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  Still, though, there had been a moment last night when she’d seriously considered—well, it didn’t matter. Kevin and his unwitting interruption had provided the perfect opportunity for Charli to discover a few things for herself. She’d examine it further, later. Right now, it was time to leave those questions alone.

  “You look great for a sleepless cyber savage,” Anna laughed again, an appraising gleam in her eyes as she sat on the corner of the desk. “Bad interview today? You should have come home with me last night,” she said casually as she picked up a sheaf of printouts and leafed through them. She gave Charli the slightest of glances, a glint of hazy green filled with promise, over the pages. “Franko could have had two minutes of wild fantasy in his brain before he melted down—three thirty, Charli! Do you know the damage we could have done to each other in that time?”

  “Between one and three thirty?” Charli grinned at her and let her honest admiration and enjoyment of how well they had already implemented and could further deploy their more carnal skill sets on each other show in her smile. “Not as much as we could have between one and five.” She was relatively certain Anna didn’t know what had happened after she’d left the club. She’d made sure to leave a few minutes after Kevin had gone ahead to hail a cab.

  Charli sighed to herself, frustrated and tired from the dissatisfaction of the night, and the breach—no, it was the total collapse—of the system, the system she was responsible for. She checked over her shoulder, the dark strand of hair that normally fell to her chin safely tucked behind her ear, and reassured herself with the sight of the well-carved long-board she’d brought from their former offices in the Puck building farther downtown Manhattan, right on the edge of the East Village.

  Now they were firmly ensconced in midtown, on Fifty-first Street and Park Avenue, the literal heart of some of the most expensive real estate globally. The dot-commers might have gone corporate, but Whitestone had promised to let them maintain their internal culture, or at least some of it, Charli mentally amended. They used to wear jeans and T-shirts—no slogan too outrageous or taboo so long as they didn’t display hate speech of any sort—have late-night pizza and Chinese food with the team, summer Friday cocktail hours that started at three p.m., and company-wide surfing trips. Now they had suites and suits, although khakis and chinos were the uniform for late-night and holiday hours. They were allowed to play whatever music they preferred on quiet, polite headphones, instead of blasting the latest find of someone’s favorite band over the PA system. Oh, and they were encouraged to decorate their offices and cubicles comfortably.

  Charli had gained an office, a new wardrobe, a staff of approximately fifty, and an assistant. She’d lost the ability to sit late at night, in her favorite sweatshirt and jeans, music pumping and the ideas flowing, everything a puzzle to be solved, whether it was a snippet of code or designing an entire technical infrastructure.

  Gone too was the easy give and take between her and her team, the open door that meant she had a desk in the middle of the floor, easily visible and available. Instead, she now had functional groups that worked under a strict hierarchy, and everyone made appointments.

  There were two things Charli hadn’t given up: her friendship with Anna Pendleton and their mutual wave addiction. That board, the one that leaned on the wall behind her, the board that was now a beautiful wood sculpture since it had been cracked after a nasty run-in with a rude surfer who’d dropped in on her wave, had been custom made by a local Long Island crafter. It had been her first such purchase for herself, and though she preferred body surfing to board, she loved the totem that it was. It had been a long enough winter, and a new season was upon them. “We still on for tomorrow?” Charli asked, even though she knew the answer.

  “Oh, please.” Anna rolled her eyes and put the stack of papers down. “Like anything could stop that. Although”—she pointed to a line on the top sheet before her as she picked the stack up again—“I could see where this might cause a delay.”

  Charli didn’t even glance at the page. “You caught that, too?” She watched as Anna studied the ID. There were times Anna surprised her. She’d been brought into the group when they’d first landed the contract with Whitestone to integrate Whitestone’s system to the Fed system, make it functional internally for corporate needs, externally for clients. And what they needed for their team, they got: Anna Pendleton, the graphical user interface—GUI—guru. Most GUI designers were just that, designers who knew nothing about code, but Anna was different. She knew- the code, understood the concepts that drove it so well, she’d pitch in with the team in emergencies and during crunch times. Added to that, her ability to translate from geek to normalspeak with clients was so fluid that it had seemed natural for her to be promoted to co-architect, then design team lead, on par with Charli. But because Charli’s focus was purely technical and structural, while Anna’s was all about interface, both technical and client-wise, she found that she sometimes forgot that Anna actually had superb coding skills.

  There were moments Charli wondered what the real deal was with Anna, for there were a few other things, too, things about the way she stood sometimes, or the way she held her hands, that reminded Charli of her brother, a marine engineer and career Navy officer. That occasional glimpse in and of itself made her wonder on occasion, because it was rare in her experience that someone had those mannerisms without that background—and nothing like that was revealed in the background search.

  Anna’s records had been thoroughly investigated by every means available before she’d joined. Professionally, it was standard operating procedure, both for security and research reasons, but personally and individually there was curiosity, too.

  While not officially encouraged, it was unofficially expected. After all, their group was essentially made up of hackers, and finding information was what they did for fun. They surfed as much electronically, digitally, as they did the ocean, perhaps even more, searching for and finding intelligence and news that floated through the electric ether like so much flotsam and jetsam. They were capable of and enjoyed performing investigations that were thorough and rigorous despite their apparent informality, and generally speaking, discovered much more information than those who investigated through more traditional channels.

  Anna had turned out to be almost surprisingly clean, though; no military history, no high school jock shots, no college club pix, just one mention of a white paper written a few years ago, Communications as Metrics, but otherwise, nothing out of the ordinary—at all.

  On the one hand, for people who worked in the field, that was normal: most tried like hell to ensure none of their personal information could be found, but on the other, it was almost as if—

  “It does look like a normal call to the host,” Anna said, interrupting Charli’s thoughts, “but the address looks like a host change—do you think it was a scramble, or a scrub?”

  Charli stretched as she stood and considered her response. A scramble meant that the sending IDs had merely been disguised, scrambled to read as something else, either misdirection or utter nonsense, as a way to hide the sender and the source. But a scrub…a scrub indicated an executable piece of code had been injected to the system that would do whatever it had to do, then erase its tracks and itself.

  That the entire system had collapsed told her. “Both, I think. Whoever did it was super sharp—knew the system well enough to tunnel in, then collapse behind. I think they dropped in an executable with a self-erase. Had we not frozen and isolated systems, we wouldn’t even have found it.”

  She walked over and ran a hand over the outline of her board, reassured by the wood under her hand and the faint smell of salt and wax that still clung to it. The truth was that had an active and live pair of eyes not been watching, the whole event would have simply become a blip, an incident automatically noted on the server log only as a momentary failure.

  It had been instinct, a hunch she’d played when she’d asked Franko to do it. Sh
e’d told no one else, not wanting to tip her hand on the off chance that it had been an inside job. And if it had been Franko, she reasoned, the event might not have happened at all. As it was, her gamble had so far paid off, for both of them. She had evidence of an event and so long as Franko told no one she had ordered his night watch, it looked good for him, too, added to his cred as capable. Job grooming, she mentally repeated, it’s all about job grooming.

  “Something came in, Anna, and it looks like something went out, because there are calls at the gate, and thanks to the dinosaur servers from this”—and she waved to indicate the building they were in—“this acquisition, there’s no telling where they hit in the system, or what they went out with.”

  She didn’t notice the sharp look Anna gave her or that she’d crossed the carpet to stand behind her.

  “What about destination addresses?”

  “Unknown—the collapse wiped them,” Charli answered. It was funny, she thought as she straightened and turned to face the voice that had sounded almost on her neck, how Anna always managed to move so silently. “And again, no redundancy along those routes, so between that and the system reset, without that”—she pointed at the pages Anna held—“I’ve got nothing. I’m waiting for Cooper to bring the snapshot for the server feeding the Fedwire, and I sent Franko home—he’d already put in twelve hours before the clusterfuck.”

  The rest of the team, or rather the three separate groups ranging from five to fifteen members, each performing a separate yet distinctly important function, Charli had fine-tooth combing through their codes, checking for compromises, for the tiniest of mistakes in syntax, for the insertion of code snippets or even just degrades over time that might possibly become larger issues.

  Anna nodded in agreement. “I’ve got my team checking their end of it,” she told her as she handed the pages she’d examined back. “They’re checking for loopholes in the interface. Oh hey,” she continued, her tone lightening considerably, “is Coop still holed up in the server room by himself?”

  Charli laughed and nodded. “Yeah. It’s the scented soap and deodorant thing—he still won’t use any.”

  “Yeah, Coop’s a real high-tech hippie,” Anna agreed. “The only thing that’s missing is—”

  “The only thing that’s missing is taking the farm completely off the grid,” a laconic voice said behind them, “and I’m having a self-contained solar-powered electrical unit installed.”

  Both women turned and faced the lanky frame that stood in the doorway, a folder undoubtedly containing the activity readout Charli had asked for with a still-steaming cup of coffee in his left hand—and everyone knew he took it black. A bit over six feet and reed thin, Ben Cooper with his dark ponytail and thick beard still had the appearance of a man who could talk or fight, though both Anna and Charli knew well it was the verbal, political arguments, delivered with defiant and defensive vehemence that he preferred, and the ones everyone else preferred to steer clear of. He was a self-admitted misanthrope; his skill set made his job perfect for him. It left him alone.

  “Well, lucky for us that you’re still building your cabin out.” Charli grinned at him. The entire original crew had been treated to tales, specs, and pictures of the property Cooper had bought in celebration of the bonuses they’d all received during the takeover, the market-share value of the stock they’d all been gifted with by the original dot-com. “You’re the only one besides me capable of handling these dinosaur servers.”

  “What about the pretty-boy interview this morning, Zero Boy or whatever?” Ben asked with a slight lift of his brow and a disparaging twist to his mouth.

  “Yeah, what about him?” Anna turned and asked her brightly, and Charli caught the quickest of hidden smirks.

  Charlie rewarded it with a brief sidelong glance, although she didn’t blame Anna for tweaking her just the slightest bit. And she knew it wouldn’t be taken any further than that.

  She settled the papers back on her desk with one hand as she reached for the new readout she wanted to review with the other. “Nguyen’s got skills, but he’s not a server admin. So no worries, dude, you’ve got your chicken coop all to yourself for now,” she answered. “He’ll join the new script team in two weeks.”

  She opened the folder and began to flip through the pages, the readouts all in seeming order at first glance. “Did you catch a look at—holy shit! Look at that encryption!” she said almost to herself. “Contained in the firewall and looking too—ah fuck!” She jumped away just in time to avoid the splash of coffee that missed her but managed to soak the report she’d just put down.

  “Dude—so sorry!” Cooper apologized as he tried to snatch back what remained of the cup, managing to instead dump the rest of it on the new report, and on Charli.

  “Shit!” she exclaimed again as the fluid continued to find its lowest level and she leapt to quickly rescue her hard drive.

  “Can you reproduce those?” Anna asked quietly as they mopped up the mess.

  Charli shook her head with disgust as she dumped what was left of the illegible mess in the metal mesh waste basket. “Can’t,” she answered shortly. “The kick-over wiped everything.” They were screen shots done as IDs and IPs hit in and out, and they couldn’t be duplicated. Fuck. This was a mess, and it was her responsibility. If she couldn’t find out where things had gone or where they’d come from, she could at least find out what they did or didn’t do, to a degree. Inside, she thought, that encryption call was from the inside. The timing is too right…fuck.

  There were only a handful of ways that could happen, some perhaps innocuous, but it was the timing, that was what alarmed her, that pointed to only one motive. She needed to know. Charli strode to the door and stuck her head past the frame. What she was about to do would override the chain of command, but there was no help for it. She’d been stymied the last time, she wouldn’t be this time.

  “Laura?” she called to the redheaded young woman who was managing a conversation while compiling the presentation Charli would give next Tuesday, the one that again called for the remodel of their more important gateways. “Get me Eric.”

  Laura put her call on hold and swiveled around, shock writ large in her slate blue eyes. “Are you serious?”

  Eric Lundenman was the CFO, the driving force behind Whitestone’s climb from small but aggressive boutique hedge fund manager, with an office in New York and another in San Francisco, to financial baby giant with a corporate presence in every major financial city including London, Singapore, and Tokyo. The company was the largest manager of its kind, handling assets of over thirty billion thanks, in no small part, to the rapid acquisition of other smaller, well-heeled firms.

  Tall, charismatic, and sporting a thick white shock of hair, Eric was also the most influential man on the board of directors, and prone to occasional flares of temper that were already the stuff of legend. In fact, the office workers had a saying about him: when Eric gets mad, get out of the way.

  Fits and flair aside, his management style meant he generally preferred to let divisions run themselves so he could maintain his focus on Whitestone’s continued growth, leaving him free to direct and develop the future heading of the company he nurtured.

  It had been Eric’s idea to bring the dot-commers in as a full division once technical needs had outgrown the feasibility of having outside contractors. It made pragmatic sense: the tech group knew their systems, how to run them, how to integrate them, better than any new group could be trained to do, since they had created them. Besides, it had been their innovative technology that had given Whitestone the earning edge over the competition, drawing new clients and investors, and it was the continued efforts of the now-absorbed group that kept Whitestone ahead of the game.

  As one of the heads of that group, and, most critically, as the person responsible for creating the program that kept Whitestone so much more than solvent, Charli knew she had a special leverage. Even with a failure of the system, even if it had been compl
ete and irreparable, Charli herself was an asset. She could walk out of Whitestone at any point she chose and any other corporation would be happy to have her, and pay a premium for her services as well.

  Eric knew that. Let the rest of the teams be as afraid of Eric as they wanted to be, Charli frankly didn’t care. Hell, if he fired her, she’d spend a week or two surfing—she could take a month, more if she wanted, then walk into a new position anywhere. That was if she didn’t decide to go mercenary as a consultant, selling her skills to the highest bidder or the project she found most intriguing, or just simply run her own operation. There were days she wondered why she didn’t do just that.

  But she wasn’t doing any of that at the moment, and she wasn’t one to shirk her responsibilities. If Charli could present her concerns to Eric before the presentation on Tuesday, she’d have a valuable ally. She didn’t consider it possible that he might not listen or take her concerns seriously; after all, she was a VP-Ops for a very good reason. What she wasn’t certain of was whether or not he’d authorize the expansion of her investigation, beyond merely a review of code, to the activities of each and every single account Whitestone held. If, as she suspected she would, she found something, she’d walk into the meeting with his backing and gain the rest of the Board’s as well.

  “Yes. I want the first meeting Monday morning. Thanks, Laura,” Charli answered and ducked back into her office.

  “Christ, Charli, what are you doing?” Cooper asked in an unmistakably anxious tone as she crossed the office and began to pack her things.

  “Don’t you think that it’s beyond coincidental that both times we’re hit it’s when quarterly dividends are being distributed?” she said finally, the question rhetorical as she straightened and gazed first at Anna, who nodded in agreement, then at Cooper, who stared at the fresh coffee stain on the rug as he shook his head.