Protection

by Jay S. Wilder

  She was sure she shouldn’t go there.

  Fuck this.

  She was going there. “Is there something specific you’d like to ask me? Because you might want to speak to Ryan Malone about the hours I’ve worked for the past eighteen months. Unless you want to talk about something that happened more…recently.”

  “We’ll get to that,” Doyle noted.

  “As recently as say, last Friday?” Bernhardt asked, taking the bait.

  “Sure. What would you like to know?”

  “Have you ever seen any visitors who, from your knowledge, were not authorized to be on the project floor? Other than security, of course.”

  “No, sir. I mean, there was that courier guy, but no one else. I was alone.”

  There. Perfect. This was as good a time as any to lie. These men were so curious about what she saw, it could only mean that she wasn’t supposed to have seen it.

  “Did you see anything suspicious?”

  “No.”

  Another lie, but fuck it.

  Bob Worthington was less patient with the pace of this interrogation. “Why were you here Saturday morning?” he blurted out.

  “Bob, we’re handling this,” Bernhardt snapped.

  Nicole sat forward. “Handling what exactly?” When Bernhardt wouldn’t meet her stare, she pleaded with the head guy. “Doyle?”

  “We’ve had a… umm, security breach here over the weekend and just wanted to talk to employees who were on the premises. That’s why we wanted to know what you might have seen on Saturday morning?”

  Shifting her eyes over to Bob, she could see he was suspicious of her. Him. Luis. Mr. Wu and his two friends. Not to mention the four muscle-bound thugs in the lobby. She wasn’t giving in, though. Her father had taught her a hell of a lot more than manners and how to play spy. He’d schooled her on keeping her mouth shut and never saying more than you were asked.

  She tucked her long hair behind her ears and eased back in the chair to seem as if she had nothing to be nervous about. “Fuck… I was so bogged down on the lines of code I was writing all night. Yards of them. I think the only time I bothered to get up was to go to the bathroom.”

  “Or to get some water?” Bob asked, lifting a brow at her.

  “Maybe. I don’t remember.”

  “So, you didn’t see anyone else here in the office before you left Saturday morning at—” Bernhardt reached for a print out from the security staff and said, “—left at 6:49 a.m.?”

  Playing along, she smiled. “Wow. Was it that late? Or, that early, rather?”

  Doyle returned her grin, but Bob and Bernhardt didn’t.

  “You had to have seen who was here,” Bob barked out.

  Nicole jerked her head to face him. “No, sir. I didn’t. I was doing my work—and Ryan’s work, too, for that matter—and then I went home and collapsed from exhaustion. Quite frankly, Clark Kent could have walked up to me, stripped down to his Superman tights, and flown out of the office with me on his back and I probably wouldn’t have noticed because I was so absorbed in all the work.”

  Bob let out a frustrating sigh, and Doyle held his hand up to him.

  “You’re quite funny, Ms. Hunt. You’ve been with us how long?”

  “Eighteen months, sir.”

  “And, you’re happy here?”

  “I would be a hell of a lot happier if I didn’t have to do Ryan’s work while he had an actual life.” There. She’d said it. She didn’t give a shit if Ryan got pissed or never spoke to her again, especially if it meant she might get a real weekend before this project was over.

  Doyle smiled. “We’ll look into that, won’t we, Anthony?”

  “Sure, sure…” Bernhardt said, making a note.

  She got up and smoothed her hands down the front of her pants. “May I get to work now?”

  “Yes, yes,” Doyle said. He gestured toward Bob to move out of the way. It was obvious the larger man didn’t want to obey. “We’re done for now. If you can think of anything you might have forgotten, Nicole, please contact Bob or me immediately.”

  “Sure thing,” she said. As if.

  Bernhardt added, “You know you are not authorized to investigate any suspicious activity on your own.”

  She couldn’t help but laugh because it was exactly how she felt. “I’m a computer nerd, sir, not one of Charlie’s Angels.”

  Mr. Bernhardt closed the folder, flipped the laptop down, and tucked them both under his arm as he stood to leave. “Thank you for your cooperation, Ms. Hunt.” He stretched across the table and extended his hand to her. Even though it was thought to be rude for a man to extend his hand to a lady before her doing it first, Nicole took it and gave a confident shake before releasing his hand. “Do be careful when working after hours, and thanks again for your contribution to this crucial technology project.”

  “Absolutely.” She tilted her head up at Bob. “Have a nice morning.”

  The door to the office closed behind her. She was sure she’d heard both men raise their voices immediately. Had Doyle’s assistant not have been sitting at her desk right outside the door, Nicole would have pressed her ear up against it to have a listen.

  She hustled back to her cube.

  Think. Think. Think.

  8

  Nicole

  To avoid any undue suspicion, she went back to work as if nothing happened, plugging away at changes to the project and running and testing code like the bad-ass programmer she was hired to be. She kept her head down and didn’t talk to anyone. Just worked.

  What she did at lunch was a different story.

  She left the building and walked six blocks to the mall where she purchased a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and three burner phones with their own internet access. She also bought a Visa check card and put seven hundred dollars on it that she had stashed away in cash. That way, if she needed to use a credit card, she’d have something that wasn’t traceable back to her.

  She stopped in at the nearby Starbucks, bought a Tall cup of their strongest brew with a double shot of espresso and hid out at a table in the back with one of her new phones. She needed to know why the name Delta Shandong was so familiar to her and there was no way she would take the chance to research it on her personal phone or at work. Starbuck’s open Wi-Fi network was perfect, paired with her ability to cover her tracks online. No one would be the wiser.

  Opening the tiny browser on the phone, she did a Google search. It yielded very little, mentioning only an economic zone in China. That was no surprise to her, as many Chinese websites and servers were blocked from the west. She went to Yandex next and found a few more articles and a company website. What she saw made the blood drain out of her face.

  Closing the flip phone, she opened the back and pulled out the SIM card. She dumped the used burner phone in the trash can before grabbing her bag to get the fuck out of there. In an alley a few blocks away, she pulled out her pack of cigarettes and lit one up. She didn’t smoke it. That was for show. She used the lighter to burn the SIM card. No one was getting a chance to figure out what she had just discovered.

  Because it was much worse than she thought.

  She plopped down in the chair and shivered from head to toe. It was a warm, spring day, but hell, this kind of thing chilled her to the bone. She hadn’t felt this way since her mother—

  Right there in front of her was the “Janine’s Bride Tribe – Nicole” water bottle sitting on her desk like a fifth-grade participation trophy.

  Scheming fuckers.

  It had purposely been placed there after she left for lunch. Someone had made a distinct point of letting her know where they’d found it. Bob, Doyle, Bernhardt, Ryan, or, hell… even Matio could have returned it to her desk as a clear and concise message.

  They know.

  Nicole tried to compose herself when all she wanted to do was run screaming out of the building. She needed to do something – fast. Protect herself. Cover her bases. Fuck that, cover her ass.

&
nbsp; She gathered her things together and slid her messenger bag and purse over to the far side of her cube. She made sure her keys were securely in her pocket, as well. Returning to her chair, she logged on to the network and started up her programming software—that was monitored at all times—and clicked some autocode to run automatically to check over the work she’d done over the weekend. It would buy her some time to figure out what the hell to do.

  Milton, a junior level programmer, stopped at her cube. “Hey, Nic,” he said. “Did you hear Sherman blew chunks all over the kitchen at lunch and they sent him home? Stomach flu.”

  “Gross. Poor guy. I hope the rest of us don’t get it.”

  Milton shrugged. “Did he give you the specs for the firewall coding for TDE-5X?”

  “No, sorry, he didn’t.”

  “No worries. I’ll ask Ryan. Can I help you with anything?”

  She didn’t need a thing from Milton, although he’d told her everything she needed to know. Sherman’s cube was open and available. He was the only non-manager on the TDE-5X team with a higher level clearance than her. Perfect.

  “Actually,” she started. “Can you go down to the server room and reboot drive K? It’s running a bit slow and probably hasn’t had a good cold start in a while. And, please stay with it to make sure it’s back online.”

  “That’ll take forever.”

  “Fifteen minutes, at the most,” Nicole said with a sweet smile. “Please?”

  Milton blushed and said, “Anything for you, Nic.”

  She watched her colleague walk off and then moved into action. To protect herself, she needed a trump card, an ace up her sleeve, and other analogies that added up to she didn’t want to be up shit’s creek without a paddle. Safeguard herself at all costs. She opened the top drawer to her desk and retrieved a brand new USB drive and put it in her pocket.

  Hitching her bag up onto her shoulder, she crouched down a bit, looked both ways, and covertly went to Sherman’s desk. He had a messy cube in the corner behind the tall filing cabinets, so Nicole figured she’d be out of sight while she did what needed to be done.

  Dancing her fingers quickly over the keyboard, she noted that Sherman hadn’t logged out of his system before the great barf-fest and his dismissal for the day.

  “Amateur,” she said with a snicker. Sherman damn sure knew better than that. He must have been awfully sick to do something so stupid. Her luck, though.

  She snuck over to the security logs that were kept in the staff forum. They were there in case anyone needed proof or justification of work hours on certain client projects. Nicole scrolled through the data and saw her own access leaving the building Saturday morning. Page back, she noted an access around six a.m. of only Bob Worthington’s card. Nothing about registering Luis or the three Chinese men. Oh wait, there was a screen capture of Bob entering the building with the men. Three excellent shots of the faces of Mr. Wu and company. She did a print screen and swiftly tabbed over to Cooper’s graphics program that was opened and pasted in the shot.

  The overhead announcement buzzed out, taking her attention away. Madison’s voice said, “Would Nicole Hunt please report to the executive board room. Nicole Hunt to the executive boardroom.”

  “Oh, hell no. Not again,” Nicole said and sped up her process.

  Right now, she couldn’t dig too far on who the Chinese men were. She had a bigger prize to nab. She went to the DOS prompt screen and initiated a backdoor workaround into the secure server where all of the files to TDE-5X were stored. With her breathing out of control and her stomach doing nervous somersaults—God, don’t let me puke all over the place like Sherman—Nicole pulled an encrypted thumb drive from the pocket of her blazer.

  She had to do this.

  She had no choice now.

  9

  Nicole

  If overhearing that conversation put her in danger, copying these TDE-5X specs would kill her for sure. She plugged the USB dongle into the side of Sherman’s computer and dragged the files over with the mouse, clicking to save them to the drive. She also copied over the security camera date, and the screen shot she’d nabbed.

  As she watched the progress bar on the copying, her knees felt weak, and she couldn’t stop the heart palpitations threatening to send her to the emergency room. “Come on, come on, come on!” She checked out her left and right to make sure no one saw her tucked away here. “Stupid slow-ass server. Save, dammit!”

  “Has anyone seen Nicky?” Ryan asked loudly from several cubes over.

  “I saw her at her desk a while ago,” someone responded.

  “She’s not there,” Ryan said.

  “What’s up, man?”

  Nicole heard Ryan take a long pause. “I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s good.”

  Fuck! I have to get out of here ASAP!

  She bit her bottom lip watching the progress bar… 80%... 85%... 92%... done!

  “Yes!”

  She tugged the USB dongle out of the drive, cleared the cache, history and activity log, and stuck the drive in her front pocket, pushing it down deep. Popping up, she saw Ryan’s head of hair above the cubicles as he wandered the office, probably searching for her. She hunkered down and waited a moment until she didn’t hear the sound of his voice.

  You can do this.

  Just like those times when she’d dash across an open field in two seconds flat while her dad was peering off in another direction, Nicole was grateful for those play dates pretending she was a spy. Who the hell knew it would actually come in useful and—what—save her life?

  “Anyone seen Nicole?” she heard someone else shout out.

  It was time to get out of there, get home, and make a plan. She’d clearly overheard something she wasn’t supposed to and Bob, Doyle, and… fuck, maybe even Ryan, who knew?

  Glancing around Sherman’s cube, she pulled down his San Jose Sharks cap from the shelf above his desk, tucked her hair up underneath it, and dragged it to cover her face. She took a deep breath and then stood up, walked firmly gripping her bag, and headed straight for the staircase.

  She ran like a triathlete down the steps all the way to the parking garage where she’d stashed her bike. Riding like the wind, she made it home in record time, abandoning the bike inside the front hall as soon as she burst into her apartment.

  “Think, Nicole, think.”

  Sitting on her couch, she withdrew her laptop from her bag and set it next to her. When her cell phone rang with Ryan’s name appearing in the readout, she clicked “Reject” and started grumbling. “Fuck you, asshole,” she muttered at one point.

  Logging into a Tor browser for an incognito searching, she started looking for anything about a Mr. Wu and Delta Shandong. Three links down… “Bingo!”

  Nicole read as fast as she could seeing two news articles from a Chinese technology company’s website. When she clicked on the link, it took her to a 404 error. “No longer available. Fuck.”

  She added in a few more strokes and went to a website that would take you “back in time” to archived copies of websites. Scrolling back three years on the site’s calendar, she found a cached page on Delta Shandong, owned by Chao Wú, Hung Jaing, and Ling Zhang. They worked for this Chinese corporation with strong ties to the Republic of China Armed Forces. With her hand to her mouth, she covered the gasp escaping from her. If she weren’t so terrified of what was going on, she’d have to make a sexual joke against all of these loaded names.

  It was more than that, though. Ling Zhang had a connection to someone Nicole knew. Little had she known then that she’d been betrayed with the ultimate treachery. The one friend Nicole had made while she had worked in Shenzhen, the same person who recommended her for the position at Terratech and, in fact, got her the interview.

  Mei-Ling Zhang.

  That rebellious, purple-haired, down-with-China, freedom-for-all, social media manager of the Chinese software firm where Nicole had worked may not have been any of those things. The five minutes at the
back table in Starbucks had shown Nicole the truth—that Mei-Ling was some kind of double agent and it traced right back to her own fucking father! Delta Shandong turned out to be a Chinese cyber-security firm—and Mei-Ling’s father owned it lock, stock, and barrel.

  Laughter bubbled from deep within her, bursting from her throat as she cracked herself up. Not one goddamned thing was funny at all, but it was the only reaction she could muster up without having to shove her head in the toilet. However, the humor transformed into tears. Hot, salty, fat blobs of water rolling down her cheeks at an impressive pace. Her breathing quickened. She was close to hyperventilating. She knew she had to get control over herself or else she was going to need the ER—which was not an option because they would actually call fucking Ryan as her emergency contact.

  “Why is this hap-hap-happening to me?” she got out as she tried to breathe. With her head between her legs, she filled her lungs slowly and did her best to calm down.

  She knew what she had to do. As much as she hated to do it, she had to call the one person who would know what she should do to solve this shit show.

  Dialing her second burner phone, she waited for the man to answer.

  “Well, I haven’t talked to you in a long time,” he said flatly.

  “I know. I’m sorry… work has been really busy for me. In fact, I think I’m coming down with something.”

  “Really? Let’s hope it’s not going around.”

  She bit down on her bottom lip. She shared another one of their code phrases, one of many between them. This last one was to let him know that she was in trouble, someone could be listening, and she needed assistance. “I think it is. It’s pretty rough from what I can tell.”