In Deep with the FBI Agent

by Lynne Silver

  The next day, it took him a little longer than usual to get to Morgantown federal prison. He tried to get out here at least once or twice a year in a non-official capacity to visit his college roommate, but today it was all official business.

  Kevin entered the private secure visiting room clad in the dismal required uniform. He was only a month older than Sam, but he looked at least fifty. Prison did that to a person. Two years after they graduated, Sam had learned how his roommate had always seemed to have money during their cash-strapped student days. He’d been installing spyware on nearly every computer and kiosk ATM on campus. He hadn’t touched Sam’s computer, because it would have been uncool to steal from his best friend, and Sam was smart enough to catch the malware.

  It was shortly after Kevin was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison that Sam joined the FBI. He’d been recruited his senior year, but turned it down in search of more lucrative offerings until he was confronted up close and personal with the effects of a hacker.

  “Sam Cooper.” Kevin’s greeting was his usual effusive voice, but there was weariness in his tone. He was more than halfway through his prison sentence, and the lack of freedom had to be getting to him. Granted, it was a minimum-security prison, which some liked to joke was a country club, but there was nothing luxurious or fun about having your every movement monitored and regulated by someone other than yourself. “What are you doing here? I usually expect you around Christmas.”

  Sam pulled up a chair. “I can’t come visit my old college roommate?”

  “It’s not visiting hours,” Kevin pointed out.

  “What’s the point of being an FBI agent if I can’t use the perk to visit you on a day and time convenient for me?”

  Kevin’s eyes narrowed. “It’s ten o’clock on a workday.”

  Sam said nothing and waited. A light of interest sparked in Kevin’s otherwise dimmed expression. “Something’s going on, but I haven’t read anything in the papers. You always call me to discuss a hack you can’t solve. What is it this time? A bank? Walmart?” It was one of Kevin’s punishments that he was not allowed on or near a computer for the duration of his incarceration. He was forced to read the newspaper in print, something Sam knew grated.

  Sam kept his silence in a mutual understanding. Kevin might have been his closest friend at one time, but he was still a criminal and Sam was in law enforcement. But if anyone could understand hacker motivation, it was Kevin.

  Sam watched as Kevin’s excellent computer-for-a-brain memory went back through the last week of news.

  Finally, Kevin snapped to attention. “The school in California. It was hacked.”

  Still, Sam kept his silence.

  “There were other school hackings, weren’t there? Nothing big was stolen or it would’ve made the papers in a bigger way. Am I right?” But Kevin didn’t pause or wait for Sam’s confirmation, which was good because he would have received none.

  Kevin tapped the table, his brain on overdrive. “Lots of school hackings, but no big financial losses…you need a motivation…” The finger tapping stopped and he looked Sam dead-on. “Grade changing.”

  “At more than one school?” Sam let slip and inwardly cursed. This was supposed to be a social visit in which he said nothing and Kevin gave his investigation a boost.

  “You hacked into your school computer in high school, didn’t you? And you weren’t even slightly tempted to change any grades?”

  “What would’ve been the point? I already had all As.”

  “And if you hadn’t?” Kevin asked.

  Sam shrugged. “Then, sure, I would’ve been tempted, but I wouldn’t have done it.”

  “You have to find out who stands to benefit from changed grades.”

  “You think students across the country might have banded together in a conspiracy to change grades?”

  Kevin grinned, revealing teeth badly in need of a dental checkup. “Hey, stranger things have happened, right?”

  “True.” Sam stood, knowing their twenty minutes were up and he had a long drive back to D.C. “Good seeing you, Kevin.”

  “Thanks. You too.”

  Sam turned to go, but Kevin called to him as his hand was on the door handle to leave.

  “Hey, Sam, maybe when I get out, I could come work for the FBI? You know, as a consultant or something.”

  He sounded eager, and Sam didn’t have the heart to tell him a criminal record was a no-go in his office, but there were other departments that loved to hire former hackers. He swiveled back to give Kevin a grin. “Stranger things have happened. We’ll keep in touch.”

  He drove back to D.C. in a funk. Seeing Kevin in prison always affected him. It was easy to deny that he would have changed his grades in high school, but he’d never been put to a true moral test. As always, when he saw Kevin, the expression “There but for the grace of God go I” resonated.

  The similarities between Sam and Kevin were striking. Both had similar computer skills and academic acumen, both boys had been on scholarship, and both had been computer science majors. Paying tuition and other expenses hadn’t been easy for Sam’s parents and him. Who was to say whether he would have made a better choice than Kevin if faced with having to drop out of college because he hadn’t been able to pay his tuition, which was what happened to Kevin.

  Without much forethought, he pushed his earpiece in his ear and dialed a phone number that was on top of his most recently dialed list.

  “Sam?”

  Casey’s voice instantly soothed something inside him.

  “Sam, is this you? I’m busy at work, can I call you back?”

  He ignored her request to call him later. He wanted—no, needed—to hear her voice now. “Did I ever tell you my college roommate was convicted of grand larceny and three felony counts?”

  There was a startled silence. “No. I never knew that. He was that tall kid with the bad haircut, right?” Casey and Kevin had met once in college.

  “He’s serving a six-year sentence in West Virginia. I visited him this morning, and I’m driving back from there now. But you have to go back to work. I didn’t mean to bother you.”

  “No,” Casey said, “no, I can talk.”

  So Sam talked. He shared with Casey how hard it was to see Kevin’s mental and physical health deteriorate under the federal prison system. He shared how easily he could’ve been caught up in Kevin’s scam.

  “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night dreaming that Kevin had asked me to hack computers with him and I said yes. I wake up dreaming I’m in prison,” he confessed.

  “Did he ever ask you to be part of his scam?”

  “No, but what if he had? I wonder if I would’ve had the moral fiber to say no. And even more, would I have had the balls to turn him in? He was my best friend.”

  “Yes,” Casey said immediately. “You’re one of the most moral people I know. You would’ve turned him in, and you never would’ve stolen from people.”

  “I love that you have that kind of faith in me.”

  “You deserve it,” Casey said. “It’s one of the reasons we all hated you in high school. There was no playing jokes on a teacher if you were around, and there was no copying homework, either.”

  “We had an honor code.”

  “Yes, and you were one of the few who followed it,” Casey responded.

  “You did, too.”

  Silence.

  Sam accelerated past a slow car on the highway, speaking fast to Casey. “You were up for fun in class, but you never broke the honor code. You always found a way around it if your friends asked to copy your homework.”

  “You really did stalk me in high school,” Casey said with a quick laugh.

  “I was a boy in love,” he said, and gripped the steering wheel at his revelation.

  “And now?”

  “I’m a man intrigued. I had a good time the other night, Case. I want to take you out again Friday night.”

  He held his breath for what fel
t like forever before she quietly said, “Okay.”

  “Awesome. I’ll pick you up at seven. Now stop dawdling, Ms. Cooper, and get back to work.”

  She laughed, and the throaty noise went straight to his groin. “Bye, Mr. Cooper.”

  Before she could hang up, Sam said, “And, Casey? Thanks for listening.”

  “Anytime, Sam.”

  Chapter Six

  Casey’s finger froze on the mouse when a photo of Sam grinning in the computer lab flashed on the screen.

  “He was short, wasn’t he?” she muttered, but she said it with affection, especially when she thought of arriving in her office this morning to discover a tiny typed and folded note from him. Just like he’d slipped into her locker in high school. How he’d entered her office, she didn’t know, but the message on the note had her squirming with happiness all day. Instinctively, her fingers went to her pocket to rub the folded note.

  “What was that?” Valerie leaned forward in the chair adjacent to Casey’s and squinted at the screen.

  Casey gestured to the screen. “Sam. I remember him being little in high school, but he looks like he’s twelve there.”

  Arianna laughed. “Well, he’s all grown up now.”

  “You don’t have to tell me twice,” Casey said and earned speculative looks from both women. They’d been in the school administrative conference room for more than an hour making a photo slide show for their upcoming reunion. Her admin, Annie, was taking care of the class of 1995, but since the ten-year reunion class was her own, she wanted to take care of it personally. Valerie and Arianna had volunteered to help, but now Casey suspected they were here to get their own take on her burgeoning relationship with Sam.

  To give them credit, they hadn’t said a word or asked a single probing question, which was good since Casey wouldn’t know what to say. Sam had snuck in the locker note on her desk this morning, and he had called her Thursday, obviously shaken from his visit to his friend in prison, and he was taking her on a date tonight. Was it a relationship? She didn’t know. They’d done nothing more than kiss, but given their long history, he was much more than simply a man with whom she was going on a second date.

  “He mentioned to Lance that he’s taking you out tonight,” Arianna said, almost cautiously, which for her was a miracle. Arianna had never understood the meaning of cautious, though her father’s legal battle had changed her subtly. There was a sympathetic depth to Arianna that hadn’t been there in high school, or maybe it was that Casey—too focused on her own issues—hadn’t seen past the surface.

  “Yes, we’re going out. Did he happen to mention where he’s taking me? I’m not sure what to wear.”

  “This is Sam, so you never know,” Valerie said. “He could take you to mini golf, or to the nicest restaurant in town.”

  Casey felt a smile form on her face. “I know, he’s unpredictable, and yet he’s totally predictable in that the date will be unlike any others I’ve been on.”

  “Is that a good thing?” Valerie asked. Both women eyed her, obviously feeling protective of their friend, and Casey felt her hackles rise. What right did they have to question her intentions toward Sam? He was her friend first, and it was her he’d had a crush on forever. Oh, boy, she was feeling possessive over Sam Cooper. Not good.

  Yet why wasn’t it good? As she edged nearer to the dark side of age thirty, Casey was close to admitting that though she had a great job and some close friends, she wanted more. She wanted a partner, one who shared the intimate and the mundane. Though she’d never in a million years dreamed she could find it with Sam, she wasn’t averse to it either.

  “I like him,” Casey said. “I think I always have.”

  “You had a funny way of showing it in high school,” Ari said.

  “I was a bitch in high school, and it wasn’t like I actively bullied Sam.”

  “But you weren’t very nice to him either,” Valerie said.

  “No,” she admitted. “I wasn’t, but that’s between me and Sam.”

  “Point taken,” Ari said. “Let’s go on to the next photo.”

  Valerie had a printout of the names of every person in their graduating class, and their goal was to make sure everyone appeared at least once in the slide show. They’d put out the call for photos about a month ago and people had responded nicely. It helped that Casey was able to contribute a boatload of her own photos, but as they were seeing now, they featured the same group of kids over and over. Quite a few members of her class were left out.

  “Some people are simply going to have to remain absent,” Valerie finally declared, crossing off one more name on their list. “Has Dina Grodinsky said she’d attend the reunion?”

  “Who’s Dina Grodinsky?” Ari asked.

  “Tall, dark brown hair. Played volleyball,” Casey said.

  “How do you remember stuff like that?” Ari asked.

  She remembered because she had every yearbook from the school’s history and before she made a personal phone call or email to request an alumni donation, she looked the person up.

  “Part of my job,” Casey said.

  “I may need to hire you for my gallery,” Ari said.

  “You couldn’t afford me.”

  “True.”

  “I think we’re done,” Valerie interrupted. “Let’s test it, ’cause I have to go. My babysitter needs to get to her class.”

  Casey hit Play on the montage software and turned up the speaker volume.

  “The song is killing me,” Ari said. “It’s cliché.”

  “It was the song that played throughout high school,” Casey protested.

  “It’s like a rule,” Valerie said with a giggle. “No photo slide show could be made between the years 2002 and 2007 without using Green Day’s ‘Time of your Life.’”

  They all laughed.

  “But it works,” Casey said, and they fell into silence to watch their handiwork. As the images flashed on-screen, her stomach tightened and her throat felt heavy. Oh, good God, were those tears she was swallowing back? At a cheesy photo montage of bygone days?

  She wasn’t alone in her sudden sappy sentiment.

  “Oh, remember that?” Valerie laughed at the photo of the boys’ basketball team in cheerleading uniforms.

  “She has three kids,” Ari said as the next photo flashed on, showing a perky blonde in a volleyball uniform.

  “Three? Wow, she must’ve started right after college,” Casey said.

  “During,” Arianna said.

  There was nothing wrong with someone their age getting pregnant in her early twenties, but it was certainly unusual for kids from their prep school. From Casey’s RSVPs to date, she estimated that only about thirty percent of their class was even married, and only a handful of their class were parents.

  “Oh, wow,” Valerie breathed and they all froze as the screen showed two boys with ear-to-ear grins, arms around each other. The boy on the left was Eric Cohen, forever frozen in time at seventeen.

  “I think he died a few weeks after that photo,” Casey said. “That was taken on the spring break ski trip.” Eric had died driving home from lacrosse practice in the spring. He’d been on his phone and had driven off the road into a tree. The tragedy had brought their class together, even though Eric had remained the kind of stereotypical jock asshole memorialized in teen movies.

  “So sad,” Valerie said.

  “Yeah,” Casey and Arianna echoed.

  “It’s weird to think we’re about to attend our ten-year reunion and Eric never will. He never even got to go to prom or graduate.”

  “His sister sent a letter,” Casey volunteered. “Remember, she was two years ahead of us at school.”

  “That was nice,” Valerie said.

  Ari stared at the screen thoughtfully. “I know this sounds awful, but I tend not to remember the kids that didn’t go all the way through elementary school to graduation with us.” She glanced at Casey. “You being the exception, of course.”

  �
��Glad I’m memorable,” Casey said.

  “Unforgettable, more like.” Valerie and Ari laughed.

  “Hey, what does that mean?”

  “Casey, you were voted most likely to succeed and most popular.”

  “Despite the fact that you weren’t that well liked,” Arianna said.

  Casey rose. “Yes, I was a bitch in high school. I think I’ll wear a scarlet letter B on my blouse to the reunion. Or should I type up apology notes to everyone?”

  “Casey, relax, we were kidding around,” Ari said.

  “No. I think people owe me apologies. You both have no idea how crazy this school was.”

  “What are you talking about? We both went here,” Valerie said, a wrinkle marring her brow.

  “Not on scholarship,” Casey said. “When there were bake sales or you had to buy a team uniform, you asked your parents for money. Not all of us could do that. You didn’t go on the senior ski trip because you didn’t want to. I didn’t go because I couldn’t afford to, and I wanted to. Desperately. Instead people mocked kids they thought were on scholarship. You know how many times I had to pretend to laugh when one of my so-called friends made a joke about someone buying clothes at a discount store. I bought all my clothes at discount stores.”

  “You were on scholarship?” Valerie’s eyes were wide. “I had no idea. But stop acting like it’s some dark secret. So what if you had less money than the rest of us? It wasn’t a big deal.”

  “Wasn’t it?” Casey asked. “You know why I was on scholarship? Because my mom had trouble holding down a job. She suffers from depression and wasn’t able to go into work a lot. So either she missed paychecks or had to find a new job. And yet, she insisted I come to this fancy private school so I could have a better life than her.”

  “I’m sorry, Casey. We had no idea about your mom. That must have been rough,” Valerie said.

  “Still is,” Casey muttered.

  “I hate to be dense, but was the money such a big deal? I totally get why your mom’s health problems were, but…”