by J P Barnaby
“Now, what’s this about?”
“I think your father was turning off the software that spiders banks for money laundering,” he said in an urgent whisper, even though no one else was around.
“What?” Aleks asked. He could hear his pulse pounding in his ears.
“Every morning, when transactions go through the bank, an automated software routine runs against them to check for clear indicators of money laundering. Grandma’s pension wouldn’t trigger it, but a $50,000 deposit from a dry cleaner might. We consulted on something similar at Jonesboro.”
Aleks’s face felt cold as the blood drained from it. “About a month before he died, my father sent for me,” Aleks said. “He said he was ready for me to start moving up to the head of the company. That I’d paid my dues. But it felt forced and uncomfortable. When I went up to see him about it, I had to wait because he was in a meeting. When the door opened, these men came out looking angry. They were dressed like businessmen in expensive suits but felt rougher somehow. My father was shaken when I went in.”
“I can’t tell you anything for sure until I get at those servers.” Thomas put a hand on his back.
Aleks used his corporate key card to open the heavy steel door at the end of the hallway that led to the main part of the office. Then they headed along the front wall through customer service to the server room. A blast of cold air hit them as they walked through. Aleks thanked God there wasn’t a card reader on that door. He’d have a hard time explaining why he was in the server room.
Sam sat at the large desk surrounded by monitors, playing Galaga on one of the screens. Over the whoosh of electronic noise and fans, he hadn’t heard the door open. It wasn’t until Aleks’s shadow fell across him that he nearly fell out of his chair.
“Mr. Sanna, good morning, sir.” Sam couldn’t have been older than twenty-two or twenty-three. Don Hall, their CIO, had hired him right out of Georgia Tech. Aleks wasn’t terribly bothered that the kid was playing games; he and Thomas had played hours of Call of Duty in their dorm room.
“Good morning, Sam. Did you install an emulator on one of my servers?” he asked, unable to help himself. They couldn’t afford any funny business on those servers while Thomas was messing with them.
Sam stumbled out of the way, rolling the chair sideways to point at the floor. “No, sir, of course not. It’s one of the tech swaps. I installed the emulator on it from a USB drive. It’s not even on the network.”
“Good man. Hey, I don’t mind you playing games while you babysit the server room. I’m sure there are more useful things you could be doing, but it’s Sunday morning. As long as you’re smart about it, I won’t tell Don.”
“Thank you, sir.” Sam let out a breath and ran his hand through is thick red hair. Freckles stood out on his arms. “Sir, is there something I can do for you?”
“As a matter of fact, there is. The network jack in my office has been giving me trouble lately. I don’t know if it’s the cable, the jack, or the hub. Could you tone that out for me and see where the problem is? I thought I’d pop in today so you guys could check without having to work around me. Plus, I’m taking my new husband on a tour of the office.”
Poor Sam’s eyes bulged out of his little freckled face at the word husband. He popped out of the chair like a cork and scampered to a metal utility cabinet to grab a bag of tools. The door closed behind him in a quiet snap of air that said more than his silence.
“You’ve got about five minutes before he figures out there’s nothing wrong with my jack. And I have about ten minutes before he’s texting everyone he knows to tell them that I got married to a guy.” Aleks chuckled. Thomas’s face showed surprise.
“You really don’t care?”
“Not even a little.” And he found that he truly didn’t.
Thomas dropped into the seat and scanned the port switcher for the server he wanted. “Okay, so he accessed the project files twice a month. Let’s check 6:00 a.m. on January 3,” Thomas murmured, mostly to himself, it seemed, as his fingers flew across the keys. They didn’t have much time, and Thomas was making the most of it. Aleks had never seen anyone move that fast on a keyboard. The confidence in his strokes made Aleks smile.
“Can you find the logs in—”
“Got it,” Thomas said. “Your father accessed this server and disabled a service. Let me isolate those logs. Yeah, every couple of weeks. It looks like the service was disabled for… about… six minutes each time. The service runs the executable for that project.”
“How did no one catch this?” The breath had been knocked out of him at the confirmation of his father’s indiscretions.
“You have, what, fifty servers, maybe more? And really bad network guys?” Thomas shrugged, eyes still glued to the screen. “They probably only sweep the servers for failed services, not ones that were deliberately turned off. And if they saw it, the service was only down for a few minutes. No one would have felt the need to raise the alarm, because the service was running. Hang on, it looks like there’s something else in here, more code—”
The door opened in that moment, and Thomas jerked the port switcher back to the rogue computer. Sam looked up to see that they were both at his station, and his hands shook a little on the bag. At least he thought they were investigating him rather than breaking into the servers.
“Sir, I didn’t see anything wrong with the jack in your office. But I couldn’t get into your computers to check and see if maybe it was your network driver.”
“I’ll call Don in the morning and have him pop over and check it out. Maybe I just think the world is too slow for me.”
Sam just stared at them, probably wishing for all the world that they would just go away.
“Thomas, let’s go check out my office,” Aleks said with a fake cheeriness that fooled the kid. It didn’t appear to fool Thomas, whose eyes were full of concern.
They walked past the empty cubicles, past accounting, and back to his office. Thomas looked around the open concept space, and then out the window. He seemed to be examining the office as if looking for answers.
“What do we do?” Aleks asked after closing the door behind them.
“What do you mean what do we do?” Thomas asked. “What is there to do?”
“Do we go to the police?”
“And tell them that I hacked into your computers?” Thomas’s voice rose as he spoke.
“I gave you permission.”
“The board didn’t. And how will you keep your PCI compliance with an ex-con wandering through your files?”
“You said there was more code. What could that be?” Aleks struggled to get the question out, desperate for the answer to be anything other than his father being a criminal.
“I’m sorry, but your father is gone. It’s not worth the risk to pull that code off the server and examine it. There’s no current crime happening. You do not want to be on the wrong side of this, trust me. Please.” Thomas paused and took Aleks’s hands. Aleks liked their warmth, their comfort. The stress lines on his face lessened, and then he continued. “We need to focus on Hannah. What’s best for her?”
“Not you going to jail or me losing the company,” Aleks conceded, squeezing Thomas’s hands.
“No, those would be bad things for all of us. Trust me, I don’t miss prison.”
“Do you think this is why my father was killed?”
“I do. He was helping someone scary launder money by turning off that service every couple of weeks. I don’t know how or why he got started, but I think maybe he wanted to stop. He was afraid of getting caught.” Thomas dropped into the chair across from Aleks’s desk, the one Wes usually occupied. Aleks sat down too, slouched in the chair next to him.
“I never imagined he was doing something illegal. The board did, but I—I had a different view of my father. To me, he could take over the world.” Aleks picked at the arm of his visitor chair. He’d never sat in it, but it felt pretty comfortable.
“We all
do things we’re not proud of. Some of us far more than others.” Thomas sighed and glanced around his office again.
“What?” Aleks glanced around too, wondering what Thomas saw.
“Why don’t you have personal pictures in your office?”
Aleks snorted. “Of who, my imaginary cat?”
Thomas laughed. “I don’t know. It’s just so impersonal. It doesn’t feel like you.”
“I’m waiting for the wedding pictures to come in. Then I may wallpaper.” Aleks fixed his gaze on Thomas.
“Tell me you’re kidding.”
“I’m kidding. Mostly. I did have Wes pick out half a dozen frames. He even has one for that picture Hannah drew of the four of us the other day. It’ll go right over there.” Aleks indicated a blank spot near the window.
“She’ll love that. We should bring her here sometime,” he said, indicating the huge windows. “I’m sure she’d love to see where you work. She likes you, and she loves the house.”
“Let’s go get her, then.”
Thomas got up and held a hand out to him. Aleks took it and pulled Thomas down into his lap. He liked the weight on his legs.
“This chair isn’t going to hold us.”
“It holds that guy in accounting; it will hold us.” He kissed Thomas with a slow, sweet whisper of meeting lips.
“We’re going to get through this,” Thomas whispered. “I would need the source code to make sense of what he was doing, but no one needs to know about this. We just go on with our lives.”
“I’ve got you now. I can get through anything.” Aleks kissed him again.
ιε͵
THOMAS SAT with Hannah asleep on one leg and his painfully awesome new laptop on the other. He hadn’t bothered to argue when Aleks took him shopping on the way home from Polytech. Why? Because he wanted it. It had been so long since he’d just been able to go online and check the weather or the news. A personal computer and internet were luxuries most people took for granted. Even though his parole had ended, he just couldn’t afford them.
Until now.
Hannah shifted, resting a hand on her cheek. Okay, back to business. Thomas had typed “oncologist Atlanta” into Google and gotten almost six hundred thousand hits. So that didn’t help. The phrase “pediatric oncologist Atlanta” brought it down to only forty thousand. Forty thousand. How the hell was he supposed to do this? How had his mother found the team Hannah had now? He didn’t think he’d ever asked her. They’d just always been there.
Thomas picked up his new shiny iPhone, another gift from Aleks on their shopping trip. He sent a text to his mother asking that very question. A moment later the little blue bubble told him that his mother was answering on her own spiffy new iPhone. She hadn’t wanted it—had fought against it, even—until Aleks showed her Hannah’s little face on FaceTime. After that, she was hooked.
Her pediatrician ran some tests and sent us to Dr. Fitzsimmons. It never occurred to me to take her anywhere else. What about CHOA?
Of course. He hadn’t thought to start with the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Of course he should start there.
A knock at the door woke Hannah, so he hit the button for FaceTime and gave her the phone to talk to Grandma. He grinned at her as she started telling his mother about her new bedroom furniture, which had arrived that morning. She had a castle bed, and it was the coolest thing ever.
He opened the door to find Wes standing there, holding a large manila envelope.
“More gifts? Tell me there’s not a puppy in that envelope,” Thomas deadpanned.
“It was laying on the porch, addressed to you. Weird. But no, I’m under strict orders not to discuss the puppy.”
“You’d better be kidding.”
“I am. I can talk about the puppy.”
Thomas stepped back to let Wes come in and closed the door a little too harshly behind him. Wes turned but didn’t say anything. Hannah babbled away, cheerfully discussing the princess that came with her castle bed. She didn’t know what an American Girl doll was, only that she was pretty and she looked like Hannah. The doll even had tiny budding hair, just like her. God knew how much Aleks paid for them to do that.
“Anything I can do?”
“No, I’m just looking for a doctor here for Hannah. Do you know there are 1.27 million oncologists in the city of Atlanta?” Thomas led them back into the living room, where Wes gave Hannah a smile and a wave. Hannah never stopped talking, she just waved back.
“I would find that surprising, given the city’s population is about half a million.”
“How the hell do you know that off the top of your head?”
“It’s my job to know things,” Wes said with what Thomas was sure he thought was an enigmatic smile. Only, young and freckled, he didn’t quite pull it off.
“I couldn’t even find a date. How the hell do I find a doctor?”
“Well, you’re married to a Greek tech tycoon, I’d say you won the dating round. Let me do some research. You guys aren’t the only ones with mad computer skills.”
“You code?” Thomas didn’t mean to sound so skeptical. Wes worked for a tech company; it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. But he just looked so… normal.
“I worked in the programming division with Aleks, remember? And… my Google fu is strong, and… uhm… I post on Instagram a lot?”
“So we need a pediatric oncologist who is an exhibitionist?”
“Just let me look.” Wes snorted and neatly sliced the top off the envelope in his hands. When he turned it, a handwritten note slid out along with a few large pictures. Frowning, Wes flipped through them, going paler with each page.
“What?”
“I don’t… I don’t understand—”
Thomas pulled the papers away from his unresisting hands and saw his daughter’s face looking back at him from the page. She sat on the edge of their pool in the backyard with him at her side. They’d just picked her up from his mom’s after their trip to Polytech. He remembered the moment. They’d been talking about school and how much she wished she could go.
The words scrawled across the bottom read Such a pretty child.
A picture of him and Aleks kissing in the kitchen. Your father would have been appalled.
And then a newspaper clipping about the death of Aleks’s father with a note: We’ll be in touch.
“Call Aleks right now. Tell him to come home,” Thomas instructed.
“We need to call the police.” Wes reached for the package, but Thomas walked away.
“No. Get Aleks home, now.” They couldn’t involve anyone else. These men would hurt Hannah if he and Aleks crossed them. He couldn’t risk that. Hannah fought for her life every day, and now she had a real chance.
No, he would do whatever he had to do to keep her safe.
SOMETHING IN Wes’s voice must have resonated with him, because it took Aleks exactly twenty-eight minutes to get home from the office—eight minutes faster than his best time. Thomas waited for him in the kitchen. He’d sent Wes upstairs with Hannah—neither of them needed to know what the contents of that envelope meant for their family.
“What happened?” Aleks asked as he wrapped his arms around Thomas. It felt good—really fucking good—against all the fear and stress and anger welling inside him. He’d never been one for physical affection until Hannah came along, but that one embrace helped to settle his world.
“Wes found an envelope on our front porch. We opened it to find that.” Thomas handed him the contents and watched his face go green.
“Oh my God.”
“Look at the pictures, Aleks, really look. They were taken here. Someone has been watching the house. They got that close.”
“We need to go to the police.”
“What if your father went to the police? Look what they did to him. I won’t let them hurt Hannah. They can kill me first.”
“I don’t know what to do.” Aleks’s hands trembled on the pages.
“We wait
for them to contact us, and then we do what they want.” Thomas took the pages from him and left a hand on his arm.
“To what end?”
“Pray to God to no end.”
“I should never have gotten you and Hannah involved in this,” Aleks whispered. “I didn’t know.”
“Why did you, Aleks?” Thomas threw the pictures down on the table.
“I saw that picture of you and Hannah. Right there in front of me. I sat staring at that picture for an hour, just remembering. Sleeping four feet from you in that dorm room was the happiest time of my life.” A tear rolled down Aleks’s cheek.
“You couldn’t have just called?”
“Would you have answered?”
Thomas thought about that for a long moment. Would he? He didn’t need any complicated relationships, even one with a spoiled rich boy. “So you saw our vulnerability and you preyed on it.”
Alex recoiled. “I didn’t mean for it to be like that.”
“You said yourself that Daddy bought everything he wanted in life.”
“Thomas, stop. Please? I didn’t—”
Thomas sighed, a long, slow, exhausted sound. He wanted to blame this on Aleks, all of it. But he couldn’t. Aleks didn’t know any more than he did what they would find at the end of the trail. And he probably didn’t need to dig as deep as he had. But he didn’t want to let himself believe he’d been bought so easily.
“Do you hate me?” Aleks’s voice was so small. So much smaller than Thomas would have thought possible from a grown man.
Thomas shook his head. “No.” It was the truth. “As much as you wanted me, you also did it for Hannah. You have more than kept up your side of the bargain.”
Aleks blew out a long breath. “Unfortunately for us, you did too. I underestimated just how good you were. I also underestimated the shit my father could get into.”
“I went in with my eyes open and didn’t say no. So what do we do now?”
“I don’t know. We can’t go to the police. We can’t involve anyone else. I guess we wait.”