“Ok,” I answered, “I think I mostly remember which way I went. You want me to draw it?”
“Yes please.”
I pulled out a pen and started marking which doors and hallways I went down. It had taken me the better part of forty-five minutes to go up twelve floors to Nathan’s office, since I was just following important looking people wearing badges and hoping they headed up. I did the best I could. While I drew arrows and notes, Nathan and Cecelia looked on silently.
“Alright,” I finally said, “I think I’m done. Will you explain now?”
“Soon,” Nathan answered, “but a couple of questions first.”
I shook my head. This felt wrong. Nathan was being too cold and unfriendly. This was worse than I thought.
“No,” I replied, “explain now. I indulged you and drew all that stuff on the understanding you’d tell me what this was all really about. What did you think I could help with?
Nathan sighed and ran his fingers through his hair in apparent frustration. He didn’t answer. My breath froze in my chest.
“You think I did it, don’t you?” I finally managed.
Nathan and Cecelia exchanged a glance. That was as good as admitting it.
“This is why you were weird last night?” I asked Nathan, trying to keep my voice even, “you thought the whole time I was the one who hacked you?”
Nathan didn’t answer. He was staring somewhere in the middle distance between us. The thought that he’d charmed me, took me out on a nice date, and let me take him into my home just to figure out if I was behind his data breach made me feel ill. I wanted to sleep with him, but he’d never wanted me at all. Everything about last night had been a lie.
Nathan just continued to stare at me with a guilty expression on his face, so Cecelia took lead.
“Did you access any computers on the ninth floor?” She asked.
“No,” I replied in angry, flat voice, looking her dead in the eye, “I didn’t touch them.”
“Did you use any network connected devices on the ninth floor.”
“No.”
“Can I see your phone?”
I took it out of my purse and showed it to her. Why not? All I had was a glorified burner phone. It was just your average prepaid flip phone. There’s no way I could afford a smartphone on my income. Cecelia blinked at it in shock when she flipped it open and saw how crappy and non-smart it was. I guess she thought I’d have something better?
“That’s not your real phone. No one has phones like that anymore. Where’s your real phone?” She barked at me. Nathan looked like he was going to be ill, but he didn’t stop Cecelia.
“Fuck you both,” I said, standing up, “I’m so done with this. Not being rich doesn’t make me a criminal, Nathan. Not having a nice phone doesn’t make me a liar, Cecelia. Sneaking up to Nathan’s office doesn’t make me a hacker. At worst, it maybe makes me a trespasser. Call the police and have me arrested for that if you can. I’d love to hear your statement on how you handled catching me, Nathan. But this… whatever it is, this shit is so over.” My voice had risen considerably. I needed to get out of there before my composure collapsed.
I headed toward the conference room door. Tears were starting to burn the corners of my eyes and I fought them back with anger.
“Zoey, wait,” Nathan said seriously, standing up and blocking my access to the door.
My eyes widened as a sudden wave of fear washed over me to make me feel weak and vulnerable. My anger evaporated. Was he going to keep me here? He was so much bigger than me, he easily could. Would he hurt me? I backed up, out of his grasp. My eyes scanned the room for another exit. There wasn’t one.
“Zoey, calm down,” Nathan said, trying too late to attempt a soothing tone, “I just want to talk to you.”
A feeling of deathly calm descended on me. I knew it was temporary, but I’d make the most of it while I still could.
“You tricked me and you lied to me. You lured me here to interrogate me because you’re too incompetent to figure this out yourself and are blaming me instead. You have zero proof, or the police would have been at my door last night. We both know that. I didn’t have anything to do with your hacking. Let me out of this room right now or I’ll start screaming for help. Now. You think you’ve been publicly embarrassed before? I could do so much worse to you. I’m sure Juicy News will love publishing my piece about your other rocket’s performance.”
Cecelia opened her mouth to say something, but Nathan silenced her with a look and stepped aside. I practically ran to the elevator. People stared at me, but I ignored them. I didn’t look back and I didn’t slow down.
By the time I made it out to my car, I was sobbing hysterically.
15
Nathan
“What’s she doing now?” I asked Cecelia miserably. Cecelia had produced a pair of night vision binoculars from god knows where and was standing in my office and peering into the parking lot. She was ex-special forces, so for all I knew she kept a pair in her big-ass purse.
“She’s still crying in her car,” Cecelia said, offering me the binoculars. I shook my head. I wasn’t going to spy on Zoey.
It had been almost two hours since the ‘conversation’ with Zoey went south. She was still crying in the parking lot at ten pm. Even if she had hacked Durant Industries, I now felt like I was the real criminal. We never should have confronted her.
“I’m not so sure it’s her anymore,” Cecelia said with a frown, “I’m not sure anyone can fake crying like that until they throw up. Especially twice in a row over two hours. Maybe she’s got the flu or something?”
“Great,” I said sarcastically. I couldn’t believe I’d made Zoey so upset she was now sick. She wasn’t the only one feeling ill. My head felt like someone had been testing my skull density with various power tools.
“Maybe you should go talk to her?” Cecelia asked. The fact that Cecelia now felt guilty made me vaguely angry, but not at her. I never should have asked Zoey to come here tonight. This was all on me.
“I don’t think she wants to talk to me,” I told Cecelia, “you don’t know what I did last night.”
Cecelia was my friend as well as my employee, but I really didn’t want to get into something so personal with her.
“I can guess,” she replied dryly.
A knock on the door saved me from having to explain.
“Mr. Breyer, Ms. Salina?” Paul poked his head in the door, read the feeling in the room in an instant, and cringed.
“Hi Paul,” I answered tiredly, “what is it? Also, why are you still here? Your workday ends at five.”
“Victor’s here to see you,” Paul answered, “he says it’s important. Should I let him in?”
That was a surprise. Victor hardly ever came up from the basement. He was strictly an email kind of guy. I wasn’t sure he’d ever been in my office before.
“Yeah of course,” I said, “but you didn’t answer my question, Paul. Why are you still at the office?”
“Everyone’s still here, Mr. Breyer. The whole company, not just the data and IT teams. You’re still working, so we’re still working.”
The people that worked for Durant Astronautics were incredibly dedicated. They were the absolute best of the best in every field. At that moment, I didn’t feel like I deserved to lead them.
“Please send everyone who isn’t working on the data breach home, Paul. With the launch so close, I don’t want anyone overworked.”
Paul nodded and disappeared. Victor lumbered in a moment later.
Victor was what happened when a Stephen Hawking level brain was born into Chris Farley level body. His seething genius peered out of round baby blue eyes in a big pink face, and he grinned at Cecelia and I with yellow peg teeth. Underestimating Victor because of his appearance, while common, was very stupid.
“We made a mistake!” He said happily, plopping down into one of the chairs across from me with a loud thud, “we were totally wrong!”
“Why do you sound happy about that?” I asked Victor, hoping he hadn’t finally lost his mind. He was brilliant, but Victor, who reported to Cecelia and was actually the man in charge of our networks and data privacy, had not taken the news of our breach well. Last I heard he’d been running on Red Bulls and Bugles for the past 24 hours with no rest save occasional forays to the vending machines.
“Because it’s good news,” Victor said, beaming, “we knew what time the hacker accessed the network to disable the security cameras, however, we did not realize that the hacker had actually used a remote VPN to do it. Whoever turned off the cameras wasn’t actually in the building at all.”
VPN stood for virtual proxy network, I knew that, but the only other thing I really knew about them was,
“We don’t have a VPN,” I stated.
“Exactly!” Cried Victor joyfully, assuming that I understood both his point and the significance of it.
“Explain in smaller words,” Cecelia interjected, “you two might be tech geniuses but my background is in physical security.”
Victor rolled his eyes.
“A VPN creates a secure tunnel through the internet from one device to another. It’s a commonly used way for companies to allow users to remotely access their desktops through the server. We don’t use a VPN though. We have a closed network that only allows access with a direct link to our servers. The fact that someone hacked us using a VPN means two important things. The first is that they had to physically install the VPN on a router somewhere. The second is that the VPN, while it can spoof its IP address, can actually be traced back to its real location.”
“Then what you’re trying to tell us is that someone plugged in an unauthorized USB drive to one of our routers and then someone else, or maybe the same person, installed that software and disabled the cameras that allowed access the server room,” I ventured.
“Correct,” Victor said, still grinning, “instead of just accessing data from a machine using stolen credentials, which is what we thought they did, they used our machine as a bridge. It gets even better. We already found the drive that contained the, well let’s call it, other end of the VPN hole.”
He held up a standard flash drive.
“Ok, hold on,” Cecelia said, still confused, “the VPN is a tunnel between our system and the rest of the world. That flash drive created the tunnel. Is that right?”
“Yeah pretty much,” Victor answered.
“Alright,” continued Cecelia, “so the flash drive had to be plugged physically into one of our routers in order to work, is that right too?”
“Obviously yes,” Victor said, getting visibly annoyed that Cecelia wasn’t sharing his excitement yet.
“So, do we know who plugged in the flash drive? Where was it found? And then where did the other end of the tunnel go?” She asked.
“No. Launch control platform. Right here onsite. The code and USB were clearly Russian in origin.” Answered Victor, the news he had actually come up from his dungeon for at last.
“Someone, possibly a Russian someone or at least using Russian technology, plugged the drive into a router in the launch control office?” I asked, and Victor nodded. That was bad. There were dozens of people in there for the press junket and tours. That area wasn’t monitored internally by cameras either since it wasn’t part of the permanent structure of Durant Astronautics. It had been built for the current batch of test launches and would then be rebuilt on a much larger scale if we were successful.
“And then that same someone onsite that day then hacked us,” Cecelia added, coming to the same dour conclusion as me. In the same moment, another thought barged into my brain and set me on my feet an instant later.
“This means it can’t have been Zoey, because she was with me the whole time. Thanks Victor great work. Keep me posted Cecelia. Every five hours. See you tomorrow.”
I sprinted to the stairs.
16
Zoey
I went home to try and write my damn article, so I wouldn’t lose my job and starve to death. But as I worked my way through the second glass poured from the bottle of painfully cheap vodka I picked up on the way home, my efforts were becoming increasingly weak. In my drunken stupor, I’d taken to writing dirty limericks about Angelica instead of the panegyric I was supposed to be composing.
Gold-digger Angelica Hunt,
Who pulls the occasional stunt,
and thinks that she’s royalty,
and lives so flamboyantly,
Is really a thundering cunt.
A knock on the door shook me loose from my stupor. I glanced over at the clock on my oven. The little glowing, green numbers said it was eleven pm. Aside from pizza, nothing good ever shows up at your door at eleven on a Tuesday. I hadn’t ordered any pizza.
“Go away!” I yelled from my position at my dining table/desk. Sometimes the heroine junkies that lived down the hall forgot which apartment belonged to them. I knew for certain there was no one I wanted to see right now. And there was one person I definitely didn’t ever want to see again.
My phone started ringing a second later. I almost knocked the notebook I was scribbling in to the ground in surprise. It was Nathan. I stared at the door, then back down to my phone, feeling trapped. He could probably hear it ringing, so now he knew I was in here. The call rolled over to voicemail, and the knocking started again.
I let the cycle of knocking and calling repeat three times before I reluctantly got up to open the door. At least I was drunk enough that I was no longer actively hurting, I just wanted to be left alone. Hopefully this would be brief.
“What do you want?” I snapped, flinging the door open so hard it hit the wall and bounced. On the other side of it was Nathan, standing with an enormous bouquet of white, yellow, and pink flowers in my hallway. “Don’t you know what time it is?”
Instead of answering, Nathan stared at me up and down in surprise.
I was wearing my unsexist pajamas: short shorts and an oversized T-shirt. My makeup was an absolute disaster, with destroyed mascara drawing livid black streaks down my face and eyeshadow smeared all around from trying to wipe away the tears. I wasn’t wearing a bra, but I was wearing a pair of pink fuzzy bunny slippers. The point is, I looked good.
“Can I come in?” Nathan asked, glancing nervously down the hall at a few of my sketchier-looking neighbors who were peeking out of their own doors. They were actually harmless, but he didn’t know that.
“Why the hell not?” I said recklessly, as much to myself as to him, “it’s not like you could make this night any worse.”
I turned around and let him follow me in, grabbing my vodka glass and sitting down on my teeny-tiny loveseat.
“Do you have a vase?” Nathan asked, looking confused about what to do with the flowers now that he was inside.
“No, but the trash can is under the sink. Why don’t you just help move this along and put them there? I don’t want your fucking flowers, asshole.”
Nathan set the flowers on the counter and came over to kneel in front of me. I watched him warily and tried to look confident and uncaring when what I really felt was desperate and vulnerable. Still, despite how I was feeling, if he touched me I was going to punch him.
“Zoey, I’m so sorry,” he said sincerely, “after you left we found proof it wasn’t you. I never should have accused you like that. I should’ve told you everything last night and I realize that. It was wrong to lie to you by omission.”
I absorbed his apology in silence. When he was finished, I nodded and then shrugged.
“Ok,” I said, smiling at him tightly, “I’m glad you apologized. I still don’t forgive you and never will. Now leave.”
His lips parted in surprise at my order. What, did he think that would work? That if he came over here with flowers and apologized I would just forgive him and he could feel all better? Fuck that. This isn’t a Disney movie. I wanted him to be miserable with guilt, and then I still didn’t want to forgive him. He tricked me
.
“Zoey,” he continued while I sat fuming, trying to ignore him, “you’ve got to believe me, I didn’t want to do any of it. I didn’t really believe it was you. This company means everything to me, and I just didn’t know what else to do. You were the only suspect we had…” He trailed off into silence.
“Whatever Nathan. There was no excuse for pretending like you liked me just to see if you could figure out if I was the hacker. That was cruel. And it was even worse to drag me into that trap tonight.”
Nathan looked completely shocked.
“I wasn’t pretending to like you, Zoey,” he said, and it made me start to leak tears again, “I do like you! I like you a lot… that’s why I couldn’t go through with it last night and ran off. I couldn’t take advantage of you. My intentions weren’t honest, and I panicked.”
I tried to wrap my mind around what he was saying. It made a certain sort of sense. But this explanation relied on Nathan not being a liar, and he’d already lied to me once. I couldn’t just believe that he really cared about me. Maybe everyone with lots of money was as cruel and unfeeling as Angelica.
“Is this how you usually treat women you like? How’s it working for you? Because that’s the most fucked up version of chivalry I’ve ever heard.” I still didn’t believe him. The flowers were nice, but the pie last night was nice, too. Nathan wasn’t trustworthy, and I wouldn’t be lied to by him again.
“No,” he said haltingly, “look, I don’t really know what I’m doing. I haven’t dated anyone in a very long time. I haven’t wanted to. My work has been all-consuming. You have every right to be angry at me. You have every right to hate me. But I wish you wouldn’t.”
I stared at him kneeling on my floor in the middle of the night and wished I could believe him. His blue-green eyes were so wide and earnest, and he had his hands spread out, palm up in desperation. Did he really care? Was he really attracted to me? I shook my head. This was clearly just another trick.
Kiss and Tell (Scions of Sin Book 2) Page 7
