only dork who did things like that.”

  “No, there are two of us. But get this, the terms of service was from 2013, and it gave the developers access to the user’s friends list and all their information.”

  “Shane,” Jorge said quietly. He held himself very still, and I almost looked behind me.

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  “That kind of data access is … dangerous.”

  “But the friends aren’t the ones answering the personality quiz questions,” I argued.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said, shaking his head. “I just took a US Government and Politics in the Information Age class, and we had a whole section on how the media impacts voter perceptions. To change politics, you have to change culture, and what are the units of culture? People are.” He paused to let that sink in, then continued. “When you have that kind of access to the things people like and share, and to the comments they make, you can micro-target your message. If they create the right content, it’s like whispering into the ear of each and every voter, and they’ll never know it’s happening.”

  I stared at him. “You’re scary.”

  He smirked. “They see a skinny brown boy and they have no clue who’s coming for them.”

  “And by ‘them’ you mean …”

  He shrugged and grinned. “I haven’t decided yet.”

  I narrowed my eyes at my friend. “What can we do about it?”

  Jorge shrugged. “Dude, I’m eighteen. I might think I know everything, and I might even convince you that I do, but I leave the heavy lifting to the adults.”

  I scoffed. “You say adults like there’s one around here.”

  Jorge laughed. “You thought I meant you? You maybe need to rethink that,” he said, ducking away from me as he led the way into the lobby.

  Gabriel stood by his open mailbox and looked startled to see me.

  “Hey,” I said to him as Oscar bounded over. I looked at Jorge and said, “It’s okay. Oscar knows him.”

  My dog swirled around Gabriel for a rubbed-ear greeting as I made introductions. “This is Jorge,” I said to Gabriel, and then I turned to my young friend. “Jorge, this is Gabriel.”

  “The cop in 3C,” said Jorge.

  A half-smile lifted Gabriel’s lips. “Former British Army. But I’ve been accused of standing like I’ve a stick up my arse, so I suppose old habits die hard,” he said, his clipped English accent making the crude statement sound almost elegant.

  Jorge bit back a grin and he held out his hand. “Oscar likes you,” he said. “It’s high praise.”

  “I imagine it is,” Gabriel said, shaking his hand with a smile.

  Gabriel’s gaze flicked to Oscar and then moved across my face like a caress. I could feel my skin warming in response, and the glint in his eye told me he saw it.

  “Jorge has some interesting ideas about the political influence ADDATA could have with the information they’re gathering,” I said, to redirect my thoughts from things like caresses and warm skin.

  “Oh?” Gabriel’s gaze sharpened.

  “If you have time, why don’t you two talk at my place while I shower, and then you and I can go meet the ex-girlfriend together,” I said to Gabriel, before turning to Jorge. “Is that cool?”

  He shrugged. “I can spare fifteen.”

  “Thanks.” I nodded at both men then sprinted up the stairs ahead of them. I left my door unlocked and pulled my t-shirt off as I headed down the hall to the shower. Gabriel must have entered my apartment right on my heels because his voice sounded a little strangled as he called from the kitchen.

  “Mind if we drink the last of your coffee?”

  “Help yourself,” I called from the bathroom as I stripped off the cheetah leg and ti
ghts and stepped into the scalding spray. I smiled at the thought that Gabriel was probably picturing me naked as he heard the shower running.

  I have excellent balance on one leg, and I’ve become a very efficient shower-taker. My shower is tiny, so I can brace myself on a tiled wall for all things except hair-washing, which takes two hands to be effective. I have to extend my elbows like wings when I shampoo my hair, just to stay upright long enough to rinse, so I’ve gotten fast. I was out, dry, and dressed in my uniform of jeans and boots in under ten minutes. I wound my hair into a French twist, which meant it would dry curly, and chose a linen t-shirt the color of red wine. I figured I’d been wearing so much black recently that I was in danger of becoming predictable. I grabbed a tapestry coat with autumn shades of wine, rust, and green from the closet before heading out to the living room.

  Gabriel and Jorge sat at the dining table, empty coffee cups in front of them, talking about cyber security and encryption algorithms. Gabriel’s gaze lingered on me as I entered the room.

  “That was fast,” he said.

  I shrugged. “I’m fairly low maintenance. Did you guys figure out how to take down the world’s financial systems yet?”

  “Is that what we were doing?” Gabriel smiled.

  “Nah, that’s small time. Anonymous is the one to hack. They’re way more dark web than even the NSA,” Jorge said as he rose to his feet.

  I studied my friend whom I’d first met just over two years ago, before he’d gotten stringy height, whipcord muscles, and whiskers on his chin. He was not quite as quick to smile as he’d been as a fifteen-year-old boy, nor quite as easy in his skin, but most notably, somewhere along the way he’d gotten just a little dangerous.

  “Remind me to stay on your good side, Gonzales,” I said as I walked him to the door.