Beating Ruby

by Camilla Monk

Wait . . .

  “Besides him, Chaptal was the last one to connect to the server. She disconnected at 8:34. Whether she actually helped him prepare the attack, that part I’ll leave to you.”

  Wait, wait, wait. What attack? And what was this guy implying about me and Thom?

  Alex’s expression darkened. Gone were the gentle, ever-amused brown eyes sparkling under thick and expressive eyebrows. Something tore in my chest, because it seemed I was seeing him, really seeing him for the first time.

  “What about the attack itself? Did you find anything?” he asked Turtle-boy.

  His colleague shrugged. “Nope. The app normally generates extensive backlogs in a NoSQL database that would contain every single bit of data sent and received, every method executed, when—”

  Alex cut him off sharply. “In English, please.”

  His tone made me shudder a little. Turtle-boy, on the other hand, appeared used to it. “All tracks got erased right after Ruby was shut down. It’s a complete disaster. All I can tell you is that Roth copied Ruby on a distant server around midnight, then the local version got launched at 2:41. From there, several terabytes of data got exchanged. Then it was shut down at 3:37, and someone wiped all logs, all remote backups, and physically destroyed all the disks where Ruby had been installed. Totally degaussed them—that requires some serious hardware,” the young guy explained, pointing at several racks that seemed to have been disassembled.

  Holy shit. What exactly were these three accusing Thom of? Stealing Ruby before destroying every single trace of the program in EMT’s mainframe?

  Alex turned his piercing gaze to Ellingham’s subordinate. “Is EMG done assessing the losses?”

  “Yes. Ninety-seven bank and trading accounts accessed. Six hundred—” The bald guy’s voice faltered. “Six hundred and ninety-eight million, four hundred and seventy-three thousand, five hundred and ten dollars . . . and eighty-two cents missing.”

  I clenched my fists until my knuckles hurt. Ruby had been used. Unbridled. On actual bank accounts. And nearly seven hundred million bucks had been stolen. I couldn’t believe this. It wasn’t possible. Well, it was, but only if someone had bypassed all security systems to replace Ruby’s simulation scenarios with real targets. None of this made sense, though. Why would Thom have done such a thing? He had never shown any sign of being greedy, and the Ruby project was his fricking chef d’œuvre!

  I focused my attention back to the three men in the clean room, where a long sigh had just escaped Alex’s lips. “And we have no idea where that money has gone?” he asked, his gaze traveling back to Turtle-boy.

  “Nope. Ruby hammered the banks’ systems, and once it got in, it performed thousands of micro transfers to some obscure offshore banks, and just as many dark pool transactions. By the time the banks’ security systems started automatically blocking the accounts showing suspicious activity, the money had already been transferred so many times it was untraceable.”

  Alex raked a hand in his messy brown curls. “All accounts belonged exclusively to EMG?”

  There was a brief pause, during which I heard the bald man breathe in and out several times, until he seemed to find the courage to speak again. “Yes. Ruby targeted very . . . specific accounts.”

  “What he means is that EM’s saving several billion dollars each year through tax evasion schemes, and all the accounts targeted were located in tax havens,” Turtle-boy supplied with a smirk.

  “So they can’t go public about those losses,” Alex concluded.

  Turtle-boy laughed. “That’d be in bad taste, to say the least. And then, of course . . .”

  The bald man clasped a trembling hand around Alex’s arm, who seemed unaffected by his interlocutor’s tension. “Agent Morgan, I hope you understand that no one must know about what happened here. If the general public learns what Ruby proved capable of . . .”

  Agent? FBI then? Provided their agents were allowed not to shine their shoes. But if so, did he know about me, March, and my family? Was it why he had lied to me about his job? But why go so far, then? I felt tears brimming at the corners of my eyes at the memory of his hands holding me, his lips caressing mine as he tried to reassure me last night. I swallowed them back.

  After a few seconds spent listening to EMG’s exec prophesying a financial Armageddon, Alex schooled his features back into that warm smile I knew so well. “I get it. Investor panic, wide-scale market losses, public hearings . . . the whole nine yards.”

  “Yes.” The bald guy said in a gasp.

  “All right. You two try to recover whatever you can. We still have employees to question. I’ll see you later.” With this Alex got up on his feet and seemed to be ready to leave.

  The tension in my muscles eased a little, and that was when I noticed that something was tickling my hand.

  I looked down.

  A dark mass. Fur.

  I promise I’m not kidding—that rat was bigger than a raccoon. I jumped back in panic and hit my head against the metal walls imprisoning me. The clanking sound seemed to echo indefinitely in the narrow tunnel, laced with my squeal of pain. I clasped my hands over my mouth in horror. The fifteen seconds that followed were something halfway between It and Alien. Blood pumped furiously in my ears, my chest hurt from the effort not to scream, and I could see Alex’s legs approaching the vent slowly . . . while that twenty-pound—no, make that thirty-pound—rodent returned to nibble on the little leather ears of my mouse ballet flats.

  Behind Alex, Turtle-boy had heard the noise too. “What is it?”

  All I could hear was my own shallow panting, the beating of my heart, as I watched Alex crouch down to examine the air vent. I saw his face appear inches from mine, familiar yet terrifying, the only barrier between us that small grille.

  A soft expression, belied by that intense cinnamon gaze. A tilt of his head. A smile.

  “It’s nothing. Just a rat,” he announced before getting up with the ghost of a sigh.

  My heartbeat settled as he walked away, and I jerked my leg to kick the beast away. It ran down the tunnel with a series of protesting squeaks. I curled up and massaged my temples for a few seconds, struggling to process what had just happened. Alex couldn’t possibly have seen me. He worked with them; he’d have said something. Plus it was dark in here. He wouldn’t have been able to make out anything through the grille, right?

  But he had smiled. That gentle, enigmatic smile I now knew to conceal a great many layers. What would I do if he knew? He had just given me a temporary reprieve, but for how long?

  No need to stay to see if he’d come back and check again. With excruciating care, I turned around and started a slow crawl back toward the light of the hallway, a distant white square whose edges appeared blurred—or maybe I couldn’t see straight because all I could think of was that under my palms and knees, reality seemed to have collapsed. Thom had broken past Ruby’s security systems and reprogrammed it to steal Ellingham’s money. Alex was some kind of federal agent—or even worse, I realized, remembering what kind of countries he traveled in—and had been lying to me from the day we had met. My head was spinning. I stopped a meter or so from the air vent’s exit, suddenly scared that perhaps someone might be waiting for me out there.

  My breath little more than a faint whistle, I waited, every muscle paralyzed, eyes wide. I strained my ears to pick up the slightest whisper that might indicate that someone stood in that damn hallway. Nothing came but the low hum of the air-conditioning system and the occasional buzz of fluorescent lights on the ceiling. I inched forward. A sticky sweat caked the vent’s grayish dirt on my palm. I couldn’t even find the strength to swallow. And all that tension made me want to pee. Badly.

  I squirmed as silently as possible in an effort to get some sort of vantage point of view to the hallway. When I was 100 percent certain no one was waiting out there to pounce on me, I darted my nose out, breathing in fresh air and thinking of Fantastic Mr. Fox’s tale. You know, that part where not only do the farmers m
anage to get Mr. Fox out of his burrow, but they shower him with bullets, shoot his tail off, and destroy everything with bulldozers. That stuff traumatized me when I was seven.

  It took me almost a minute to dare climb out of the vent, and by the time I stood alone on the taupe carpet again, the mad beat in my rib cage progressively slowed down. Best cardio of my life. Putting the vent’s grille back in place was a torturous process, since I had to deal with a bad case of clammy, trembling fingers. Dammit, those little screws kept slipping out of my hands! Once I was done, I drew out a calming breath and looked up at the security camera.

  I hadn’t received any texts for a while, but Prince was probably still watching. Behind me, the freight elevator’s steel doors opened with a muted metallic sound. I folded myself back in and balled my fists as darkness engulfed me.

  I can’t even begin to describe how relieved I was to see Prince’s pudgy fingers reach out for me when the elevator doors opened again. That second ride had made me nauseated; I struggled out of my shoe box with almost frantic movements.

  At first I didn’t realize something was wrong. Then I registered how short Prince’s breath sounded, as if he had been the one trapped in there. He hadn’t said a word since helping me out of that car. I saw him shake his head. I blinked and looked around.

  Next to us, patiently leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, stood Alex.

  A jolt of electricity that I recognized as panic contracted my muscles. My legs flexed of their own volition in a familiar feeling: the need to run. I was trapped between four walls and couldn’t reach the exit door without making it past him, though. And Prince . . . Nah. Behind me, he remained frozen by fear. He had been caught red-handed by “Joe Jonas” and looked like he could barely stand as it was.

  I couldn’t read Alex’s expression as he moved to take a few steps toward me. This shuttered, impassive face was foreign to me. He didn’t look mad, but there was no trace of compassion either.

  “Miss Chaptal . . .”

  I gulped.

  “We need to talk.”

  SIX

  The Puffer Fish

  “‘I wish I could clean my heart of you, Asher! I wish I could scrub it with this sponge,’ Peyton sobbed.”

  —Izzie Shepherd, The Cardiologist’s Christmas Surprise

  When I was twenty-two, I tried to go to a frat party because I was stalking this cute guy from Joy’s family law class. I padded my bra with the firm intent to seduce him, but that didn’t work because the tissues I had crammed in there fell into the punch bowl when I bent down to fill my glass. Right in front of the guy.

  On an awkwardness scale of one to ten, I rated that particular event a solid eleven.

  Now, on a similar scale, I’d rate it around a forty-six for me to be arrested by my boyfriend and end up sitting across from him, ready to be questioned. Alex had dragged me into a small, nearly empty office used to store stacks of undistributed copies of EMG Magazine. Hadrian Ellingham and Kerri Lavalle’s photoshopped faces smiled at us, while Agent Morgan’s fingers rapped against the brown melamine of the desk between us.

  I didn’t say anything at first, and he remained silent as well, observing me with predatory patience. I found it difficult to collect my thoughts, sort them out, and decide what aspect of this debacle needed to be discussed first. I studied his features, the hawkish eyes and tightly sealed lips. In control. Unreadable. He was the one who eventually broke the silence, faint rustling sounds echoing in the room as he reached inside his brown leather jacket. I looked down at the wallet he had opened and laid on the table for me to see. A blue ID card bearing a round seal and eagle hologram.

  It’s a possibility that my adventures with March and everything I’d learned about my mother’s past had made my skin a little thicker, or maybe it was just that I had been readying myself for this since the moment I had realized that a regular federal agent would have likely had no business in Cambodia.

  I massaged my temples. “CIA, huh?”

  He nodded.

  A memory flashed in my mind. I was in Paris, alone with March’s ex. We were in her bedroom, resting and confiding in each other—yeah, she had been the nice ex type. A rare species, according to Joy.

  “Since he started his . . . business, March has often accepted wet jobs from the CIA. It’s an easy way to stay on the US government’s good side. He gets things done for them, and in exchange they’ll overlook the rest of his activities as long as he chooses his clients wisely. Of course, they never trusted him much, so a few years ago this guy called Erwin came up with the idea to try to put one of his agents in March’s bed. That sounded like the best way to keep a close eye on him.”

  Spoiler alert: that particular plan hadn’t ended well. The aforementioned agent, a woman named Charlotte Covington, got captured and burned alive during a mission in Ivory Coast. March struck a deal with Erwin to come to her rescue, but he made it there too late. There was nothing left to do. He killed Charlotte to end her suffering, and it took him three years to sleep well again in the wake of that intense trauma.

  My hands gripped the edge of the desk so hard I feared my fingers might snap, and in the storm roaring inside my skull, something struggled to surface, bubbling with anger. Now I knew where to start. “You’d have—” I swallowed, forcing the word out of my throat. “You’d have fucked me.”

  I knew we had somewhat more urgent issues to address, but this realization overwhelmed me, made me physically ill. If I had let him, he’d have used my body the same way Charlotte had used March’s. He’d have taken my virginity, that tiny chunk of myself that meant so much. All because it was his job. My skin itched; I felt violated by what had nearly happened just a dozen hours ago.

  “Island, this is not the best time—”

  “Not the time? Really? You touched me!” I yelled, wishing I could now scrub my skin clean until it was raw. I was so throwing those panties away. Hell, the dress was going in the bin as well.

  Alex jumped out of his chair as if he had been stung, and his fists banged on the desk. “Island, your boss is dead. He let loose a goddamn cyber disaster. Seven hundred million dollars is missing from EMG’s accounts, you’re the last person who saw him alive, and I just found you in a fucking air vent, spying on a classified investigation!”

  When he sat back, I remembered how to breathe. “Thank you for the recap. So you’re gonna make it all fall back on my shoulders? What really happened to Thom?” My nails scraped the melamine repeatedly, the only outlet for my anger at the moment. “I heard . . . rumors . . . that you have no actual recording of Thom jumping, that someone cut the power in the fifth floor’s west wing right before—”

  His tone was direct, clinical: “Thom was dead before he touched the ground.”

  I took the blow with a clenched jaw. “How?”

  “The coroner found traces of TTX in his blood. It paralyzed his diaphragm. Cause of death is asphyxia. We have evidence of two men entering the building via a maintenance tunnel around two thirty. Accomplices, likely. They killed him sometime after he was done wiring the money and destroying the servers.”

  TTX. Tetrodotoxin. Paralysis; loss of sensation. A painless yet horrifying death. As a kid, puffer fish had been among my favorite animals until an old encyclopedia taught me that they were—quite literally—full of that shit. I struggled to focus back on Alex. My voice sounded muted, distant to my own ears. “Will it be made public? Will you tell his wife?”

  His lips curved; his gaze softened. Not really a smile—a silent apology. “You know we can’t. Death has been ruled a suicide.”

  “I see. And I suppose it’s a complete coincidence that you’re the one investigating all this. I mean, you must be bored already. Greenwich Street doesn’t sound nearly as exotic as your usual destinations,” I said bitterly.

  Lines appeared on Alex’s brow that I wasn’t sure I had ever noticed before. He seemed equally tired and conflicted, and when he spoke again there was an edge to his voice. “
Don’t play with me. I know you’re smarter than that. The CIA is involved because US interests are threatened, and I am involved because you are threatened. My boss gave me the job because he knew I could never stand watching someone else—”

  “Treat me like this? Locking me in a room for interrogation?”

  “Yes,” he admitted.

  I looked away. “You’re lying. All you’ve done is lie from the start, anyway.”

  “As you lied to me,” Alex gritted out. “If I recall, you told me your mother had been a French diplomat. I must have missed the part where you mentioned her job as a spy.”

  I wondered, as he said this, if he knew about the Cullinan affair as well, or even . . . Dries.

  He was the other surprise package my mom had left for me to discover after her death. You see, she never delivered the diamond after she stole it, and was murdered before she could reveal where she had hidden it. What the Board would learn only a decade later was that she had double-crossed them with her lover, and incidentally my biological father, a supervillain hell-bent on world domination and known as Dries. No wonder my mom had chosen the nice American banker she had shared a brief fling with to raise me, instead.

  Here is where things get even trickier: she was supposed to give Dries the Cullinan, but for some reason she decided against it and vanished off the grid in Tokyo with me. Dries, however, belonged to a little club called the Lions, a secret fraternity of deadly and incredibly arrogant South African assassins who seemed to believe that the rest of us were maggots and the world was theirs for the taking. Said fraternity often took care of the Board’s dirty jobs: they got summoned to catch my mother and recover the diamond. Very convenient, as you can imagine.

  Except that on the day Dries was supposed to kidnap us, one of his men went rogue and shot my mom while she was driving, without any valid explanation, save for some bullshit about a faulty aim. I should have died too, but Dries’s favorite disciple, a young assassin he brought everywhere with him, turned his back on his “brothers” to save my life.