Code of Conduct (Cipher Security Book 1)

by Smartypants Romance

  Shane wasn’t actually my real name any more than Sophie, but it was what everyone called me. Not that everyone was a lot of people, or more than ten actually, not counting clients. My list of friends could safely be counted on two hands and did not, for example, include the Vietnamese food delivery boy, who knew me as Miss Hane, or the Armenian family who ran the market and deli where I shopped every other day.

  Shane was who I’d been since I left home. It wasn’t on my high school diploma, my college transcripts, my passport, or my P.I. license, but it was who I’d chosen to be. I wasn’t searchable, identifiable, or easily found as Shane, so when I answered to it, the person asking was always someone I trusted.

  I shifted Oscar off my thigh, and he grumbled but cracked an eyelid open to watch me. I hopped across to the dresser and grabbed a pair of tights that I’d modified for my prosthetic leg, and by modified I meant cut off. They fit just over the silicone liner that rolled onto my residual limb like a giant condom and attached to the leg socket with a pin locking mechanism. The modified cheetah leg I wore for running was one of my favorite prosthetics, not counting the fake nose I sometimes used when I needed a disguise for work.

  A black hoodie went on over my head, and I laced up my left running shoe. Once a year I sent a box of right men’s size nines to Wounded Warrior Project, and last year I got a letter back from a twenty-year-old kid thanking me for the great shoe. It inspired him to try running again, he said, which made me smile for a whole month.

  Oscar’s head had perked up when he saw the cheetah leg, but the shoe going on was his cue to race me to the door.

  I liked to run by the lake after dark, the closer to midnight the better. Street traffic had slowed to almost nothing by that point, and even the homeless were mostly asleep. I stuck to bike paths for the smooth surface, and wasn’t worried about things that went bump in the night because physical therapy had made me strong and fast, and because Oscar was a deterrent for most predators. To me, a five-mile run by streetlight was like releasing the steam from a pressure cooker. It was always the most peaceful part of my day.

  The early spring night was clear, and a breeze came in off the lake. I went south on the Lakefront Trail toward Waveland Park, and I let the wind push me into a nearly six-minute-mile pace. Oscar kept up with me easily enough, and we both reveled in the feeling of flying down the paved trail.

  I spent the first mile clearing my head of noise – not so hard to do at nearly midnight on a Tuesday. I listened to the step-slap of my running shoe and the blade of my cheetah leg, heard my breath punctuate Oscar’s panting, and was dimly aware of the distant sound of nighttime traffic. When the scope of my world had narrowed to the sounds in it, I expanded it to include the shapes of trees, of streetlights, and in the distance, the skyscrapers of the Loop. Anything that moved caught my attention – car headlights on Lake Shore Drive, a rabbit scampering away from the sounds of the dog, and in the distance, down the trail, someone on a bicycle heading toward me.

  I saw midnight cyclists occasionally, but they were rare, and I tightened my grip on Oscar’s leash. Bicycles and skateboards were approximately as welcome in his world as lice and misogynists were in mine.

  This offender was a racing bike, with the clip-in pedal system that always made me slightly tense when I imagined stoplights and pedestrians. The rider had no headlamp or light of any kind, just a few strips of reflective tape on the forks of the bike. To be fair, I was dressed in head-to-toe black too, but I was attached to an unmistakably large black and white dog, and there was enough silver on my cheetah leg to catch headlights as needed.

  When our encounter became inevitable, I hugged the far right of the path to keep Oscar’s lunge out of range. I should have stopped and pulled him off the path entirely, but I was at mile three and had just hit the sweet spot in my run. It was a perfect storm – I hit a hole in the grass with my blade and stumbled, which loosened my grip on the leash just as Oscar lunged to demand that the bike yield to his superior size. He traveled farther than he meant to, and the cyclist swerved to avoid the impact of a hundred pounds of indignant dog. And, because the cyclist’s feet were clipped into those damn racing pedals, he couldn’t drop them for balance and had nowhere to go but down.

  So down he went in a spectacular crash of man over handlebars and bicycle over man. His feet did finally unclip from the pedals somewhere in the cartwheel of man and machine, but it was a brutal thing to witness, and a giant cavern of dread took up residence in my chest.

  I yanked hard on Oscar’s leash and barked at him, “STAY!” The rider was curled on one side, facing away from me, and the bike had landed a few yards beyond him. One wheel was bent and the other was spinning like a bad cartoon.

  “Are you okay?” I gasped as I knelt beside him and put a hand out to his shoulder. He was wearing a helmet, thank God, but in the dark I couldn’t tell where his black clothes ended and blood might begin.

  The guy moved slowly, tentatively, as though testing for pain before straightening his joints. It took a few agonizing seconds before he finally rolled onto his back.

  “Oh!” I stumbled backward, lost my balance, and my butt hit the ground. Oscar came to my side immediately, giving the vanquished bicycle a wide berth. I grabbed his leash before he could investigate the man on the ground, as I attempted to regain coherent thought.

  The man I’d just caused bodily harm to was the possible Cipher Security agent from outside the restaurant where I’d had my “date” with Dane Quimby. He would undoubtedly recognize me – unless he was concussed and/or would die without speaking.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he growled in a deep voice laced with a British accent I could’ve listened to for days. I guessed a mute death had been too much to hope for. That he recognized me was oddly comforting, because maybe he’d been thinking about me like I’d been thinking about him, but it wasn’t good, particularly as my prosthetic leg was currently parked about three feet from his face, making me far too identifiable for someone with a reason to find me.

  “Causing you injury, clearly.” There was too much sass in my tone for the circumstances, but he’d scared me, and I got defensive when I felt cornered. I took a breath and tried again. “Are you as badly hurt as you should be?”

  “As I should be? You were trying to take me out?” His voice was too quiet for the depth of it, and even with the edge in his clipped accent, I wanted to lean in to catch his words. I shook myself out of the thrall.

  “If I’d tried to take you out, you’d be in the lake.” I was proud of my matter-of-fact tone, even if I sounded like a twelve-year-old. I know you are, but what am I?

  His eyes flashed dangerously, and I scooted backwards out of his reach. It was an automatic reaction to a perceived threat, but it drew his attention, and his gaze darted to my prosthetic leg.

  “What happened?” he asked, probably before he could stop himself. Most people did that – asked reflexive questions without really wanting to know the actual story.

  “Crushed in a thresher,” I answered automatically.

  His eyebrows furrowed, and then his mouth twitched as if he were trying not to smile. Who smiled at an amputation story? Granted, it wasn’t my story, but still – who smiled at that?

  “Right. Well …” He pulled himself to a sitting position, wincing as he did. “We’ll see if I need one of those after this.” He winced again and held his breath as he tried, and failed, to stand.

  “Hang on,” I said, scrambling to my feet. I held out a hand and braced myself.

  He hesitated too long before he reached for my hand, and I was oddly insulted. Because I was female? Or white? Or “disabled?” Why hesitate to accept my help?

  When he did finally take my hand, I had to resist the urge to snatch it away again. His hand was too big, too warm, too male, just … too. I pulled harder than I needed to, and he rose easily, if a little gingerly, to his feet.

  He let go of me the moment he was upright, and I automatically w
iped my palm on my tights to erase the memory of too much. It didn’t work, except that he noticed, and the line of his mouth tightened. Was it from pain, or did he imagine I wouldn’t want his touch?

  I almost reached for him again, but then I stepped back and nearly stumbled over Oscar, who had completed the grass-sniffing task on his to-do list and sat down behind me. “Oscar was protecting me from your bike,” I said inanely.

  The man picked his bicycle up off the path. “How noble of him.” There was a bite of well-deserved sarcasm in his tone, and I clamped a metaphorical hand over my mouth to keep from answering in kind.

  He was moving slowly, but I was amazed he moved at all. “What hurts?” I asked.

  “My pride. Everything else will hurt tomorrow.” He hefted the bike to his shoulder and started to walk south. He went about ten steps, then stopped and looked back at me.

  “Are you coming?”

  I stared at him. “What? Why?”

  “So you can tell me about Dane Quimby.” His voice had dropped so far down in volume I almost jogged up to him just to make sure I didn’t miss any words. I resisted, but just barely.

  “I don’t know a Dane Quimby.” I resorted to belligerence to cover up the feeling of being cornered again.

  His eyes narrowed, and he studied me with a full up-and-down gaze that made my heart beat faster and my palms sweat. I rubbed my right hand absently against my tights, which brought his gaze back to my cheetah leg.

  “He didn’t know about the leg, did he?” His voice thrummed deeply, and I felt it in my chest.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I did know, I just couldn’t admit to any of it, because once I did, I’d admit all of it.

  “Quimby’s too shallow. Even a stunner like you couldn’t get past his idea of perfection with that.”

  I couldn’t decide whether I should be insulted or flattered, so I was both – and neither. And I waited. Even Oscar stood silently at my side while I debated my next move.

  He didn’t seem to need an answer and nodded to himself as he spoke out loud. “You’re also too tall for him, so you didn’t meet him in person. A blind date? Unlikely. Quimby doesn’t do blind. Online, then. That’s it. You found him, made him think you were his type so he’d meet you, and then you got in and moved his money.”

  I felt my insides flutter in an idiotic reaction to his deductive skills, and I crossed my arms in front of me like the tough girl I definitely wasn’t feeling. “You done?” I cocked my head at him and hoped I sounded more confident than I felt.

  He smiled, and the fluttering intensified, sending tendrils of heat to my skin. “Not nearly. You?”

  I arched an eyebrow at him. It was a move I’d perfected as part of my intimidation repertoire. My thirteen-year-old self had practiced in a mirror until disdain oozed from my eyes when the eyebrow went up. I wondered whether it was as effective without the disdain, since I couldn’t seem to muster any for this man.

  “Maybe.” I had no idea what I was equivocating about, but he wasn’t going to win this … whatever it was.

  “With Quimby?”

  I shuddered involuntarily. “Definitely.”

  His smile got bigger and held the glint of something … appreciative? “See you around, then.” He turned and continued walking down the path, the wrecked bicycle on his shoulder as if it weighed nothing.

  See me around? How? He didn’t know my name, didn’t know anything about me. Chicago was a big city. How in the hell did he think he was going to see me around?

  I watched him for another ten steps, half-expecting him to turn back and speak to me again.

  He didn’t, and I was absurdly disappointed.

  4

  Gabriel

  “Speak up or risk becoming background noise.” – Kendra Eze

  I woke up feeling like I’d been beaten with a cricket bat.

  Nothing was broken that I could tell, but one whole side of my body felt like a slab of meat to which someone had taken a tenderizing mallet, and the bruises would be a sight in a couple of days.

  The alarm went off on my mobile phone – currently set to the Hamilton soundtrack, which amused my twin, Kendra, to no end. She laughed at my show tunes, but I just shrugged and turned them up louder.

  An image of the beautiful brunette with the bloody dangerous dog suddenly filled my head, and I had the thought that I wouldn’t mind if she knew I sang to Hamilton in the shower. Which led to thoughts of her in a shower, which led to thoughts … and a long time spent in the shower having those thoughts.

  The hot shower did make me feel better about the bruises, at least until I walked into the kitchen table and had to swear a streak so blue my mum would have reached for a flip-flop if I’d been in her flat. It was either that or cry, and I didn’t cry.

  After a painkillers-and-coffee breakfast and quick heart emoji proof-of-life texts to Kendra and Mum, I made my way downtown to the main office of Cipher Security Systems. Stan raised his coffee cup to me as I passed his desk in the lobby. All agents put time in at the front desk, and my three days there the week prior had been a much-appreciated chance to catch up on the latest Rivers of London mystery.

  “O’Malley wants to see you,” Stan said gruffly. He had the face and physique of a prize-fighter, but I suspected a jelly-filled center under the hard exterior.

  “Right,” I said. I squared my shoulders and decidedly did not limp to the elevator.

  Dan O’Malley and Quinn Sullivan were equal partners in Cipher Security, though they oversaw different elements of the business. Sullivan was the corporate face who regularly took meetings in Washington, New York, and London with CEOs, heads of banks, and high-powered government officials. O’Malley was the head of operations, and he preferred to be the man on the street. Given the direction Sullivan had been taking the company, there was far less street and far more boardroom to cover, but O’Malley had an instinct for dirty dealing, white or blue collar, that put the finest police forces to shame.

  Sullivan was in O’Malley’s office when I knocked on the door, and they both looked up from the files they held. O’Malley said to Sullivan, by way of explanation, “Gabriel came up with the girlfriend-stole-for-the-wife theory on the missing money, and I feel like it’s the right call.”

  “I assume Quimby called in local law enforcement?”

  O’Malley shook his head. “Shit-heel says he wants us to handle it. Says he has an insurance clause with us that makes it as much our problem as his.”

  Sullivan looked pained. “He’s not wrong. ADDATA was one of our first contracts, from the days when we were hungry for corporate business. Unless we can prove criminality on Quimby’s part, we insured any assets we agreed to protect.”

  O’Malley looked pointedly at me to weigh in, so I did. “Honestly, it would be difficult for him to bring the police in as his mobile appears to have been the access point. Not that it would have been particularly difficult otherwise as he has no password security and easy entry to banking applications. If the transfer had been made via hack we could have stopped it. As it was, we were aware of it the moment the money was moved and we contacted him immediately. Apparently we missed the girlfriend by only a few minutes, though I believe I may have seen her outside the restaurant when we arrived.”

  O’Malley looked up from the file he was holding. “What’d she look like?”

  “Caucasian female, about six feet tall, long brunette hair, perhaps late-twenties, wearing denim jeans, boots, and a gray sweater.”

  O’Malley snorted. “No way a piss-ant like Quimby’d date a tall chick. He’s maybe five-eight and doesn’t have the fucking balls.”

  “Unless he met her online and last night was their first face-to-face encounter,” I said quietly.

  Sullivan addressed me. “Find out what you can about the girlfriend.”

  O’Malley added, “Use Alex for the internet shit if you need to. He digs kicking over digital rocks to expose all the fucking creepers to the light.”


  Sullivan held out his hand to shake mine. “You were military police before joining the Peacekeepers, right?”

  “Royal Military Police for three years, UN Peacekeeper in Ethiopia and Cambodia for two.”

  O’Malley looked at me oddly. “You spent time in Nigeria though.”

  “With forces from that country. Not on an official mission.” Sullivan no doubt saw my hand tighten on the back of the chair, but he said nothing.

  O’Malley merely nodded. “Nigeria is where you met Fiona Archer?” he asked, citing the name of a former CIA agent I knew was a personal friend of theirs.

  “That’s correct.”

  Sullivan clapped me on the shoulder. “Good. I’m glad she connected you with us, and I appreciate you taking the lead on this. I want to drop Quimby from our client roster, but he can’t have any possible claim against us when I do.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said automatically.

  Sullivan’s mouth twitched in what I thought might be a partial smile. “I’m not sir to you, Gabriel.”

  “Habits die hard … Quinn,” I said as I nodded to them both and left the office.

  I preferred to work in one of the three large conference rooms on the third floor of the Cipher building. They were well-stocked with coffee, and I could generally spread out with my laptop and notes at one end of the massive table.

  It was a challenge not to sing along with the Hamilton soundtrack playing in my headphones as I worked. The music brought the founding fathers of the U.S. to life in a way that made me almost imagine they had been black.

  I flexed my fingers over my keyboard with something suspiciously like relish as I pictured the mystery woman as she had looked the previous night in running tights and a black hooded sweatshirt, her prosthetic leg glinting like something slightly dangerous, and her eyes flashing at me as though deciding whether to run or fight.