A Game of Chance

by Emma Shortt

  “And was there any evidence?” she asked, the words still croaky. Dammit!

  “No.”

  “The code that you had last night…”

  “Given to me by my client.”

  “I’d love to see the whole script,” Meg said.

  Chance’s smile widened. He uncrossed his arms before taking a step forward. “You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.”

  Meg closed her eyes. She simply had to. Chance was right in front of her. She could smell whatever scent it was that he wore. She could feel the heat coming off him. And there was no denying it now, if there ever had been. Meg was ridiculously attracted to him. It was almost like an actual, physical thing, this attraction. It arced and sizzled between them, and Meg did not doubt that Chance could feel it. It would be impossible for him not to.

  She snapped her eyes open. Chance was looking straight at her. Those eyes…she swallowed.

  “Blue?”

  And that damn nickname.

  “Is that what your nerd’s working on?” she said quickly. “Intrusive code? Malicious code?”

  “I don’t think so,” Chance replied. “It’s a bit beyond me, but he said it was something to do with the traveling salesman problem.”

  Meg gasped. Her own proposal, the one that she had shared with X-Tech, flashed through her mind. She didn’t hesitate. She left the kitchen and went straight across to her desk. Her favorite machine wasn’t there—Kate was using it to hack Chance’s site—but she had a less favorite in her desk drawer. She pulled it out, booted it up, found the program she wanted, and stabbed a finger at the screen.

  “Look, do you see that?”

  Chance had followed her. Of course, he had. He leaned on the desk. The electric-blue flowers were right next to his hand. Where had he gotten the damn things from? And why was Meg so ridiculously touched by the gesture?

  “Yes, but I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

  “Of course, you don’t, no one does,” she snapped and not least because she had to focus! “Not unless they’d spent four long years with Dr. Andrews, obsessively studying the behavior of ants.” She shook her head. The beehive wobbled. “And I really do mean obsessively.”

  “You lost me.”

  “She was my supervisor.”

  “Supervisor?”

  “For my PhD,” Meg said.

  Chance shifted slightly so that he was looking across at her. The smile was no longer there. Instead, he looked…intense. It reminded Meg of the night before. She almost shivered.

  “So, you’re Dr. Marlowe?” he eventually asked.

  “Surely, that came up in your research?”

  “I clearly didn’t dig deep enough,” he said. “It’s cute.”

  “Cute? Seriously? A girl tells a guy she’s a doctor and he says ‘cute.’ Are we in the fifties?”

  Chance waved her words away. “I meant about the ants. You being an ant doctor. A zoologist.”

  “I’m not an ant doctor,” Meg snapped. “And it’s entomologist.”

  “We’re drifting off topic.”

  “No shit, Sherlock.” She turned back to the screen. “My point is, that this code, the math it is built on, it’s based on the behavior of ants, and unless there’s someone else out there who was inspired by classic Dr. Who and then spent four years studying the little fuckers, they would not have been able to write this.”

  “Classic Dr. Who?”

  “Yeah, the first doctor, and the episode was called ‘The Web Planet.’ It had giant ants, and that was when I knew that there was far more to the ant colony optimization algorithm than I had realized, than anyone had realized.”

  “It had giant butterflies, too.”

  How could she not turn back to look at him then? “You’re a Whovonian?”

  “And I’m lost again…”

  Meg let out a shaky breath. It was bad enough that he was beyond attractive. Bad enough that he was a PI, what with her weakness and all, but if he’d been a geek, too? That really would have been the last straw.

  “Will you stop saying that already,” she said quickly. “The point is, you don’t need to know the specifics; you won’t understand them. But this little bit of code, once I develop it a little more, will change the world.”

  “That’s a hell of a claim.”

  “You’re not the first to tell me that.” Meg snapped the laptop shut. “But the real-world applications…” She sighed. “There are so many of them. Artificial intelligence, game theory, economics even. But, most importantly of all, this code would break almost every cryptosystem there is.”

  “Cryptosystem?”

  “The systems that keep data safe.”

  Chance shot her a look. “You don’t strike me as the type of person who would want to do that.”

  Meg shot him a look right back. “And what sort of person do I strike you as?”

  He shrugged. “The kind that would keep people’s data safe.”

  Meg’s heart clenched, because she was that kind of person, or at least she’d always tried to be, and Chance saying as much was a huge nerd-level compliment. Damn him!

  “Most cryptosystems are flawed,” she said after a moment, and her voice was suddenly all croaky again. “This would let us replace them with something better, something safer.” She ran her fingers along the laptop. “It’s so complex though, so intricate, and I know I’m not quite there yet. That I need a little help, a little guidance. And I know where I want that guidance from. I want Jack Richards.”

  Chance shot up from the desk. “Jack Richards?”

  “The CEO,” Meg said, even as she took a step back, taking her laptop with her. “He’s a genius. He’s why everyone knows about X-Tech competitions. Why everyone wants to be invited to one. To win one. It’s all about him.”

  “I’m sure X-Tech is about more than one man,” Chance said.

  Meg held her laptop against her chest. She swore she could feel her heart beating in time with the little fans on the edge of the machine. She let out a shaky breath. “You’re not getting this. For a mathematician? For a developer? For a nerd? Working with Jack Richards would be like finding your own, personal stargate. It opens the door to millions of worlds. Of course, I entered the competition. It never occurred to me not to. And this one was a little different than the usual. It was for local developers only. I wasn’t the only one. A whole bunch of us got involved. We pitched our ideas.” She held the laptop tighter. “It happened there. I’m sure of it. It had to have happened there. Our security is too good for them to have broken through.”

  “They stole the ants?” Chance asked.

  And another shaky breath. “Yes.”

  “If you really believe that, then we have to prove it.”

  “And how do you suggest we do that?” Meg asked.

  Chance smiled once more. “I have a plan.”

  Chapter Seven

  When Chance got back home that afternoon he didn’t do the many, many things that he should have done. He didn’t head to his office and look at his whiteboard—a board that showed the entire chronology of what he had termed “the X-Tech fuck-up.” He didn’t review the projects that had first aroused his suspicions. He didn’t look through the tweaked algorithms, some of which bordered on genius, that his developers couldn’t quite explain. He didn’t even look through the profiles that he’d created for the various suspects both within and outside his company. Instead, he went straight into his gym and spent the next two hours on a punishing workout.

  Did he think about the X-Tech fuck-up as he cycled for miles and then hit the treadmill for a few miles more? Did he think about how everything that he had built, everything that had defined him for the first decade of his life was on the line? No, he didn’t, he thought about her. About Blue.

  But then, even as sweat dripped down his body, even as he cranked up the numbers on the treadmill to the point where his muscles screamed, he didn’t even know why he was surprised. He’d been thinking about her n
onstop since the moment he’d stood there in Gabe’s office, willing his program to run, willing it to find something, anything that might explain the irregularities in his company, and realized that someone was standing in the doorway.

  Who had he expected? An actual cleaner? Another member of his staff? Gabe himself? A dozen explanations had readied themselves, but none had been needed because she wasn’t any of those things. She was an intruder. A very pretty intruder. And she might just be the key to cracking this case wide open.

  Her image swam in Chance’s mind as he left the gym and stepped into the shower room. He tried to dislodge it, but it refused to be removed. She was right there as the hot spray beat down on his tired muscles. He couldn’t help but think about the way her electric-blue hair sparkled under the light, the way her eyes flashed when she was angry, how her plump lips moved as she spoke.

  And, of course, he thought about her body. How could he not? Meg was like something out of one of the video games or comic books that he had grown up with. As a bonafide nerd in every possible way, those were the only women Chance had gotten close to as a teenager and as a young man, too, if he was honest. Meg was just like one of them. The way she dressed, the way she wore her hair, even the way she behaved. She was literally one of Chance’s young adult fantasies come to life.

  He wanted her.

  How could he possibly deny it?

  He was pretty sure she wanted him, too.

  And that was an issue. A big issue.

  He snapped his eyes open, ignoring the persistent ache of his cock, and stepped out of the shower. Body still damp, he dragged on sweatpants and a tee before finally making his way through to his office. Long ago, Chance had rigged the whole thing up so that it responded to his commands. One click of his fingers and all the tech came to life, the computer that sat at his desk—the very first one that he had built himself—surrounded by dozens of screens. The extra screens that sat on the wall opposite, running various muted television channels and feeds direct from the X-Tech data center. And the huge whiteboard that showed the entire depressing chronology of the X-Tech fuck-up.

  With thoughts of Blue still prominent in his mind, Chance stood in front of it, looking, as always, at the very first point where, so far as he could tell, the problem had started. It was a mathematics puzzle, because despite calling themselves a software company, mathematics was a huge part of what X-Tech actually did. It had to be. The line between math and computer science didn’t really exist anymore, if it ever had, and the answers to almost every problem in the world were written somewhere in numbers, even if those numbers had yet to be discovered. X-Tech had a whole department whose focus was on solving the most difficult mathematical puzzles in the world. Chance called those problem the “Golden Group.”

  This team, the first team on his chronology, was working on the Reimann Hypothesis, a puzzle considered to be the most challenging of all mathematical problems in the world. Chance knew that because he’d solved it when he was twenty-six years old. Solved it and hidden it. Chance’s hard drive was full of mathematics and code that was hidden. These were things that would change the world. Things that, if he had his way, the world would never know about.

  The Reimann team hadn’t solved the puzzle. They hadn’t even come close. No one had ever gotten close, but a post on an obscure tech forum—one Chance had subsequently deleted—had made him take a second look at the work his team was doing. Once he had, he’d realized that there had been a leap in their understanding of a certain aspect of the puzzle. And yet, there had been no obvious point where that leap had come from. He’d spoken to the head of the team, tried to get some thoughts from her, but she wasn’t quite sure, either. It was then that Chance had started to wonder if that leap hadn’t come from somewhere else…someone else.

  Panicked at the thought of what might be happening, Chance had spent weeks looking through every tech forum, every obscure post, every project, every puzzle, every advance in X-Tech, and he’d started to see a pattern. Most worryingly of all, those leaps were all in the projects and puzzles where Chance had spent years ensuring that there wouldn’t be any leaps. They were in the Golden Group.

  And they weren’t internal. It didn’t take him long to discover that. They weren’t coming from his staff. They were coming from elsewhere. Being taken from elsewhere. Bit by bit, piece by piece, someone was bringing in the work of others to X-Tech.

  Stealing that work.

  There was no other explanation.

  And it had to stop.

  He pressed his fingers to a point on the whiteboard where the Reimann Hypothesis was written. Yes, in his mind it had all started then, though Chance wasn’t entirely sure that was when it had actually started, because, and though the media might not know it, though the nerd world remained blissfully unaware, Chance had long since stepped away from not only the direct management of the company but of the development team.

  Sure, he still went into the office, he still looked over the new developments and the new staffing appointments, but Chance was the CEO of X-Tech in little more than name. That had been a purposeful choice on his part. He had no board to oust him. No shareholders to make demands. Chance’s company was his and his alone…and he was so fucking sick of the responsibility of it.

  He ran a hand over his face. His beard was still damp. The damn thing itched. Not for the first time, Chance wished he could take a razor to it. But that was more impossible than ever now. The beard was surely what had stopped Meg and her friend from recognizing him. Despite the weight he had put on, despite the muscle that he had built, Chance was pretty sure that if he grew his curly hair, shaved off his beard, and shrugged into his gray sweater, Meg would soon realize that he was Jack Richards. The man she wanted.

  The genius.

  The fraud.

  He shook his head even as he stepped away from the whiteboard and around to his desk. A picture of Blue looked back at him from the smallest monitor. Chance had found it late last night on an obscure blog dedicated to the TV series Magnum PI. The picture was a few years old, Meg’s hair was pink rather than blue, and she was angular in a way that suggested the beauty that had since blossomed.

  It was Meg’s blog. One of several weirdly specific blogs that she had kept during her college years. Apart from her GitHub account, they were the only “normal” social media footprints he’d found for her. Like him, she didn’t have Facebook or Twitter. Instagram or Pinterest. Didn’t matter. The blogs, coupled with his requests for information from the nerd world, had been enough for Chance to track her down to other social media sites, ones the public didn’t know about, ones buried deep in the dark web. She went by many aliases, many user names, but it didn’t take Chance long to pick up enough information that he had a pretty decent profile of the woman who had quickly become a necessary piece in the jigsaw puzzle that was the X-Tech fuck-up.

  Had Chance thought about simply being honest with her? Of course, he had. He’d given it serious and deep thought. But it was too soon. He didn’t know enough about the sort of person she was. And there was too much on the line. It wasn’t even about the company and the thousands of jobs that it had helped to create. It wasn’t about the money, either. Chance had enough of that to last him several lifetimes, and he had always paid his employees very well. It was about the advances, the changes that X-Tech had made to the world, the changes they might still make. They had to be very careful about that. He had to be very careful about it. And so, Chance had approached his plan with only one thought in mind. How could he get Blue on his side and find out what evidence she had?

  A private investigator…the Magnum PI blog suggested that Blue would respond well to that.

  A request for help in cracking the case…what he’d already discovered about her personality suggested it would be impossible for her to resist.

  Flowers to match her hair…she’d mentioned many years ago on a blog dedicated to Harlequin Mills and Boon books that it was one of the most romantic
gestures any man could make.

  And charm. She liked charm. Despite his precarious start with members of the opposite sex, Chance had learned charm.

  He sat down at his desk, eyes locked on Blue’s picture. She was so damn pretty. Why hadn’t he realized that last night? Why hadn’t he realized how attracted to her he would be? How she would make his heart beat in a way that he couldn’t remember it ever doing before? How she would make his chest tighten with simply a glance? How she would make him hard with just a look?

  Well, he realized it now, and so the issue. He’d already lied to her. He was actively manipulating her. Deceiving her even. And her work—work that fell firmly into the Golden Group, work that Chance would put a stop to if he had his way…

  He shook his head. With all that between them, how could he possibly act on the attraction that had sprung up between them?

  He couldn’t.

  That much was obvious, too.

  “It’s a complete fucking mess,” he muttered as he leaned forward and logged into the company servers.

  His mind racing, Chance activated a search program to return all records on recent X-Tech competitions. He was in no way surprised to find that there was no record of a competition being held in the last twelve months or of any invitations sent out to local developers. Whoever had organized the competition Meg had attended, they hadn’t been from his company. Or, if they were, they hadn’t left any record trail behind.

  They never left record trails. Chance had spent weeks combing every inch of their data center, and all of their local files, looking for evidence of wrongdoing. It was sheer desperation that had led him to Gabe’s office to search his head developer’s personal drive. The architecture of X-Tech was such that while Chance had access to every other part of X-Tech, personal drives could only be accessed by the account holders. Chance had to make an effort to hack into them. It was an effort he was going to have to replicate for every other member of the senior management team. Wouldn’t that be fun?

  Chance leaned back in his chair, eyes narrowed on the screen where Blue continued to look back at him in all her pink-haired glory. After a moment, and mostly because he didn’t know what else to do, he found himself clicking through to the KIT website. Was their security really too tight for anyone to get in? Chance decided to test that claim. A few dozen keystrokes later, and he sat back and let out an admiring sigh. He couldn’t remember the last time it had taken him this long to find a back door into a site. Kate and Meg should be working at X-Tech. They were that good.