Code of Conduct (Cipher Security Book 1)

by Smartypants Romance

  He shrugged. “If it’s African, it’s the Igbo word for king, spelled E Z E.”

  I stared at him in stunned silence long enough that he looked up from the socket in his hands. “What?” he asked defensively.

  “It isn’t enough to carry around an entire Wiki file on every Marvel character ever invented, you have to know the origin of obscure foreign words too?”

  He ignored my sarcasm. “Not Marvel. I got that from Comic Republic. Either way, you spell it E Z E.”

  “Thank you,” I said as I typed “Gabriel Eze” into Google. I scrolled through the pages that came up. “What’s Igbo?”

  “An ethnic group and language in Nigeria.”

  “Oh, thanks.”

  I tried Google Images first, but they quickly devolved into photos of famous men named Gabriel. Finally, way down on the bottom of the fifth page, I found a photo of some men wearing light blue helmets. One of those men was in profile, and he looked like my Brit, but younger. The man was Lieutenant Eze according to the article attached to it, and he was a Peacekeeper in a mostly Nigerian squad.

  Fascinating.

  “Blue helmets,” I said, turning the computer so that Sparky could see the photo. “Those are UN Peacekeepers, right?”

  He shrugged. “Marvel made a deal in 2008 to make educational comics with Spiderman and UN Peacekeepers, but they never followed through, so my blue hat knowledge is pretty limited.”

  I scoffed. “So if it doesn’t exist in the world of comics, you don’t know it?”

  Sparky picked up a socket wrench and adjusted something on the fin of a diving leg he was working on. “Sounds about right.”

  “So why do you know so much about prosthetic legs?”

  He stared at me with a you can’t be serious look. “Cyborg, Bucky Barnes, Atom Eve, Flash Thompson, Forge, Nebula, Misty Knight …” He was counting down on his fingers, and I held up my hands in surrender.

  “Okay, okay, got it. I’m just your willing guinea pig, is that it?” I said, laughing.

  Sparky’s expression turned serious. “You’re my muse.”

  He held my gaze for a long moment. “Oh,” I said, inadequately.

  He raised an eyebrow as a mischievous grin broke across his face. “You’re also either brave or dumb enough to be my crash test dummy.”

  I snickered. “Right, there’s that.”

  The next page in my Gabriel Eze search revealed a five-year-old article from a London newspaper about an investigation the Royal Military Police had conducted into the death of a soldier on the base. Lieutenant Gabriel Eze was mentioned as a witness. I couldn’t find anything else about that case or any other mentions of MP Eze, but it felt like it fit.

  If my guy had joined the British army right out of high school, he could have reached the rank of Lieutenant by twenty or twenty-one. He could have done some time with the UN Peacekeepers, maybe fit in a couple of years of university in no particular order, and then joined the private sector as a security agent.

  No searches of his name in conjunction with Chicago resulted in any hits, but there was a Kendra Eze at University of Chicago. I had no way of knowing if she was connected to Gabriel at all. For all I knew, Eze could be the equivalent of Smith. I sensed that I’d gone as far as I could with the information I had.

  I closed the lid of the laptop and spent the next hour trying various leg components Sparky had been playing with, and he surprised me with a liner, socket, and sleeve from the Santa Barbara company that he’d already fitted to my titanium walking leg. It made the limp almost imperceptible and was way more comfortable than even my cheetah leg socket.

  I gave him an impulsive hug and then poked him in the ribs when he sniffed my hair and said I smelled like the vanilla air freshener realtors use when they want to sell a house.

  Dork.

  7

  Shane

  “Why did you wait two days to call her? She gave you her number, right? Call her as you’re walking away and tell her how nice it was to meet her.” – Overheard on the basketball court

  I was startled to realize it had gotten dark while I’d been working in the warehouse, and a pang of guilt hit me. Oscar would be hungry, so I texted my neighbor’s son. Jorge was a senior in high school and always took my dog out for a walk when he got home from school. He could also be counted on to feed him if I was late.

  You got it, was the reply.

  Thanks. How did the comp-sci test go? I texted back.

  He responded with an eye-roll emoji that he’d programmed to actually roll its eyes. I wanted it, but he was holding out to use it as currency someday.

  Jorge was taking computer science from a high school STEM teacher who had stopped advancing his own education around the time the internet was invented, which meant Jorge had been teaching himself using YouTube videos and reading programmer message boards. He was the one who had set me up with my own VPN service, and he could generally be counted on to fill the gaps in my programming education. He was also one of the few people who was possibly more paranoid than me. Oscar and I were both going to miss him when he went away to MIT.

  I took the L back to Bryn Mawr station and made it home about twenty minutes later. Jorge was still in my apartment wrestling on the floor with my giant, hairy dog.

  “Hey,” he said, looking up from under piles of fur. Oscar gave his face a tongue-swipe and then leapt up to greet me.

  I grinned as Jorge picked dog hair out of his mouth. He was a stringy cross-country runner, and one of the few people I knew who could keep up with me and the cheetah leg.

  “I got a new socket. Want to go for a run later?”

  “I gotta work tonight, so I’ll be up at five tomorrow to run. Want to go then?” Jorge stood up in that graceful way only teenagers and yoga instructors can manage and attempted to brush off the dog coat he’d cleaned off my floor.

  I made a noise somewhere between a scoff and a snort. “Pre-crack is not something I experience on purpose. I need to wake up slowly, with copious amounts of coffee, preferably administered intravenously.”

  Jorge laughed and scratched Oscar’s ears on his way to the door. “Have a good night.”

  “Thanks for taking care of my dog,” I called to him.

  “He’s my dog. He just lives with you,” he called back as the door shut behind him.

  I heated up some leftover rice and Moroccan chicken and scrolled through Twitter for a few minutes while I ate. I used social media mostly as a way to see what people were talking about, since I didn’t have water cooler conversations in my line of work. The political news depressed me, the random bits of activism gave me hope, and I scrolled past way too many fake news claims and comment trolls for comfort. It was getting harder and harder to find the kind of conversations people actually used to have at the water cooler. Even TV shows were binge-watched, so there weren’t collective Friday morning “can you believe what Ross and Rachel did?” moments anymore. The last time I remember people actively suppressing spoilers was when the Bruce Willis movie The Sixth Sense came out and nobody gave the secret away.

  Also, every social media account I had was under a different name, because my paranoia was that big. I never clicked on anything as I scrolled, no matter how tempting the quiz to reveal my Hogwarts House was (I was pretty sure I was a Ravenclaw, but I had hopes for a little Gryffindor too), and I refused every overture of Facebook friendship I received. Social media was a tool for my work, just like property searches and the County Recorder’s Office, which meant the less I exposed of myself, the more anonymous I could remain.

  I ran my fingers through Oscar’s fur with one hand as I scrolled through Facebook on my phone with the other. My hand would likely be gray with dog dust, but he was in that blissed out space hounds get where tongues loll and eyes glaze in ecstasy, and consequently he shot me a glaring stink-eye when I stopped ruffling his fur.

  I’d just scrolled past a quiz that promised to reveal your personality type. Even more striking to my eyes tha
n the click-bait photo of the woman yelling, was the fact that it was powered by ADDATA, which was Dane Quimby’s company. From my research I knew they scraped data from social media to predict market reception for ad sales, but this was something completely different.

  I debated for a long moment – to click or not to click. On the one hand, I had every reason in the world not to break my cardinal rule about anonymity and invisibility, but on the other hand, I had the curiosity of a cat with all the survival instincts that went along with it. I could always delete that account, create a new e-mail address, and start over.

  Curiosity won. I clicked the app and then actually read the terms and agreements. Everything was pretty standard except for the tiny little clause that gave ADDATA the right to use my data and that of my friends, in the event I had any, for their research.

  That was interesting. As far as I knew, Facebook hadn’t allowed friends’ data to be accessed by third-party applications since 2014, which was approximately the year I removed my actual name from most online public records.

  It was much more difficult to click the “agree” button, but I consoled myself with the thought that I’d be deleting this account tomorrow – and the fact that I had no friends.

  It was a clever quiz, and if the first question was any indication of the rest of them, I knew they’d be able to guess my age and gender and then have a fair degree of information to guess education, interests, and leisure-time activities.

  I was trying to decide between the truth and complete fiction when my cell phone rang. I answered on speakerphone without thinking. “Hello?”

  There was a pause. I looked at the number and realized I didn’t know it. My hand was just reaching for the disconnect button when a deep British voice said, “Sophie?”

  And I promptly dropped the phone.

  “Shit!” I mumbled under my breath as I grabbed for it, then, “Sorry.”

  Oscar gave me a side-eye look before hmphing himself back to sleep, and I heard a low chuckle as I put the phone to my ear. “Tell Oscar he’ll be getting the bill for my bike.”

  “How do you know his name?” I asked without thinking. I was actually doing a lot of not-thinking – far more than I was comfortable with.

  “It’s what you called him. I briefly considered searching the veterinarians in the city for patients named Oscar to find you, so I appreciated the note.”

  “I didn’t actually mean to give you my real number.”

  “Well, I assume Sophie’s not your real name, and the number’s unlisted, so perhaps we’re even?” His voice was very smooth and deep, and I pressed the phone to my ear to get closer to it, which hurt.

  “Hold on, let me get headphones,” I said as I grabbed a pair of earbuds from the coffee table. When I could see my phone screen again, I took a screenshot of the phone number as backup. “Give me the address of your bike shop, and I’ll go in and pay the bill,” I said.

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll just straighten the rim and it’ll be fine.”

  “I’m really sorry about what happened. Are you okay?” I played with the cord of the headphones and tried to picture him as he answered.

  “I’m pretty sure they’re going to have to amputate,” he said significantly.

  “Smart ass,” I said. “You’re walking just fine.”

  “Really? And how might you know that?” Gabriel Eze sounded relaxed and amused, and I settled back into the couch and absently ran my fingers through Oscar’s fur.

  “I spied on you at work. I thought about sending you flowers, but I couldn’t very well address them to the hot guy my dog smashed into.”

  His low chuckle rumbled through me as I winced at my un-filtered mouth.

  “Why did you call?” I finally asked.

  “You gave me your number.” There was a note of laughter in his tone, and I pictured him lounging back on a sofa. “We didn’t catch your thief, by the way.”

  “Oh, well, thanks for trying.” I played idly with my phone, and the Facebook quiz screen sprang back to life.

  “I’m not done. The thief’s still out there, and I’m still searching for her,” he said quietly. My hand stilled, and I might have held my breath a little. “She seems to have found an account worth a million that didn’t belong to her – an account under our protection.”

  “A million dollars? That’s a lot. You sure that much went missing?” I tried to keep my tone airy and unconcerned.

  “The account holder implied so,” he said carefully.

  “Hmm. You’ve got your work cut out for you. I’d better let you get to it, then.”

  This time, Gabriel was the one to change the subject. “What were you doing when I called? You sounded distracted.”

  I smiled. “I was about to take a personality quiz on Facebook. It’s on an app run by ADDATA. You may have heard of them?”

  I could hear his sharp intake of breath. “I may have. Why might ADDATA be running a personality quiz? Don’t they sell digital ad space?”

  “It’s something I’ve been asking myself too. Why don’t you take the quiz with me and maybe we can figure it out?”

  There was silence on the other end of the phone, and then another low chuckle. His laughter did very strange but not unpleasant things to my insides. “Okay,” he finally said. “You read the questions, and we’ll answer them out loud.”

  I exhaled sharply. “I was just trying to decide whether to answer them honestly or make something up when you called.”

  “Oh, honesty is always the best policy,” he said.

  “I will if you will.” I closed my eyes and thought I heard a smile in his tone.

  “Deal.”

  Of course either of us could lie at any point and the other person wouldn’t know, but I thought it might actually be fun to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth for once.

  “Okay, question one. You’re stranded on a desert island. Which would you rather have with you – your favorite book, your favorite music album, your favorite video game, or your favorite movie?”

  “We’re assuming the requisite electronics accompany said choice?” he asked.

  “We are assuming so, yes.” I smiled.

  “You first.”

  “Book,” I said quickly.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because when I’ve read it through so many times that I’ve memorized it, I can use the pages for toilet paper or to light signal fires.”

  Gabriel burst out laughing, and there went my insides again. “What about you?” I grinned. His laughter was infectious.

  He thought for a moment, then answered, “Music album.”

  “Okay, why?”

  “Because music is my escape, and no matter where I am or what I’m doing, I can be transported someplace else.”

  Oh.

  “There’s a second part to the question. Which album would you choose?”

  “Really? That’s rather detailed for a personality quiz. It provides quite a lot of information, don’t you think?”

  “I do think. It’s also not as easy to collate fill-in-the-blank as multiple choice questions, which means they’re matching specific information with specific people – people they can track and potentially target.”

  “That’s interesting, and not a little bit frightening.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” I said as I considered the scope of the implications.

  “So, which book would you bring?” The smile was back in his voice.

  “An anthology. Something big, with all the stories. Maybe Jack London or Arthur Conan Doyle.”

  “Somehow I think Call of the Wild might be a bit more useful than Sherlock Holmes on a deserted island.”

  “Maybe. But survival requires cleverness too, not just resources.”

  “I’d say survival is ninety percent cleverness and ten percent resources,” he said with a degree of seriousness in his tone that suggested personal experience.

  “Which album would you bring?”


  “The soundtrack to Hamilton,” Gabriel said, without hesitation. I was so startled I laughed. “You think that’s funny?”

  “I think that’s excellent. Why Hamilton?”

  I could hear the smile again. “There’s music, there’s singing, there’s implied dancing, and perhaps more importantly, it’s a display of the promise of what’s possible. Also, I’d be lying if I didn’t say the emphasis on immigrants getting the job done appeals to me.”

  There was a notification ding on his phone. “Hang on a second,” he said. I heard him type something, and then he was back. “Sorry about that.”

  “It’s okay. You have to go?”

  “No, it was just my sister letting me know she survived another day.”

  “That sounds ominous. Was her survival uncertain?” I was joking, but then I realized it might not be a joke for him at all. I had no idea what her life looked like, or where she lived, or what her circumstances were, and I held my breath, waiting to hear if I’d offended him.

  “Survival is usually guaranteed in my family. We’re rather hard to kill. Sanity, however, remains a daily question.”

  “Should I be worried?” I exhaled quietly, hoping my relief wasn’t audible.

  I could hear the long, slow smile in his voice again, and imagining it on his face made my heart pound. “I don’t know. Should you?”

  I practically leapt off the couch, and Oscar grumbled at me for the disturbance. “So, I have some work to do. I don’t suppose I’ll see you out on the Lakefront Trail anytime soon, right?”

  I wasn’t sure why I’d just gotten so panicky, but I suddenly felt the need to end this call. I paced my small living room and felt Oscar’s eyes track my progress as I circled the coffee table.

  Gabriel’s voice got sharper, and his British accent was more clipped and formal. “I won’t be cycling for a few days, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Good. I mean, I’m sorry, not good, I just …” I didn’t know what I just. I just …

  “What just happened?” he asked carefully.