This little fly in the ointment, however, didn't seem to bother Teddy as much as I'd expected. "We'll just have to find a way to get our hands on it for a few minutes without him knowing," Teddy answered. "But this means that we need to know his patterns and movements."
How would we do that? I didn't want to seem like a total newcomer to this whole investigative journalism thing, but Teddy must have sensed the question in my head, or seen the confusion in my eyes.
"Surveillance," he said shortly, and then tossed back the rest of the amber liquid in his glass as my eyes widened.
Man, this really was the hardcore journalism stuff! I pictured the two of us sitting in the back of a van together, the vehicle crammed with tons of high-tech equipment, listening devices and microphones and all sorts of other spy gadgetry. Maybe I'd be the one driving the van, wearing a trench coat and a pair of dark glasses so that I wouldn't be recognized, tailing after Chad's car and keeping him in range so that Teddy, in the back of the van, could do his thing...
"Hey. April. You there?"
I snapped back to the present moment, as Teddy snapped his fingers at me. "Yeah, I'm here," I answered. "So, surveillance! Are we going to need code names? Rent the van under a fake name, maybe? Do you know a guy who's got all sorts of high tech equipment that he'll lend to us because you saved his life once?"
Teddy just stared at me like I had grown a second head. "No, to all of it," he said slowly after a long minute. "We're just going to follow Cartmann around and write down his schedule, looking for any points when he might be most easily separated from the computer. No code names, no high tech anything."
I pouted. "Fine. I accept your help. When do we start?"
"I can get Cartmann's address online, but we'll want to be at his place before he gets going in the morning, so we don't lose him," Teddy said. "I'll text you the location. Meet me there at around four. That should be early enough."
"PM?" I asked hopefully.
Teddy just shook his head at me. "I'm definitely making a mistake," he muttered to himself as he got up from his seat at the counter and left the bar.
Four AM? That was barely six hours away! Even if I got home right this moment, I'd still be tired and yawning when I showed up. I was going to need a lot of coffee to make it through this.
"Making progress!" I texted to Rob before draining the last of my glass of wine.
His response came back almost immediately. "Be safe. Don't make me have to come down there and save you."
I smiled. He couldn't hide how much he cared, even in a text message.
Chapter Nineteen
*
Surveillance, I discovered at an hour the next morning so early that it didn't even feel like it was real, was even more awful than I'd imagined.
I found Teddy sitting behind the wheel of a dull, black Cadillac parked across the street from a very expensive looking high-rise apartment building. "What are you doing?" he hissed at me, as soon as I slid into the passenger seat beside him.
"Um, surveilling?" I responded, not sure what he was talking about. Was he annoyed that I had brought an extra-large cup of coffee?
Teddy, however, gestured out his window at my little Miata, parked in a spot a few spaces down that I'd managed to snag - which I considered to be an incredibly fortunate stroke of good luck. "Get rid of that!"
"What, my car?" I responded, feeling hurt. Sure, it wasn't as corporate looking as the Cadillac, but why did it have to go away?
"We can't let Cartmann see anything out of the ordinary," Teddy hissed. "We need to track his normal routine, not his routine if we throw distractions in front of him."
"My car is a distraction?"
"Move it somewhere else," Teddy insisted firmly, so I got out of his car, leaving my coffee behind, and grumpily stomped across the dark and empty street to go find a more inconspicuous parking spot for my little two-seater.
Despite doing as he obeyed, Teddy didn't look any happier when I returned. He next directed his ire towards my coffee.
"Do you really think that bringing that was a good idea?" he asked.
I looked down at it, taking a second to breathe in its wonderfully fragrant steam rising up from the little hole in the top of the to-go cup. "Trust me, I wouldn't have made it here without it," I said.
"What's going to happen after you've drunk it all?" he pointed out. "All that liquid's gotta go somewhere."
I hesitated. I actually hadn't considered that issue. "Bathroom break?"
"Because these buildings will let you just duck inside and use theirs, I'm sure," he answered, his words dripping with sarcasm.
I shrugged, not having an answer, and took a sip of coffee to calm my frazzled nerves. I settled down into the passenger seat, tried and failed to fight the urge to yawn, and dug my phone out of my purse.
"Surveillance sucks," I texted to Rob.
I didn't expect him to be awake before five in the morning, but little dots appeared on his side of the texting screen. "I've heard that it gets very boring. Try to stay awake."
"I am trying," I responded, "but my coworker thinks that coffee is a bad idea. 'What goes in must come out,' he says."
A smiley face - aww. More dots. "He's not wrong. If it helps, I know that Chad is an early riser?"
I relayed this information to Teddy (minus the smiley face), who just grunted. My coworker had settled down into a slump in his seat, his eyes locked on the front of the apartment building across from us, and wasn't moving. If it wasn't for his open eyes, I would have guessed that he was asleep. He looked like he wasn't planning on moving for hours.
"How early?" I texted Rob.
"He was in the office most mornings just barely after six. He used to love watching the newbies struggle to show up before their boss. Claimed that after lunch, all he could think about was hitting the strip clubs."
"Wow," I typed out. "Sounds like a hell of a guy."
"Don't even think about seducing him for a story," Rob sent back. "I'm the only one you should be pulling that move with!"
I snorted into my coffee, hastily turning the sound into a cough so that Teddy wouldn't get suspicious.
The next hour or so drifted by, and we continued sitting there as the streets slowly began to fill with cars, people starting to appear on the sidewalks. I pulled up a picture of Chad Cartmann on my phone and kept looking down at the pretentious looking face, trying to commit his features to memory so that I'd recognize him when he appeared.
Staring out the window at all the people wandering by was almost hypnotic. I kept fighting against my sagging eyelids. Even with caffeine on my side to help keep me awake, my lashes kept dropping lower, my vision fading out. Surely, we didn't both need to be awake in order to keep up surveillance on the building...
"There he is," Teddy growled, and I nearly spilled my coffee on myself as I jerked upright.
"What? Where?"
Again, my companion didn't bother to hide his eye roll, but he flicked his gaze across the street. I rubbed my eyes and looked out the windshield, and sure enough, there he was! I spotted Chad striding along on the sidewalk, looking like he'd been stamped out of a mold that made Wall Street executives. His suit was so crisply creased that it looked like it could impale people. He kept his head high and his eyes aimed straight ahead, not looking around at anyone he passed.
"Target sighted, in pursuit!" I texted to Rob.
"Go get 'em, tiger!" he answered, as Teddy slipped the key into the ignition and started up the Caddy's engine.
Chad, we soon discovered, wasn't headed far from his apartment. He strolled into a post-modern coffee shop a few blocks down the way from his high-rise building, the kind of place decorated to look like the inside of an abandoned warehouse and where lattes could easily cost ten dollars or more, made with fancy designs by super-hipster baristas.
Teddy parked the car, and we climbed out and also headed to the coffee shop. "Now, don't approach him, and don't stare at him," Teddy warned me as we walked
along the sidewalk. "We don't want to give him any impression that we're there for anything related to him. We're just going in to get our morning coffee, and to sit and enjoy it. You won't even be facing towards him once we sit down."
This seemed like awful advice to me. How were we supposed to surveil Chad if we didn't even look at him? But Teddy was the expert, and he also looked angry enough to bite straight through a coffee mug if I protested. I wisely elected to hold my tongue.
Inside the coffee shop, I ran my eyes over the chalkboard that served as the place's menu board, aghast at the prices. Eventually, I ordered a "cafe au lait," simply because it looked reasonably cheap and I figured that I could pronounce it. Still, the thing cost nine dollars! For a cup of coffee!
Teddy and I stood around as we waited for the baristas to make our coffees, and I did my best to not look over at Chad. In that fancy suit of his, he wasn't hard to spot - and he'd somehow gotten a table entirely to himself, in its own little segregated area. There was even a red rope that separated his area off from the rest of the coffee shop's interior! He'd probably earned it by spending thousands of dollars on drinks here - which would only take a few visits, I grumpily guessed.
And he had his laptop out!
It took every bit of my self-control to keep from just rushing over to him and snatching the computer off the table in front of him. That had to be the computer that had his hacking program on it, letting him break into the computers of the other traders at his own firm!
I nudged Teddy. "The computer!" I hissed. "He's got it on him!"
Teddy just nodded, somehow not looking as thrilled as I felt. "You did say that he brought it everywhere with him, didn't you?" he pointed out, and I felt a little silly for a moment. I had told him already, after all.
"Target has his computer!" I texted to Rob.
"Great - but now what?" he sent back. And that was the problem, wasn't it?
After the barista set our drinks on the counter (and he sure took his sweet time getting those made for us, too - what were we paying him absurd amounts per drink for? It certainly wasn't speed!), we settled down at one of the open tables. At least here, Teddy was willing to pick a table fairly close to where Chad still sat and poked away at his computer. I caught a glimpse of the screen as we passed, and nearly burst out laughing - the man was browsing some sort of porn site! Right here, in public!
"Oh my god, he's looking at porn!!!" I texted to Rob.
"Sounds about right," he sent back. "Did I tell you that he's an ass?"
I still couldn't believe it. Right here? In the middle of a coffee shop? Did the man really not care about the sort of impression that he left on others? I almost expected him to unzip his pants and start tugging on himself, right here where everyone could see!
Keeping my eyes away from Chad and trying to pretend to have a conversation with Teddy proved to be one of the most difficult tasks I'd ever undertaken. "What do we do once we manage to get it?" I asked, taking a sip of the "cafe au lait." It wasn't bad, I had to admit, but I wasn't sure if it was worth nine dollars.
In answer, Teddy reached into his pocket and pulled out a small flash drive, which he held up to me for a second before making it disappear again. "This," he answered.
"What is it?"
To my amazement, Teddy smiled, perhaps for the first time that I could ever remember observing. "Remember how you thought that we'd be doing all sorts of high tech stuff, because I would know a guy?" he asked.
I nodded, not sure where this was going.
Teddy leaned back in his seat and took a sip of his own drink. "Well, in this case, I really do know a guy."
Of course, I wasn't going to let him just leave it at that and not tell me anything more. I whined a little, and finally he relented. Teddy explained that the flash drive had a large amount of storage, and furthermore had some sort of program that, when the flash drive was plugged into a computer, would automatically copy the entire contents of the computer onto the flash drive, compressing them so that they would all fit. This, Teddy explained to me, was what "cloning" a computer actually meant.
So now we just had to get our hands on the computer for a few minutes (Teddy insisted that he'd need no more than five minutes to clone the computer)! This plan might really work, if we could just get Cartmann away from his computer for a little while!
Turning, I looked over at Cartmann. Yes, I wasn't supposed to look right at him while we were surveilling him, but I just wanted to see if he was still on porn!
Oops. Chad was looking up from his screen at that very moment, and his eyes briefly locked onto mine. Shit, he might have noticed me. I hurriedly jerked my eyes away, grabbing for my cup and taking a sip.
As I lowered the cup of coffee back down, however, I saw Teddy, sitting across from me, stiffen. I looked up at him, curious about why he might be twitching.
And then I felt the tap on my shoulder.
"Excuse me." I turned and looked up, struggling to keep my face straight, as Chad Cartmann himself looked down at me.
"Yes?" I squeaked out, sounding like a half-drowned mouse.
"I just noticed you - I haven't seen you around this coffee shop before. As a sign of goodwill, I thought that I should buy you another cup, to welcome you." Chad grinned down at me, and for one moment, time stood still.
In that second of frozen time, I noticed two things:
First, Chad's suit was cut fairly close to his body. This meant that I could see that, just below his belt buckle, he was sprouting a full-on erection. Aftermath of his porn session, or something more? The shape stood out from the dark gray of his suit, and I had to resist a sudden urge to punch him right in the dick.
Second, if Chad was over here, hitting on me, he wasn't at his computer - which now sat, totally unguarded, on his table.
Fighting against all my better instincts, I put on a smile as I looked up at him. "That's, uh, so nice of you!" I replied. "I would love another cup of coffee from a handsome man like you!"
Chad grinned down at me, so pompous and stuck-up that I nearly wanted to barf. I forced myself to smile back as I stood up, trying to ignore how his eyes lingered on my figure, clearly not caring that I noticed.
Teddy better make good use of this distraction, I prayed.
Chapter Twenty
*
I forced myself to smile up at Chad Cartmann, Rob's former boss, as he did his best to leer down the front of my shirt. "Sure, I'll take a cup of coffee from you," I replied, doing my best to hide any trace of revulsion in my voice.
It must have worked, because Chad kept on smiling, reaching down and offering his hand to help me up. Yeah, like I needed - or even wanted - his help. Still, I wanted to keep him distracted, so I accepted the hand and let him tug me up.
"So you must come here a lot," I said to Chad, nodding towards his computer, still sitting - unguarded! - on his personal table. "How did you convince them to give you a reserved spot like that? It's so impressive!"
Chad shrugged, trying and failing to look like he wasn't proud of himself. "I helped set this place up, donated a considerable amount to paying for it," he said, as if this was an amazing act that he'd done. "They were quite grateful."
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Teddy slowly rising up from his chair, his eyes on me. I gave him a tiny little nod, trying to communicate my half-formed plan to him telepathically. "And did you help with the design?" I asked. I needed to get Chad away from his computer, so he wouldn't see Teddy messing around on it. "It's so... unique!"
As I spoke, I took a few steps away from my seat, in the opposite direction from Chad's table and computer. The man glanced back at his computer, however, apparently reluctant to let it out of his sight.
"Ooh, I know!" I exclaimed. "My coworker can keep an eye on your computer, and you could show me around!"
The suggestion made Chad smile, in a way that didn't exactly comfort me. "That would be wonderful. I'd especially like to show you the upstairs - it's quite breathtakin
g."
Erm. Alone with Chad upstairs. This was very quickly moving beyond merely uncomfortable territory and into the red-flags-everywhere minefield sort of territory. "Upstairs, huh?" I said, trying not to let any of my rising panic slip into my tone. "I didn't know that there was an upstairs section!"
"Oh, it's quite private." Chad grinned even wider at me. "But I've got special access."
And then, the man winked at me, even as his eyes locked onto my chest once again!
Oh my god. Quick, April, make a decision!
"Let's go," I said, even as I fought down the gorge at the back of my throat. If the man wasn't such a sleaze, and if I didn't know anything about his past, I might actually find him attractive, I tried to convince myself. After all, his teeth were straight and white, and he clearly had plenty of money based on his clothes. Would I really have turned him down if I met him at a club or a bar?
Yes, I would have done so, I knew. There was something about the way that he looked at me, the way he acted and spoke, that convinced me beyond a doubt that Chad Cartmann was, quite simply, not a nice guy. He had the same good looks as Rob, but none of Rob's warmth, his charm, his sincerity and deep kindness and caring. Where Rob was amazing, Chad was just an ass.
Maybe I could hit him with something upstairs and knock him out, I tried to convince myself as he reached out for my hand, leading me towards the stairs at the back of the coffee shop. Would he notice if I just hit him with a two-by-four in the forehead?
Over Chad's shoulder, at least, I saw Teddy flash me a thumbs-up as he moved towards the man's computer. At least he understood the plan.
Now, I just had to keep Chad distracted for a few minutes, in some way that wouldn't leave me horribly scarred for the rest of my life.
I tried to take my time climbing up the wooden stairs that led to the shop's second level. Chad, however, made a little noise behind me, a grunt of appreciation. "You know, I don't think I caught your name," he said.
"April," I replied. I froze for a moment, cursing at myself. I shouldn't have given him my real name!
Bad Boy of Wall Street: A Bad Boy Billionaire Romance Page 12