Kant let out a sigh. “Remember the days when we did the heavy lifting?”
“Yeah.” Bubba patted his wheelchair. “I remember them every damn day, unfortunately.”
* * * *
Dr. Ivan Ivlonsky had long rued the day he decided to major in immunology research in college.
Fucking Gina.
He’d almost gone into cancer research, except for a girl in one of his labs who’d started flirting with him. She wanted to study immunology, so he’d changed his focus of study.
At the time, he thought that’s what men were supposed to do, court cute girls. At least, that’s what Russian men did.
Four years later, she was out of the picture and he was pretty much stuck where he was.
Then the years passed and he saw a chance to actually make some damn money—and a positive impact—with the degree he resented.
Which got him stuck in fucking North Korea.
He wondered where Gina was today. If she’d ever married, had children.
If she was even still alive.
If his actions had indirectly caused her death, the deaths of her family.
Of his family.
Today he sat in the shade of a building, his surgical mask on against not just the threat of a virus, or protection from the threat of being recognized, but mainly against the dust blowing through the streets of Dakar, Senegal. The western African country hadn’t been completely shut down by Kite yet, even though it was one of the larger cities still left untouched by the virus on that part of the continent.
Ivlonsky personally attributed it to their military’s vicious eradication of anyone appearing the slightest bit ill, whether they tested blue or not for the virus.
Yet another reason he didn’t want to be there.
There was a flight out the next morning to Madrid, and he planned to be on it, with or without Dr. Max Copper.
Hopefully with.
Ivan had run across his colleague’s trail three weeks earlier, tracking his electronic footprints down to this shitstain of a city just yesterday. Ivan was perfectly convinced that the other five had legitimately found safety. Tracking their online progress both through the private server and now through the CDC’s public website detailing their progress, there was no other explanation.
Julie Chu was there. She was the most skittish of any of them. If she came in, then dammit, they should, too. At least they’d be safe while trying to figure this out instead of stuck somewhere.
Maybe they could avoid war criminal charges.
After an hour, he glimpsed a shock of blond hair so light it was nearly white, a man exiting a building just down the block.
Ivan jumped to his feet, shouldered his bag, and hurried after him. His heart pounded as he worked his way through the crowd and up behind the man.
Yes, he knew. It had to be him.
And he was alone.
Ivan timed it so that at the next break in the buildings, he came up behind Max, hooked an arm through his, and jerked him nearly off his feet into the alleyway.
Max started to fight him at first, until he got a look at who had him.
Over the top of his surgical mask, his gorgeous blue eyes widened in shock. He tugged down his mask. “Ivan?” he whispered. “I thought you died on that ferry!” He threw his arms around Ivan in a death grip that Ivan was only too happy to return.
“Not quite.”
“You…I thought you were dead!” He looked up and tried to slap Ivan, but Ivan smiled as he caught the man’s hand and pulled it to his chest.
“Foreplay? Out here in the street? Tsk.”
Max engulfed him in another hug. “You son of a bitch, I thought you died!”
Ivan hugged him, glancing around before quickly pressing a kiss to the top of the younger man’s head. “Sorry, love. I couldn’t risk reaching out to you. I got on a rescue boat, but then they took us back to Istanbul. Which was already getting overrun by Kiters and refugees. I left on foot rather than wait for another ferry.”
“I waited for you for two weeks in Greece,” he said, his voice muffled against Ivan’s shirt. “I nearly killed myself.”
They’d split up in Turkey two months earlier, with plans to reunite in Greece, not wanting to be caught together and afraid someone might have been on their trail. Ivan had a friend in Montenegro, and his plan had been to work their way there from Greece and hide out. Either to stay, or to move on from there, but to gain some breathing room, at least.
And then the ferry Ivan had been on went down in rough seas, killing hundreds. He’d been lucky to make it into a lifeboat.
“We need to go in,” Ivan said, stepping back and pulling Max’s face mask up into place.
“We can go back to my room, and—”
“In. I know you saw the data. I’ve seen you on the server.” Not even their fellow captives had known about their relationship. It’d terrified the men to think the North Koreans could have found out and used either man against the other to ensure their “work ethic.”
They’d had one hellaciously hot night in South Korea to celebrate their escape before they’d bolted from the country, and they had been on the run ever since. Plenty of places they’d had to pretend to be just friends in public, fearing people might either recognize them…or their true relationship might bring them unwanted local attention of the bad kind. At least they’d been together.
Until their forced separation.
Max stared up at him with those damned gorgeous blue eyes that turned Ivan’s crank every time. At forty-five, the man didn’t look it. He appeared to be at least ten years younger. His own handsome little Dutch boy.
“What if they…” Max swallowed and Ivan tried not to picture him in a more intimate setting. “What if they separate us?”
“I don’t think they will.” He shrugged, glancing around again before touching his forehead to Max’s, the other man five inches shorter than Ivan’s own six two. “Let them try to separate me from you again. I’ll take a few of them out with me in the process.”
Max finally nodded.
“Do you have things in your room?”
“Yeah.”
“Go get them. I’ll follow you and wait outside, then you follow me to the airport.”
“Airport?”
“We’re flying to Madrid. We get there, we can spend the night there in a sterile waiting area. From Madrid, we fly out to Havana.”
“What? Why?”
“Because that’s how Julie and Raj did it,” Ivan said. “They made contact from Havana. Why fuck with what’s already proven successful?”
Chapter Ten
By Monday, Shasta was still trying to get used to her new glasses. It’d been so long since she’d had a new prescription, and this one was so much different than her last one, that she was struggling to deal with the bifocals. It was also giving her headaches.
Lou stopped by her desk with a cup of what was, admittedly, good coffee. “You look like you could use this,” he said.
He’d confided in her that Bailey and Waxler had both received write-ups in their personnel folders, written warnings that could be used, if they pulled another disappearing act, to fire them without the mandatory wait time.
So far, the two men had stuck to their new schedules and were productive as hell.
“Thanks.” She sipped it. “That is much better coffee. What’s the catch?”
He smiled, dragging over a chair to sit next to her. With their office so understaffed, at least they didn’t need to be on top of each other in the room. She was in the front left corner with no one in any of the empty stations around her.
“I leaned on the county administrator again over the weekend and told him that, if he didn’t give a little, he was going to find Houston’s streets locked down tighter than the damn jail. That there might be some sudden problems with signal light timing during rush hours, turning a twenty-minute commute into a two-hour one. Because I have people working their asses off, but I’m understaffed and that h
e’d better find some money for raises and more personnel.”
She leaned back in her chair and took another sip of coffee. “You did, huh?”
“Yeah. He looked a little green when I said that. I asked him what he’d do if everyone in the department walked at the same time and told the press it was due to the hours, which are violations of pretty much every labor law out there. We’re critical, but it’s not like we’re first responders or linemen where they can get away with that kind of bullshit. I told him everyone in the county, including the county commission, would be looking at him for answers.”
“And?”
“Expect a pay raise this week. Not much, only two hundred dollars, but everyone’s getting a bump.”
Her heart raced. “Seriously?” That would be about eight hundred a month.
Which would, even without Stu’s contributions to the household finances, finally give them some breathing room.
“Seriously. I pointed out that he was in a pretty damn fancy office and drove a really nice county car to be saying there wasn’t money that could be squeezed out somewhere.”
“Extortion. I like it. This is a new side to you, Lou.”
He smiled, although she read the exhaustion behind it. “I wasn’t expecting it from me, either. But dammit, we’re worth it.”
“If you weren’t gay, I’d be doing you on your desk right now.” She smiled.
He laughed. “If I weren’t gay, I’d take you up on it.” He indicated her glasses. “Still bothering you?”
“My eyes will adjust. At least I can see the damn screens again.”
“I noticed you cranked the zoom back down.”
“Yeah.”
“So… Any changes there?”
She knew what he meant. “Every time I’ve seen him, he’s…well…” She pointed at John Bailey, who was currently over at his work station on the far side of the room. That morning, John had gone through and cleaned out some old code no one had wanted to take the time to touch for fear of borking the entire system.
And he’d done it in under an hour, acting almost like a bouncy puppy.
Without a single systems glitch when he was done.
Lou followed her gaze before turning back to her. He glanced around and leaned in, dropping his voice. “It’s really fucking creepy,” he said. “I mean, I’m glad they’re back in the saddle and working their asses off, but it’s like we got a couple of pod people in return. It’s…creepy,” he repeated.
She nodded. “Ditto.”
He sat back. “You hear anything—”
“Yeah. I’ll pass it along.”
He gave her a nod before standing and returning to his office.
As she sipped her decent coffee, she couldn’t help staring at Bailey. John Bailey had never done this much work, this quickly or this accurately, in the entire time she’d known him. He’d started working in the signal division about a year after her, and he’d been as slow as molasses ever since.
Do his own job? Yeah, he was a capable sys-ad.
Ask him to take on tasks outside the basic scope of his defined job?
Forget it.
She wasn’t even feeling threatened or jealous or anything like that.
Like Lou said, it was as if Bailey was…different. Changed.
Possessed.
She wished she weren’t so jaded, but it was hard not to be when it was patently obvious whatever Bailey and Waxler were taking was the same stuff Stu now took. In Stu’s case, she knew her brother’s condition before and after because she lived with him.
Bailey and Waxler wouldn’t say anything to her other than they’d found a new doctor. She had no idea what they were usually like outside of work, because she’d never socialized with either of them.
Another thing she found creepy—the wall of silence. She couldn’t even admit, and had warned Lou about it as well, that her brother had told her as much as he had.
If it was legit, she damn sure didn’t want to jinx it for Stu and the others.
But…
Every instinct in her body screamed something was wrong. And she needed to find out why.
* * * *
Shasta volunteered on the new schedule to work longer shifts for fewer days every week so that employees with families, or children—or lives outside of work—could actually get away at a reasonable time. Her current work shift would end on Tuesday evening, with her napping at work and grabbing a shower in the employee gym.
Lou went home late Monday evening, leaving her in charge as senior sys-ad. Bailey had also left, replaced by Paul Waxler.
Who was now a creepily eager-beaver twin of John Bailey.
It was just the two of them on the overnight shift tonight.
A little after midnight, her e-mail pinged with a notification.
The sender? Paul Waxler.
She turned and looked to see him sitting like a meerkat, staring over the tops of his monitors at her.
“Look what I’ve been working on!”
She couldn’t get over how…creepily eager he looked. “What is it?”
“Just look. It’s a phone app.”
He’d sent her both the compiled and the raw code for it.
“What is it supposed to do?” She had begun to suspect Paul didn’t even know how to do his own job, much less write code. She thought the only code monkeys left in the office were her and Lou.
He jumped up and pretty much skipped around the office to her workstation like a five-year-old on crack. “It’s an admin app for us for our phones! So we can remotely check and change the status and settings of signals and traffic cams!”
She leaned away from him and held up a hand. “Whoa. What?”
“It’s—”
“No, I heard you, but hello, that’s a really bad idea.”
“Why?”
“Um, hackers, for starters. There’s a damn good reason why we have the servers locked down tight. Can you imagine some teenager getting in there and getting his jollies playing Tetris with the county’s traffic signals?”
She hated that he now looked disappointed. “You don’t like it?” Damn, he sounded like a disappointed five-year-old.
“Paul, whether I like it or not is irrelevant. It’s illegal for unauthorized people to access the system. It’s a public safety issue. What if criminals could get in and turn off all the traffic cams?”
“It’s only meant for us. I wrote a login script for it.”
She was torn between wanting to smack him and wanting to apologize for pissing on his parade. “When did you even have time to write this?”
“This morning.”
“This…” She stared at him.
He nodded. “This morning.”
She had to get his morale back up. As creeped out as she was, she needed him working with her, not moping around. “I’ll…take a look at it. But promise me, promise, that you won’t let anyone else have it. That you won’t even tell anyone else about it. Okay?”
His smile returned and he eagerly nodded. The happy kid was back. “Okay!”
He practically skipped back to his station and slowly sank down into his desk chair, disappearing behind his bank of monitors.
Slowly shaking her head, she turned around and tried to focus on her own work.
The good news was, that time of night meant it was quiet. No storms, no accidents, no inclement weather. She pulled the app from her e-mail and loaded it onto her phone.
It even had disturbingly cheery graphics built into the UI, like a kids’ game.
Her sys-ad credentials logged her right in, and despite feeling very creeped out, she had to admit she was more than a little impressed. She could not only see the system statistics, access error messages, and check statuses of cameras and signals, but she could even change settings.
Paul went to use the restroom. While he was gone, Shasta used the app to override the traffic signal at the entrance to the government complex’s parking lot where her building was located. At that
time of day, it was automatically a blinking yellow.
She changed it to blinking red.
And then to green.
And back to blinking yellow, allowing it to resume its regular program.
Every change noted and reflected in the systems monitor window on her desk, and on the traffic camera that she pulled up on her workstation to watch.
Ditto the cameras. She was able to not only fully access the system, but any cameras that were adjustable, she could move and refocus them, turn them off and on, all from this tiny little app.
Holy. Shit.
Absolutely, the app could not be allowed to go public. The fact that it was a direct line into their servers scared the crap out of her. It was difficult enough to keep up with the black hats already, much less the white and grey hats who weren’t about causing trouble, just peeking around. The county’s IT department employed ten full-time security experts to handle the data center and all the systems.
Technically, this app shouldn’t even work since it wasn’t originating from within the data center servers.
She pulled up the raw code and started going through it. Not only had he written good, tight code, he’d documented the hell out of it in the process.
Holy. Fuck.
Meanwhile, Paul had returned from the restroom. She turned. “You wrote this…this morning? Or you mean you finished writing it this morning?”
Up popped the meerkat once more. “I wrote it this morning,” he said, smiling. “I had to watch the kids while my wife went to work. I sat there in the living room and wrote it.”
“Stupid question. When did you learn to code? I thought you didn’t know how to code?”
“Oh, I read a couple of books on programming yesterday. Some X+ and Java-Deuce.”
Her creep-o-meter amplified by a factor of twelventy billion.
“Yesterday?”
He nodded, still smiling. He obviously had no clue how much he was weirding her out right now.
She found herself slowly nodding in time with him. “O–okay. Good job.” She forced a sick-feeling smile. “We need to get back to work now.”
He grinned and slowly disappeared behind his monitors again.
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