James turned his body slightly to stare at his wife. "You're worth two billion dollars?"
Melody shrugged. "No. I think it's more now. Hal's really monitored my portfolio and helped it grow. Mostly mutual funds I think."
Kurt held up his hand. "So, you're saying that Johnson tried to get the information from Angela, but wasn't able to get it, so he decided he'd marry Melody and then take her money?"
James frowned then slowly nodded. "Likely. You and I both know the technology is conservatively worth a hundred times that. Assuming he thought he could steal what they'd backed up the day before and compile it, he likely hit the same brick wall my research and development team has hit for four years now. But if he had the funding of billions of dollars, he might have been able to, or thought he could have a chance of, breaking through."
"And then I broke up with him," Melody said. "And went on my honeymoon without him."
"He was waiting for you at the airport. Likely he intended to try to smooth things out, but ended up seeing you with me." James fisted his hands and surged to his feet. "Me. The husband of the woman he'd murdered. The president of the company developing that technology. Who knows what went through his mind when he saw us."
"You're right," Melody said. "When he saw us, he said, 'What are you doing with him?' I just assumed he meant with another man, but he specifically meant, what was I doing with you."
James slowly sat down again and took her hand. "What are the odds?"
Kurt shook his head as if to clear it. "This seems unfathomable."
"People have done worse for far less money." James sat forward and released Melody's hand to take his glasses off and rub his eyes.
"But why would he want to kill me?" Melody hated the way her breath hitched. "Why all of the roses and the notes? To what end?"
"Remember what he said?" Morgan asked. "He wanted you to be afraid. He fed off of that. But as for wanting to kill you, none of that makes sense to me."
Kurt rubbed his temple. "Now that we've worked it out, what are we going to do about it?"
Melody stood quickly, nervous energy fueling her pacing. "What can we do to make him come out? If he's actually been following me around for so long, I haven't seen him. I would have recognized him immediately."
"Not if he didn't want you to recognize him," Redman said. "He wasn't anticipating you being alive to be able to identify him in a picture, so he didn't disguise himself for the shooting. But, some people can change everything about themselves, including mannerisms and movements, accent, anything they need to change in order to not be recognized. Perhaps Johnson has that capability."
"He's right," Roberts said. "We need to take another look at that tape of the security camera outside of your dressing room. Now that we know who we're looking for, maybe you can point him out. If he's been disguising himself as a member of your crew, maybe that can be our chance to get him."
"But I know my crew. Don't you think that I would have been able to tell that a man I was engaged to be married to was on it?"
"Not if he was in a position you didn't deal with, like a lighting tech that only worked at certain times. There were some people going into your room that day whose names you didn't know."
"Was there ever a time that a rose appeared where you'd been that didn't require a good portion of your crew to be there?" Suarez asked.
Melody thought about it for a long time. "I've found them in my car, on my doorstep, and in my hotel room."
"What now?" Kurt asked.
"Now we catch him," Suarez said matter-of-factly.
Morgan felt like she had to do something, so she went to the kitchen and came out with a tray of cups and the coffeepot. Melody put an arm around her shoulders. "Thank you." She turned back to the group. "Maybe if I went somewhere by myself …"
"No," everyone said simultaneously.
Melody felt like pulling her hair out. "Look, I haven't been alone since I got here. I've had Peter or Hal or James or Kurt with me constantly. Now I have Jen. Maybe if he saw that I was alone for the first time, he would jump at the chance to do something, worried he wouldn't get another one. He's arrogant enough to want to take that risk."
"The last time he tried to do something, he used a high powered rifle at two hundred yards. That isn't a risk that any of us are willing to take," Roberts said.
"You don't have to be willing," she said, "I do."
"We could put her in a situation where he would have to get close to do something," Redman said.
"No," James passionately insisted. "First off, my wife isn't bait. Second, there isn't a situation you could put her in and guarantee her safety. This guy's been on the run for nearly half a decade and he's doing just fine. He's probably too smart to fall for a trap."
Melody got her purse and pulled out a notepad. She drowned out everyone's voices and started writing, slowly at first, then with more speed. Within minutes, she had several pages filled. She zoned back into the conversation.
"There has to be a way to bring him out without putting her in any kind of risk at all," Redman said.
Melody chewed her lip. "What if we stroked his ego?"
Roberts looked at her. "How?"
She shrugged. "Obviously, he's obsessed with me. If in fact he's in my crew, he probably hears me sing." She picked at a thread on her pants. "What if I wrote a song to him?"
"What kind of song?" Kurt asked.
She looked at her notebook, and read from it, "'Even with him I think of you, you're never far from my mind, you hurt me once and I may be a fool, but can we give it one more try?'" She thumbed through the pages. "There's more, and this is really rough. The words might change a little once they're put to music, but if he felt no threat from me, if he doesn't think we suspect him at all, he might try to approach me. That will keep us from having to use me as some sort of lure somewhere alone, and we won't have to relax our guard."
They all stared at her, but she misread their expressions and spoke quickly. "Everyone knows I write all my songs. Most people, especially those with me all the time, know that all my songs mean something personal to me in some way, and most of them are based on experiences I have." She threw her notebook on the table in defeat as they continued to stare at her. "I'm sorry. Continue the Machiavellian brainstorming session. It was just an idea."
James spoke first. "You are absolutely brilliant. Can you write the song tonight?"
Everyone started to speak at once, interrupting each other with ideas for lyrics. Melody smiled as she picked up her notebook. "I appreciate the ideas, but I can do it without your help. Go to the kitchen and get a snack." She sat down at the portable electric piano she took with her for travel and drowned them out again.
Hal arrived just as everyone went into the kitchen. When he asked her what was going on, she just pointed to the kitchen door and kept writing. A few minutes later, she heard him bellowing at the group, causing her to smile. Then it grew quiet again.
¯¯¯¯
AN hour later, Melody sang the song she'd hastily written to the group. It seemed a little off to her because it didn't mean anything to her. It carried the theme they wanted, a woman with another man who couldn't stop thinking about her past lover, willing to forgive the pain he'd caused her if he would just come back to her. The line she thought of as the real grabber, and hoped would get Richard's attention, went, "You never even gave me a chance to forgive, you just left me alone to cry."
She sat on the edge of the couch. "Yesterday I introduced My Love Song by saying that I wrote it after meeting James. I'm going to repair the damage and say that this song was written right after I wrote My Love Song. Hopefully, Richard is arrogant enough to believe that after he beat me up, I wrote this one."
"How much will it mess up your schedule to add a song?" Redman asked.
Hal answered him, "If she won't require any dancers, it will be easy to do. This is a very slow song, and since we want to keep it as real as possible, I may stage a couple waltzing to it,
which will be easy to light and choreograph."
"What about letting your band practice the song?" Morgan asked.
"I'll play it solo on the piano. That will draw more attention to me, which will draw more attention to the words. The more music and noise you add, the less the words mean, which is why I sing so much of My Love Song either a cappella or with very little accompaniment. You hear what I'm saying then."
"I still want you to look at the tape of the hall outside your dressing room, again. You might be able to tell us which one he is, which will give us the chance to get him without having to do this," Roberts said.
"I will, tomorrow night," Melody said.
Redman looked at his watch, then remembered something. "James, I meant to talk to you about the hacking going on."
"What tipped you off?" James asked.
"The IPSes we installed at Albany weren't able to prevent this guy from breaking in, but the IDSes in Atlanta logged it all and sent alerts on the VPN. The computer department hasn't checked the portal in the mornings very carefully for the last week, because of Christmas, and then the tech that does log review has been out with the flu. Nothing went above the tolerance because our black hat is very good. Our IAT went in yesterday, still sick by the way, and compiled the instances to an OLAP. He just called me this morning with the anomaly. All this activity was just below the radar so he obviously knows our thresholds and parameters. Apparently, our bad guy has hacked into Rebecca's computer four times in the last ten days and that caused a blip that a human being noticed."
James nodded. "I think he's also leaking information. There's an article in People Magazine this week that mentions the Japanese buyout. They used the wording, 'potential Japanese merger'. No one should know about it, but Rebecca has been typing meeting minutes."
"How did he get around the whole-disk encryption?"
Redman gave James a meaningful look, "He escalated privileges all the way to root level and created his own private key."
James suddenly felt very sick and very hot. "That's proprietary."
Redman nodded. "I know. Like I said, he's either remarkably good and superlatively patient, or this is an inside job. I've already had Rebecca disconnect her computer from the network. She's going to probably have to use her tablet in stand-alone mode until this thing is settled."
"Let's hope everything can still stay as quiet as possible before we announce the buyout tomorrow. It would blow the deal if it became too widespread," Kurt said.
"I'll meet you two in my office at eight tomorrow morning. The press conference is scheduled for eleven," James said. If it weren't for the expertise of Redman and his team, the breach would never have been detected in the first place. He turned back to Redman. "Are we ahead of this thing now?"
Redman grinned. It was sort of like when a shark smiles at a sea lion. "We followed protocol, so InfraGard has been notified. The FBI is involved and I'm keeping them in the loop. Internally, besides the people in this room, only four people in the firm know about this and they all have clearances. We're monitoring everything in real time, we set out honey pots, and he is completely surrounded. You want a call if we catch him?"
James nodded and put a hand on Redman's shoulder. "Great work, Mike. You have my gratitude. And yes, of course I do."
Redman left, and Morgan yawned in her hand. Kurt went to the kitchen to retrieve the phone he'd left there, and James walked Morgan to the door. He kissed her on the cheek. "How is life, Mrs. Lawson?"
"I love your brother-in-law," she answered as she put on her coat. "You two be safe." She kissed him quickly on the cheek. Kurt came back into the room and they left.
Suarez confirmed the time he would meet Melody back there the next day, and he and Roberts left, too. Hal stopped on the way out, and shook James' hand then rubbed Melody on the top of her head. "See you in the morning, kid."
"Okay, Hal," she said as she held the door for him.
James rubbed the back of his neck and walked over to look at the boxes in the corner. They could wait, he decided, then turned to Melody. "Where are you going with Hal tomorrow?" he asked her.
"Nashville. I have a meeting in the morning I forgot to tell you about," she said, slipping off her shoes.
"Does Jen know?"
"Yes. She's already coordinated with whomever at wherever about whatever it is she does."
James smiled. "When are you supposed to be back?"
"Probably about three or four," she said. "It's easy to hip hop when you have your own jet." She stretched, feeling her muscles protesting, deciding that she needed to dance and workout soon so that she didn't feel this way after every concert . "Why don't you have your own jet?" she asked.
"Never got around to it," James said. "Besides, some of us aren't worth two billion dollars."
Melody picked up an empty coffee cup and set it on the tray. "You are now."
James' laughter came out in a snort.
¯¯¯¯
CHAPTER 29
SUNDAY night, James couldn't sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, his mind whirled with the way his life had changed in the last month, with the danger facing Melody, with praying that they stayed in God's will as they built their marriage.
Energized, James left a sleeping Melody in the bed and wandered into the main room. As he turned on a lamp, the door to the office cracked open. He spotted Jen checking to see who was in the room before shutting the door again.
Not really feeling like working, he decided he would go through the boxes from Angela's mom. He grabbed the first box off the stack and sat down on the couch, flipping the television to a country music video channel but turning the volume down low. He smiled at himself as he opened the box.
It contained everything from pictures to complex math formulas written on yellow post-it-notes. In a stack of pictures he found some shots of their ski trip they'd taken her last winter, mixed in with some prototypes of a long ago revolutionary flat screen television. Angela had been the most unorganized person he'd ever met. She put so much mental energy into whatever she worked on that little remained for any other details. That had been one of the things he'd found so endearing about his late wife. He set aside the pictures from the vacation to share with Diane.
He began to sort the personal from the business, creating two growing stacks that seemed about equal. After working his way through three of the boxes, he still hadn't found anything relevant to the last project on which she'd been working. Twice he stopped to watch his wife's music videos, remaining impressed with Melody's work.
He opened the last box expecting to find the same type of stuff, but found that it surprisingly contained several journals. He grabbed one out and quickly flipped through it, recognizing Angela's handwriting. He hadn't known that she'd kept a journal.
The sound of the bedroom door opening broke his attention from the book. Melody came into the room, stumbling, wearing a T-shirt and a pair of sweat pants. Since she neither spoke to him nor looked at him, he said nothing as he watched her dig through her bag and pull out her notebook and pen. The office door cracked and James waved at Jen that everything was all clear. The longer he was around Jen, the more he realized she neither slept nor ate. He wondered what kind of toll the constant hyper-vigilance took on her mentally and physically.
Melody sat down on the opposite end of the couch and began to write, never looking at him. He momentarily wondered if she was asleep or awake, then went back to the box. But after a few minutes, he decided Melody was more interesting.
Her pen flew across the pages, translating the music in her head to dots and lines on the paper. When she reached what he thought must be the end, she went back to the first page and began to put down the lyrics. With her free hand, she tapped a beat on her knee, and stopped only to turn the page. She paused only once, her pen poised above the paper, her hand stilled on her knee, and then she resumed. She reached the end again, capped her pen, closed her notebook, and threw them on the table in front of her.
<
br /> She brushed the hair out of her eyes and looked at him. Her eyes cleared and she smiled as she crawled across the couch to him. "Hi," she said as she straddled his lap.
He hooked his arms loosely around her waist. "Hi."
She kissed him softly then sat back. She brushed a strand of hair off his forehead. Her eyes burned dark blue. "I love you."
He ran a finger gently down her cheek before cupping her face. "I love you, too." he whispered intensely.
¯¯¯¯
"WHAT'S your agenda today?" James asked Melody while she pulled on a gold pantsuit and, unbelievably, a pair of gold boots. Rather than looking tacky, the gold contrasted against her dark hair and tanned skin, making her look somewhat exotic. She went into the bathroom and he followed her, leaning against the door frame, watching her get ready.
Melody mentally clicked through her day. "At eight-thirty, I'm meeting a Realtor to sign the contract to sell my ranch there, then I have an appointment at Patterson Records with their marketing guy. At one, I'm having lunch with Bobby Kent to discuss a duet I wrote, then I have to go to my offices and meet with Hal's secretary," she said as she fastened a hammered gold and bronze necklace around her neck.
"On the plane coming home, I have an interview with a representative from some video channel because I'm their artist of the month for March. If I make it back to town before four, I have to meet David Patterson so he can complain to me about my tour dates, or what he calls the lack of them." She spun and looked at her outfit in the mirror. "Oh, don't forget we have to be at Kurt and Morgan's at seven."
"You really packed a day into a trip, didn't you?"
"Yep. Vacation's over." She opened her padded jewelry case to retrieve a pair of matching earrings. "Do you have a safe here, where I can store my jewelry?"
A Melody for James (Christian Suspense) Page 26
