Code of Conduct (Cipher Security Book 1)

by Smartypants Romance

  “I didn’t.” My voice held a quiet note of urgency. I needed her to believe me, but she was so angry. I straightened and held my hand out to Sparky.

  “I’m Gabriel Eze,” I said quietly. “I work with Shane in a private security firm, and with the man who may have been responsible for hacking your accounts.”

  “Billy Spracher,” Sparky said automatically, shaking my hand. Shane snorted. “I build Shane’s legs,” he finished, lamely.

  Shane scoffed. “You have a bio-mechanical engineering degree from University of Chicago and a graduate degree in bionics. You design prosthetic prototypes for some of the biggest manufacturers in the country, and I’m lucky to be your crash test dummy.”

  Sparky smirked faintly at her, and I sensed a long-standing relationship with layers that might have included friendship, humor, comradery, and possibly a little attraction, at least on his side. “You’re a good dummy,” he said.

  She inhaled deeply. “I’m really sorry I brought the hacker down on you, Sparky. I’ll make him put it all back to rights.”

  “Forgive me for asking what may be a foolish question,” I interrupted, “but why would Greene interfere with Mr. Spracher’s finances?”

  “Because I used Mr. Spracher’s computer to find out what I could about the hacker’s wife,” she said, disgust evident in her voice.

  My eyebrows arched up in surprise. “Truly?”

  “The guy’s a psychopath,” she said, swiping the trackpad to keep the computer from going to sleep.

  “He would probably argue high-functioning sociopath with overactive protective instincts,” I said evenly. I was familiar enough with my own protective instincts to diagnose the condition in others.

  She looked up at Sparky. “I’ll fix this,” she promised him.

  “I gotta admit,” he said with a nervous laugh, “I was more pissed than scared until you mentioned mental disorders.”

  “High-functioning is definitely the key to him, Spark,” she said. “The guy plays chess against Google.”

  “No kidding?” I could see the first vestiges of admiration in Sparky’s expression, but his next question was mercifully interrupted by the chime of his e-mail.

  Sparky reached for the keyboard, and Shane once more batted his hand away as she opened the message and read. Dear Ms. Hane, it began. I skimmed the message over her shoulder as she read out loud. “I apologize for any inconvenience Mr. Spracher may have experienced, and am assured that the affected funds and accounts have been restored. I believe I have met your terms satisfactorily and look forward to no further mention of this incident. Best, Alex.”

  “That’s the hacker?” Sparky spluttered. “He sounds like a suit.”

  “If by suit you mean the nerd-side-of-goth, that’s him,” she said with satisfaction as the green film that had covered Sparky’s laptop screen blinked out of existence. The machine’s fan spun up as if in a sigh of relief, and Shane stood to relinquish her chair.

  “Check your accounts, but I’m pretty sure everything’s back the way it was. Leave it running for another ten minutes so he can also close whatever backdoor I accidentally opened.” She leaned over and kissed Sparky on the cheek, and I beat down an utterly irrational surge of jealousy.

  “Sorry, bud. I’ll bring my own laptop from now on,” she said with a wince.

  Sparky stared at the laptop as if he wasn’t quite brave enough to touch it.

  “It was nice to meet you,” I said as I steered Shane toward the door with a light touch on her lower back.

  “Hey Shane,” Sparky called out as we reached the door. She turned back to see him still staring at the computer but finally sitting down to type.

  “Yeah?”

  “Come back next week. I’m working on a dive leg you can walk on.”

  She grinned, and I felt her whole body finally relax in relief. “Nice!”

  We stepped into the freight elevator and closed the gate, and it wasn’t until we were outside Sparky’s building that I finally spoke again.

  “How did you get Greene to back off?”

  “I threatened to tell his wife.”

  She explained her logic as we made our way, via public transportation, to the luxuriously modern building in which we worked. Alex wasn’t actively monitoring each individual search on his wife’s name – he didn’t have time for that – so he had alerts in place, a lot like Google alerts – with a specific attack sequence set to trigger after a certain number of searches from the same source. Shane didn’t think Sandra would tolerate that kind of over-protectiveness from a mate, no matter how well-meaning he was, which made her threat effective.

  “If you were a man, I’d say you have a set of very large balls,” I said in awe.

  She smirked. “Ovaries the size of cantaloupes, and I defy you to tell me how big balls are anything other than a complete liability. The bigger the balls, the larger the target for a well-aimed kick, and who wants that business dangling between their legs, getting in the way and slapping up against parts?”

  And now I had the image of slapping parts to contend with in my already overactive imagination.

  “I assume Mr. Spracher is the designer of all of your high-tech prosthetic limbs?” I said to distract myself with a subject change.

  “He is now. My prosthetist in California suffered from a distinct lack of imagination. He was one of the ‘if you mess with the leg you void the warranty’ types. Sparky was trying to interest him in a rock climbing foot he’d designed, and when I came limping out of my appointment, Sparky whipped out a tool kit and made adjustments to my leg right there in the waiting room. My doc came out all blustery, and Sparky just told him to shut up and quit trying to make the woman fit the leg. Everything felt better the minute he adjusted my leg, and he’s part of the reason I moved to Chicago.”

  We entered the Cipher building and greeted Stan at the front desk. “Quinn and Dan wanted to know when you got here. They’ll meet you in your conference room as soon as they’re free,” Stan informed us as he picked up the phone, presumably to tell my bosses we’d arrived.

  “Right, thanks,” I said as I held the elevator door for Shane. She touched my hand as she entered, and I caught the scent of amber. Everything about this woman intrigued me, and I allowed myself a moment to enjoy the small contact.

  The conference room we’d taken over with our colorful sticky notes was empty, and I made us each a coffee while Shane set up her laptop. We’d been using green sticky notes to represent the trail of money, and she wrote the information that Tomi gave us on green and added it to the line of stickies below Quimby’s name. She studied the board for a minute while I studied her.

  She stood tall and confident, with the easy grace of an athlete. I knew tall people who hunched, as though they’d spent a lifetime uncomfortable with the idea of being visible. For the most part, I tended to be unconscious of my size – my height and strength were just tools to keep me off the target list of the kinds of people who seek targets. But Shane wielded her size as though it were her right – as though she had chosen her height for its advantages and would be using each one as it pleased her to do. It was a degree of confidence that could look like arrogance on some, but on the woman in front of me, it fit her like a second skin.

  She looked over her coffee mug at me. “I can feel you studying me,” she said.

  I shook myself out of my contemplation. “You hold yourself like an athlete, and I was wondering what sport you played in school.”

  “Basketball.”

  I smiled at the obviousness of it. “Were you good?”

  “I was good because I worked at it. I didn’t have the natural talent to play beyond high school, even if I’d been able to.” She made a vague gesture toward her leg.

  “How did you lose it?”

  “Cliff jumping.”

  “Really? Where?” The image of long, coltish legs leaping from a cliff somewhere in the Mediterranean filled my brain.

  “Cliffs of Insanity. Ri
ght after a sword fight with Inigo Montoya. He won, clearly.” She was utterly straight-faced, and I suppressed the creeping disappointment that she still didn’t trust me with her story.

  “Right. How old were you when you leapt from said cliffs to escape the Dread Pirate Roberts, who was presumably right on your heels?” I was pleased to see the hint of an appreciative smile at the corners of her mouth.

  “I was nineteen,” she said after a pause, and I thought she might finally be telling the truth.

  “My battles at nineteen were not of the sword-fighting variety, though I think I would have preferred swords,” I said in a feeble attempt to distract her from the inevitable overshare shutdown.

  “You must have been in basic training then?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “I began basic training at age seventeen. By nineteen, I’d just left the Defense College of Policing and Guarding and was posted to an operational unit as a probationer with the C.S.I.”

  She looked impressed. “It sounds like you were quite the grown-up.”

  I scoffed. “I thought I was. In reality, I was a lost boy hiding behind a uniform and a purpose, terrified someone would call me out as a fraud.”

  “Does that feeling ever go away?” she asked with a wince.

  I thought about that for a moment, and my silence seemed to embarrass Shane, because she looked away and busied herself writing notes.

  “I don’t feel like a fraud anymore,” I said quietly. Shane met my eyes, and I continued. “I have survived enough now to feel entitled to call myself a man.”

  “Sometimes I still feel nineteen,” she didn’t meet my eyes, but she didn’t stop there. “And my survival is relative.”

  A knock on the door interrupted whatever else she might have said, and I wanted to lock everyone out of the room so she’d finish her thought. Shane looked grateful for the reprieve though, and turned her attention to Sullivan and O’Malley as they entered the conference room.

  “The tracker you set on Quimby’s car is transmitting fine,” O’Malley said. “He spent two hours at the gym while his car got new tires and a detail, then stopped by his tailor to pick up a couple suits and a half-dozen shirts that still had tags on them, flirted with the meter maid outside the tailor’s to get out of a ticket, went for coffee, and just finally rolled into work.”

  “Do you have a tail on him?” Shane sounded startled. “How do you know about the tags and the flirting?”

  “Alex occasionally hacks into surveillance cameras,” I said.

  She looked thoughtful but didn’t comment.

  “Did he do a financial check to see about the wife’s car?” I asked O’Malley.

  “Repo’d,” answered Sullivan. I’d had a commanding officer in the Royal MPs with the same brusque manner, so I’d long since stopped taking his tone personally. Shane didn’t have the same experience of our boss. I saw her flinch and then straighten her spine as if to defend against whatever came next.

  “The bank took it two days ago,” O’Malley added.

  “Who’d he meet for coffee?” asked Shane. Sullivan arched an eyebrow in question and then picked up the conference room phone.

  “Check the cameras in the cafe.” He listened briefly, then hung up.

  “Alex will be right down.” Sullivan got up to make himself a coffee and then wandered over to the wall of sticky notes while it brewed.

  “What are you thinking?” I murmured to Shane.

  “I think they’re coming for the house next,” she whispered back. I liked the feeling of sharing secrets with her, and I loved seeing the glow of intrigue in her eyes. She knew something, and the confidence of it looked stunning on her.

  “Talk to me about your system here,” Sullivan said. Shane met my eyes, and I nodded to her. She moved next to him so she could point to the various color systems on our board.

  “Orange is for anything directly associated with Quimby.” She pointed to a line of sticky notes that ran down one side. “Blue is ADDATA, which is why the orange notes connect with a lot of it. And green—”

  “Is the money,” Sullivan said, nodding thoughtfully. He was impressed, and I was glad. The colored sticky notes had been all Shane, and the minute they were up I saw them for the genius they were. Things could be moved around or added to with each new bit of information. Facts could be as simple as a single word, and yet, when they went on the wall they represented part of a visual pattern. The amount of green on the wall had become quite striking, and Shane took a moment to write another green sticky and add it to the orange side. Denise Quimby’s car repossessed, it said.

  There was a perfunctory knock on the door as Greene walked into our conference room. He looked directly at Shane. “He met with his accountant.”

  She nodded. “Yeah. He’s about to lose the house too.”

  “The guy just bought a bunch of new suits. That doesn’t sound like someone afraid he’s going to lose his house,” said O’Malley.

  Shane spoke clearly and with confidence. “When someone is going to declare bankruptcy, their attorney tells them to stop paying their credit card bills. That debt will always get wiped out anyway, and it’s just throwing good money after bad, so he’s running them up to their limits while he still can. He has too much equity in his house for the bankruptcy trustees to let him keep it, so it’s either short sale or foreclosure. The market has dipped, so foreclosure is most likely, which is probably why Quimby moved the million dollars into the hidden account, and why he’s ready to hunt me down to get it back. Denise must have known this was coming, or she’d have taken her car. She walked away with half his escape-hatch money and her personal jewelry, and if I were her, I’d change my name and start over.”

  O’Malley raised an eyebrow. “That’s a fuckin’ impressive bit of bankruptcy law.”

  Shane met Greene’s eyes as she answered O’Malley. “My mother is a bankruptcy law specialist.”

  Greene didn’t blink, but his carefully schooled expression said “I know” just the same. She shot me a quick glance too, and I realized the information about her mother must be another way to trace her true name. As much as I wanted to know her story, I refused to dig for it myself. If she wanted me to know, she’d tell me.

  “I’m guessing a douchebag poser like Quimby’s not gonna want his financials splashed all over the business news. This info is probably enough to get him to back the fuck off so we can close the account and be done with his bullshit.” O’Malley’s colorful lexicon rivaled the toughest London dockworker for expressiveness.

  “I want to take down ADDATA,” Shane said quietly.

  The room stilled, and I realized Shane was looking not at the men who paid her consulting fee, but at me, her partner.

  “Why?” asked Sullivan. I didn’t hear irony or challenge in his tone, just a genuine question.

  “Because they’re cheating,” she said.

  Sullivan sat at the table across from her and leaned forward. “Why does this offend you?”

  Shane took a sip of her coffee as she gathered her thoughts. O’Malley sat down near her, and Greene leaned back against the wall, waiting to hear the rest. She looked up and met the eyes of four men without flinching.

  “I’ve spied on a lot of people. I’ve followed them, made notes about their habits, investigated who they talked to, where they went, who they called. I can tell you three are married,” she looked at Sullivan, Greene, and O’Malley, “and the smallest things tell me your wives love you. You’re a new dad,” she said to Sullivan, “and you’re thinking about it,” her eyes flicked to Alex, “and it freaks you out that I can tell things like that just from looking at you.” O’Malley opened his mouth to speak but closed it again as Shane resumed.

  “ADDATA is doing exactly what I do. But it’s cheating on the rules it tacitly agreed to with the person who casually scrolls through social media. The implied rules say ‘use my platform and I will sell things to you.’ But they’re doing more than that. They’re finding out what mus
ic you like, whether you vote, what you’re afraid of, and who your friends are. And they’re looking at your friends and finding those things out about them too. But the biggest cheat of all is that they’re not just selling products, they’re selling ideas. They’re selling things to embrace, and things to fear. They might even be selling lies and hate, and they’re hiding behind this idea that it’s fair because you knew they were going to sell you something.”

  She looked directly at me then. “I became a P.I. because I got hurt by a cheater. This cheater might have the power to hurt all of us. I can’t stand by and let that happen.”

  I wanted to kiss her so badly I ached with it. But more than that, I wanted to hold her in my arms and protect her from the hurts of her past. My hand twitched toward her before I could still it, and my wish was approximately as useful as wishing to change history, so instead, I poured all that feeling into one very small smile.

  “We’re not generally in the social justice business here at Cipher Security,” said Sullivan, rising to his feet once more.

  Greene stepped forward off the wall. “I’ll help,” he said quickly. Shane stared at him as she stood, and O’Malley and I were up a moment later.

  Sullivan shot Greene an unreadable look, then returned his attention to Shane. “You make a compelling argument, however, and admittedly, you could very well continue the investigation without Cipher’s sponsorship.” He looked at me, then at Greene. “You also appear to have a team, with or without my support.”

  Shane took a deep breath and stood straight as Sullivan drilled her with his eyes. “You remain, however, a target of a man this company should have cut loose years ago. I dislike retaining him as a client for even one more day, but I do believe that whatever remains of his self-control will snap when we drop him. Please finish this quickly and in a manner that removes the risk to yourself.”

  Shane nodded. “Thank you,” she said quietly. Sullivan raised one eyebrow in response, then checked his watch and left the conference room.

  O’Malley considered Shane, myself, and Greene for a long moment before he directed his comments to Shane. “For what it’s worth, I say go after the wife.”