Nothing major – nothing that would set things back irrevocably. Just enough to cause annoyance and cause delays.
But now, it wasn’t looking like just carelessness, though he wouldn’t forgive carelessness, either. Now it looked like…
Harrison frowned as his fingers flew over the keyboard, as he followed trails that were almost, but not quite invisible. There were traces. But the longer he spent following those traces, finding them and carefully preserving them, the more he realized something.
He was being played.
Something odd was going on. It looked like it had been going on for about three months. At least, whoever had done it had been doing it for three months. Harrison slowed down and took a deep breath.
Something was very wrong.
There was something that not many people knew. He didn’t do much of it personally anymore – it had been a hobby, too. The gaming had been his main interest. But internet security was a part of gaming, the way he saw it, and he had begun to dabble in it. That particular wing of his company was shrouded in mystery to the outside world.
In fact, the internet security part of it had been on hold for a few months because he had found himself getting distracted, because of the trouble he and Leigh had had for a while. They had completed projects, fulfilled contracts, and he had let it hibernate. He had needed a break from the intensive work, too.
Even Leigh didn’t know that about him – because he had handled a few confidential contracts, including from the US government.
It should all have been all but erased from those servers. But they weren’t. Behind the blocks that he had put in place, Harrison found traces of somebody else – somebody who had no business poking around there at all.
He had been hacked.
There was no way around it.
Grimly, followed what traces he could find. He found pings off servers that had nothing to do with his company, with his company’s signature, and felt the first trace of real alarm. Just a hacker – that was bad, but he could deal with it. He had dealt with worse, hadn’t he?
But this felt like something more.
Quickly, he checked the time and decided regretfully that it was too late to call Anna and speed things along. She could’ve given him time logs faster.
But more pressing was why – some of it had been to sabotage him, obviously, and he could plug those leaks, but why had his servers been used to do things that simply didn’t make sense?
Harrison frowned as he followed more trails, saw the traces left from pingbacks from places where nobody from his company would have any reason going. He didn’t understand.
It wasn’t often that Harrison didn’t understand.
He didn’t have much time to understand, either.
“Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit!”
Harrison quickly backtracked, typing frantically as he tried to erase all signs of his own presence as well as those of anything to do with his network.
He had triggered something.
He wasn’t sure just what he had triggered – and under other circumstances, he would’ve been intrigued by it. But now…
“Shit,” muttered Harrison again as he realized where he was. He was deep in the dark web, and he had no business being there, not without the cloak of security that he always used when he was there.
He hadn’t followed any of his precautions. He had let himself slip, and now…
“Damn it,” he muttered, and knew, immediately, that he had screwed up phenomenally.
The traces and trails, the signatures in the code that he’d thought he’d discovered, had been a trap. They’d been there because he had been meant to find them. He had been neatly led down a path where he triggered something, and he had a feeling, from what he had seen, that it would be bad.
He had a feeling that he had accidentally broken into classified US government files, which might mean more than just a cybercrime. It might be a crime against US national security, and that was the kind of thing that money and influence couldn’t get your way out of.
The only hope was to fight against time and try to erase all traces of everything he had been doing over the last few hours, but the traces he had been following suddenly became more like beacons, and everything would lead back to him – his servers, his company. No, worse than that – it would all lead back to his home.
Harrison would’ve sworn, but he didn’t have any breath to spare for it. It was a race against time, his fingers hardly able to keep up with his mind as he tried to figure out how to stop it, how to head it off before it implicated everything he had built. The thought of how the research he had done to build his game would look now, in light of this attempted hacking from him, made him sweat a fair bit. But he had no time for that, either.
His fingers were still flying over the keyboard when suddenly, everything went black. Harrison tried everything, but somebody had pulled a kill switch somewhere.
He watched, frozen, as pixels started coming back to life.
HA. HA. HA.
HAVE FUN, HARRISON BLOOM.
The letters faded away, and he saw the code again, but now he knew that there was nothing he could do. Still, he tried. How could he not? Giving up was not a part of him. It had never been.
Finally, giving up, he sat back and stared at the screen, aghast.
He had apparently hacked into classified files, in a ham-handed attempt that left clues so big that even the stupidest of NYPD’s finest would have no trouble finding it. Hell, even a grandmother who still had AOL mail could follow that trail.
And that trail had been drawn with the digital equivalent of a permanent marker wielded by a toddler with a score to settle.
He couldn’t figure out how to undo that. It didn’t look like there was any way to undo that.
Somebody had done a number on him. He, Harrison Bloom, was left with holding the sack.
He had been hacked, and it had been done so well that he hadn’t even realized that he had walked into a booby trap. He couldn’t tell if it had been meant for him. He might just have stumbled into it. But from what he could see had happened, he would bet quite a bit of what he owned that every single step so far had been deliberate.
For once, Harrison was at a loss. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do. It was barely six in the morning. He had spent all night on the computer, and now it looked like he had breached the kind of wall that nobody had any business breaching.
Taking a deep breath, Harrison did the only thing that made sense. He pulled up his log, and went through every step and every misstep, recording everything he could before it could be erased by whatever virus he had set loose. When he saw that information was being erased and rewritten, he knew that he was in for much more than he had thought. This was sophisticated.
It had been a while. But it looked like he had no choice but to slide back into a community he had cut ties with a while back, partly because he hadn’t wanted anything tying him to any questionable practices once Leigh was tied to him.
He had been a white hat hacker for a long time, and he had built up quite a name for himself, though very few knew who he was. Now it looked like he had to dive back, and reclaim that identity, if he was to find out who had set such an elaborate trap for him – sabotaging him in little ways that would annoy him, but not enough to make him take elaborate precautions or put him on his guard. Then leaving just enough clues and hints behind that he’d have no real choice but to follow them and see where he was taken – until he slowly figured out the sophistry involved, and when he did, he would be too late, deep into territory that no civilian had any business being in, and at risk because his identity was out in the open.
Worse, his company was involved because Harrison hadn’t taken precautions to hide that.
He didn’t have any illusions about his skills. If he wanted to, he could do it without leaving a trace. But he had been lulled into it, baited into it like a fuck.
“Fuck,” he said softly, but he
knew that it had been done. There was nothing he could do about it now.
There would be fallout. The only thing he could do was try to limit the damage his company would take. He would have to push releases and figure out a statement.
There was nothing else to be done. He’d have to wake Anna up.
He needed her to get on top of this before he got asked the questions that he knew would come his way, and soon.
Harrison grabbed his phone and dialed. He wasn’t surprised when Anna answered on the second ring, sounding as competent as ever.
“Harrison, what’s wrong?”
“We have a problem, Anna.”
“Yes, I figured we did. It’s six in the morning. Tell me what it is. I’ll get on it right away.”
“We need to push all releases for the foreseeable future. We’ve been hacked.”
Quickly, he went through the explanations, and was grateful that Anna was quick enough on the uptake not to ask questions that would delay their response unnecessarily.
“Yes, I’ll get the troubleshooting team together. They’re trained to deal with emergencies.”
“No, this is somebody smarter. If I can’t do it…”
There was a pause.
“Did you try calling Dave? Dave Hills?”
It took Harrison a minute to put a face to the name. Then he wanted to kick himself for not having thought of Dave sooner.
“Of course. Of course, I should’ve called him. Maybe if I call now and explain, we can head this off. Anna, you’re a lifesaver.”
The relief was stupendous. Dave Hills of cybercrimes division was the best person to call, of course it was. He should’ve thought of him earlier, himself.
“I’m not sure if it will help. We’re prepared, Harrison. We’ll take a hit, but we’ll do it.”
Harrison hesitated, for barely a moment.
“I know. But this is personal,” said Harrison, before hanging up.
Chapter 5
“Harrison? How long have you been up?”
Harrison took a moment to still his mind and wipe worry away from his face before turning around to Leigh.
“Couldn’t sleep. I figured I might as well catch up on some work. I didn’t want to wake you up.”
Leigh smiled as she watched her husband get to his feet and walk towards her. He really was something – seeing him half-naked had a way of getting her juices running in all kinds of ways. But those worry lines were still there, and Leigh hated seeing them. With most regular folks, she would’ve suggested a vacation, but she had a feeling that the honeymoon was part of what had put them there in the first place. Harrison really did need to learn to let go a little.
“There are interesting ways of being woken up,” teased Leigh, determined to make him smile. But the kiss she got from him was distracted and quick.
He really was worried about something.
“Harrison, what’s wrong?”
Harrison shook his head.
“Nothing’s wrong. Just a few development troubles at work. Nothing I can’t sort out, obviously.”
“I suppose the indubitable Anna will sort it out if you can’t.”
“I suppose she will. Coffee? Breakfast?”
So there would be no morning sex, thought Leigh, a little deflated. But coffee and breakfast sounded good enough. At least making breakfast – eggs had become his one specialty – would keep him from frowning so much.
“Eggs,” declared Leigh decisively, and she was glad to see Harrison smile.
“One of these days, I’ll amaze you with my waffles.”
“Yes, I’m pretty sure I’ll be shocked,” agreed Leigh, making him chuckle.
But his heart wasn’t in it, and she could see it.
Leigh was relieved when it was time for her to go to work. Harrison was already far away and tackling possibly great crises and solving them all. Anyway, her own work might not have such wide impact, but it was important, too.
By the time she got to work, she had nearly forgotten about Harrison’s morning mood. It was going to be a good day. She had a healthy caseload – perhaps unhealthy, considering that she did need to sleep sometime – and she was making excellent progress. So far, she’d managed to get most cases dismissed before they’d really started. Leigh was beginning to wonder if she’d ever have that mythical day in court. After all, every lawyer dreamt of that when watching Perry Mason reruns, didn’t they? To bamboozle a DA by solving a case and proving their star witness did it – why, that was why she’d become a lawyer in the first place!
“Leigh?”
Leigh looked up to see a very frazzled Roger.
“What happened? Is Mia going into labor?”
Roger turned ashen.
“What? Why would you say that?”
Leigh frowned.
“Because she’s about eight months along and that’s what pregnant women do? No, never mind. Never mind about that, I’m sure she’s not. What is it?”
“Oh. You have a few messages, that’s all. And a request for a meeting from a client who claims he has to pay your bill.”
Leigh grinned.
“Wouldn’t that make a lovely change!”
“It would. I have a family to support. Especially if Mia has gone into labor.”
Leigh rolled her eyes at him.
“You’re so dramatic. It’s not like you’re broke or anything. So who’s this incredible client who wants to pay us?”
“Somebody named Darius. He said you’d know.”
Leigh frowned.
“Yes, I do. He’s the one who called us – remember? The first one I went for.”
Roger nodded, his interest piqued.
“I thought there was no chance he could afford to pay you.”
Leigh shrugged dismissively.
“That’s what I thought. He did say he would. I don’t know what to make of him, honestly. Anyway… I can make time for him at lunch if he wants to see me.”
“He seems to think it’s urgent.”
Leigh frowned.
“Well, he’ll have to wait till lunch. Tell him I said so.”
Leigh had just settled down to take care of some of the paperwork that had started to pile up when she got the call.
“Leigh?”
“Yes? Who is this?”
“This is Officer O’Donnell.”
Leigh put a face to the name immediately.
“Of course, Portia, do you have something for me?”
“I do, but not how you think. Leigh, Harrison Bloom has just been brought in for questioning. It’s all very unofficial so far, but I have a bad feeling about this.”
Everything in Leigh seemed to screech to a stop, including her heart.
Harrison taken in for questioning?
What the hell was going on?
“What’s the charge?” asked Leigh, but her voice didn’t sound like her own.
“There’s no charge yet. But I got from one of the guys who picked him up that it’s something to do with cybercrime and national security. Leigh, there’s some buzz about a black site.”
The mention of a black site made her blood run cold.
“That’s not happening. I’ll be there in under twenty. I… Thank you, Portia. I owe you. I owe you big.”
“We have to stick together. It smells fishy to me. Anyway, I know what you did for Darius. You’re fine.”
Leigh managed to thank Portia again and hung up quickly. She grabbed her stuff and ran out, throwing a garbled explanation over her shoulder to Roger as she ran. She couldn’t wait for him to understand. He’d just have to handle things herself.
She was in the car when her phone rang again. Another number she didn’t know, she realized, and picked up the call.
“Ms. Wells, it’s Darius. Something funny is going down.”
Leigh should’ve pulled over and talked to him, but there were times for following rules and there were times to let rules go to hell.
“What do you mean?”
“Something odd. It looks like your husband is in the middle of it. I’ve been following a few leads. There’s something odd.”
“Yes, I heard you already. I’ll call you as soon as I can. I need to go find Harrison now.”
“Shit, is he in trouble?”
“Nothing I can’t get him out of. But after that, I need to know whatever it is that you know.”
“Sure thing. I’ll be waiting.”
The kid definitely knew when not to take up her time gabbing, thought Leigh as she hung up and headed straight to the precinct. There was no time to waste.
As expected, the lieutenant was not happy to see her.
“I don’t know of any request for you, Ms. Wells,” he drawled, and Leigh to fight the instinct to plant her fist right in his smug, smirking face.
“And I happen to know that you have Harrison Bloom under your custody, though he hasn’t been charged. If he’s not being held, I’d like to see him.”
“We’d all like a good many things, Ms. Wells.”
“Yes, of course. For instance, I know that what a certain Annabelle Addams wants more than anything else is a scoop. I could give her one, including custody and being held without charge, and not letting your prisoner’s lawyer and wife talk to him.”
His eyes narrowed. He wasn’t pleased with that. He wouldn’t be. Leigh had done her research. The Lt had been known for a certain disregard for procedure, and Annabelle Addams was the reporter who had a bone to pick with him. She was also the mayor’s niece, which made things a little more difficult for the Lt.
“You watch yourself.”
“Is that a threat, Lieutenant? Goody! My day keeps getting better. You know how I like being threatened by law enforcement.”
It was with very bad grace, and she was made to wait for far too long. But Leigh finally managed to get in to talk to Harrison, who hadn’t called anybody.
“Harrison…”
“Leigh! I hoped you’d come.”
He looked disheveled and unlike himself, thought Leigh, her anger draining away as she took in the state of him.
Our Happily Ever After: BWWM Interracial Romance Black Women White Men (That Forbidden Love Book 3) Page 5
