The Passionate Mistake

by Amelia Hart

  Trawling through one, she approved the elegance of the script. It was written by an expert programmer; though hmmm, not bug-free. She altered a pair of pathways that could cause the coder trouble down the road, an absent-minded action, just because she could.

  She paused to take a quick glance around the room, checking for any threat, but she was ignored. The man at the front of the crowd now was quite a good speaker and he held the interest of his listeners. Dave. It was her job to know everyone, so know them she did. Dave Carter, flaccid belly overhanging his pants, one hand resting on the top of the mass as it jiggled along with his laughter at his own joke. Others laughed too. Yes, a good speaker. She didn’t like his code though. Weak. Too many keystrokes to say too little. He needed to pare back.

  She scanned sideways and her attention was caught by the boss, sitting to Dave’s left, alternately listening and swiping at the screen of his own tablet. From her angle she couldn’t see what programs he was in. She was curious. Michael Summers was his name, and him she watched too much. Watched him almost obsessively whenever she encountered him, in fact, though she did her best not to. He was certainly charismatic enough. Even when quietly listening to someone else talk he drew attention; a natural-born leader.

  His tablet looked fragile in those square, muscular hands with veins roping all over them. Big capable hands. Mmmm. Good hands. The rest of him was big too. Broad shoulders under a smoky blue polo-neck shirt, dark blue denim clasping large, shapely thighs. When he shifted to lean back in his chair his shirt draped conveniently over his pectorals and flat abdomen. Convenient for someone checking him out, that is. Her gaze wandered dreamily back up to his face, and she almost bit her tongue.

  Without moving his head his eyes were now on her, a dark, penetrating gaze that made her hot all over. Certain she was blushing, she pretended great interest in what Dave was saying. He was theorizing about the need parents had for an application to track their offspring’s whereabouts and show their location on a map.

  For agonizing moments she stared unblinking at Dave, until finally she dared flick her eyes back towards the boss for a swift reconnaissance. He too was looking at Dave again, his blandly interested expression unchanged. She released the breath she’d been holding. Then she went back to the program, straightening out two more lines of code before abandoning it. It was code for populating a website with a dozen features and it was too esoteric. She wanted a program that was truly generic, and this wasn’t it.

  Without at first realizing it, she was staring at Mike again. Dark-haired and handsome as the devil. Intense and charming. He gazed at his tablet, a small furrow between his brows. He looked up and scanned the room. She ducked her head just before he caught her watching him again. But it was the others he was looking at: his programmers, not her hovering to one side of the room. He was looking at his tablet and then back up as if puzzled. Looking at Francine, in fact.

  She shrugged and dismissed him from her mind with a small effort, refocusing on the next software file, translating code with an ease born of years of practice. This was a little closer to what she wanted: an application for organizing and scheduling a busy working mother’s overwhelming workload; tying into Dave’s presentation, no doubt.

  Motherhood was generic. There were billions of mothers in the world. Perhaps she had the right program. But it looked like only half of it. A shell of user interface designed to wrap around a deeper functionality. There were chunks missing. Were they still in development? Or was there another level of data she had not yet reached?

  Just like every damned program-in-progress she’d accessed so far, which pointed to a library of source code that was nowhere she could access. It must be locked up in the Datacentre. There were no hidden rooms anywhere in the building and the only other locked section was the plushy office suite on the first floor for the Platform Division’s programmers.

  She brought up her worm and sent it tunneling through the networks, searching for links to the mothers’ program, anything she might have missed. She was distracted each time the speaker changed, and a couple of times found herself Mike-watching again, but mostly her task held her attention until the series of presentations came to an end. The subject of the meeting was the gathered thoughts of this work team on their current projects, the Inspirations. Served out to the team via auditory medium and tactile (the folders), and now they would discuss the ideas.

  It was a process that was supposed to engage the team fully. She knew the theories behind it, and it all sounded like hooey to her. Just send people an email telling them what they were supposed to do, and then let them get on with it. This sort of thing was such a waste of time.

  Anyway the discussion was really the part of the event where she was expected to take notes. The actual presentations would already have been emailed to everyone anyway. The debate was the soul of it.

  She disconnected from the remote server running the search and tucked her worm’s results well out of sight. When everything looked innocuous enough she put her tablet in the centre of the table for best sound pick up, then backed away and tried to look like wallpaper.

  As the discussion proceeded it was hard to keep her mouth shut. Bright as the members of the team were, there were holes and gaps in their thinking. She longed to plug them. Incompetence was difficult to tolerate. Twice her mouth fell open and she drew breath ready to speak. Twice she squelched herself. Not her place, not her role, and definitely not part of her plan.

  The second time Mike Summers caught the movement, looking at her again with his eyebrows raised. With the whole room attuned to him, it was only seconds before heads started to turn her way and the speaker of the moment stammered and paused. Cathy put her hands behind her back and looked at the floor in stony denial she had anything to contribute, and after a moment the speaker resumed, faltering slightly.

  Whoops. Way to go, staying below the radar. Next time she was asked to do this job she would just leave her tablet in the centre of the table and leave, and let anyone who wanted to notice and gossip about that slacker Cathy go right ahead. She’d leave now except she’d never take the chance of the tablet being picked up by someone else with those search results and the other evidence of her cracking.

  As soon as things wrapped up she stepped forward to claim her tablet, ending the recording. Before she had time to move away from the table she heard Mike say to the team leader, Alex: “Alex, who’ve you got working on the Jonas site?”

  “No one yet. Why?”

  “That’s strange. The code’s been rejigged. It’s done under Francine’s name but she was sitting right here at the time the alterations were made.”

  Cathy paused and started gathering up water glasses to give her an excuse to linger, so she could listen in.

  “Big changes?” said Alex.

  “Nothing major. I only spotted it because I was already in there having a tinker. They’re fairly sophisticated fixes to bugs we hadn’t even spotted. Not her usual coding style either. Good work. I like it. Do you think it might be Sophie? They work together, don’t they?”

  “We haven’t discussed anything about that program, but I’ll ask.”

  “Do. Let me know. They shouldn’t be using each other’s profiles though. It’s confusing for the system and it makes it difficult to assign credit.”

  The men left. Cathy moved the glasses to the water cart and followed the last meeting attendees back out, tablet tucked under her arm. She was intrigued he had spotted the changes she made. In her experience no one noticed tiny alterations like that. Not unless they were searching for a bug that had been introduced, and she had done no such thing. She’d improved the software; only subtly, but hey; If you could achieve perfection, why not?

  He had some skills, she mused. She’d assumed they had hired him for his management talents, but maybe his programming know-how had given him the edge over the competition. So he was a whiz kid programmer too. He hid his inner geek well.

  Of course these days
it was rather harder to pick computer nerds out of a crowd. Computers were the dominant tool of the culture. Mainstream. You didn’t need to look like a pale, hairy creature that had just crawled out from under a rock and was blinking in the light of day in order to write software.

  Look at her. She hardly fit the stereotype either; or at least, not when she looked her normal self. But dressed as she was, with mousy brown pigtails and an overgrown fringe, glasses (without prescription lenses), no make-up and baggy cardigan and jeans, she might just qualify for the stereotype after all.

  It chafed. She hated looking like this; ordinarily plain and not worthy of attention. After years painstakingly learning to make the most of every single advantage life had given her, fighting her way to the top with every tool and weapon at hand, this enforced mediocrity felt like some sort of surrender. Like defeat.

  Let alone the pretense she was meek and ignorant. Though truth be told, perhaps she couldn’t lay claim to achieving meekness. She’d bitten off a few heads over the past two weeks; from those who expected the go-fer girl to be all willing and eager to be a doormat in order to make friends and win her way up the ladder.

  Not Cathy. Cathy was going nowhere, and she didn’t care a scrap. Let them stare at her in consternation when she sneered right back, contradicted or outwitted them . . .

  No, she couldn’t say meekness was something she had managed. As it was, even trying to adopt a subservient attitude while she tidied up after people and ran menial errands had her feeling like a thunderstorm all day; massed on the horizon and ready to strike.

  Two weeks was far too long. It was doing her head in. She had to find the ideal piece of software soon. Find it and steal it.

  Chapter Two

  She thought the room was empty when she stormed in and started to gather up papers, cups, mislaid pens and other paraphernalia. Stupid geeks. You’d think they were helpless babies, the way they couldn’t manage to pick up after themselves. And this bloody place only encouraged them to be everlasting children; a whole coven of pampered, feted Peter Pans.

  Of course she’d be a programmer too, eventually, when she had finished her degree. But at least she knew how to really get things done without all the hand-holding and helplessness. Which was good, because for certain no one held anyone’s hand at the family company – Techdos – where she would work.

  And she would work. In a way this lazy lot never dreamed of working. You didn’t learn to do that in this lap of luxury. You sure as hell didn’t learn it by having people pick up after you. No, you learnt it by independence; Standing on your own two feet; and sometimes being driven mercilessly until you learnt to drive yourself, to be at least one step ahead of the whip. That was the way to do it. Stupid is what all this gentle nurturing was! Just plain-

  “You’re going to break those if you keep stacking them like that,” came the mild observation from the corner of the room.

  She jumped and whirled, almost sending the precarious tower of glasses crashing to the floor. Mike Summers was sitting in a corner in one of the beanbags, folded up like a concertina. He’d picked a dim spot – probably so he could see his screen better.

  She stood warily stiff, trying to assess the danger of this conversation to her ultimate plans. Should she scuttle off, as if intimidated away? Or the glasses could be the reason of course; taking them to the kitchen. But even while she tried to pick, her mouth was running away of its own accord, intimidated by nothing. “You startled me. I didn’t see you lurking there in the dark.”

  “No. No I can see you’re not sight-seeing.”

  “Wouldn’t want to waste time. That’s your dollar I’m spending.”

  “Thoughtful of you,” he said, and she could hear the suppressed laughter, the evidence of it there in the quirk at the corner of his mouth. He was leaning back, totally at ease in the relaxed pose. Not one to stand on ceremony, this man. He looked approachable. It would be easy to forget he was the boss.

  “Yeah, I’m good like that. All about the thoughtful gestures.” The flippancy was a reflex. Years of managing dad’s bullying by turning it aside lightly had made her a conversational lightweight when it came to meetings with authority.

  “A real company asset then.” She saw the flash of brilliance behind those friendly eyes and thought she recognized a brain to equal her own; the tantalizing hint of intellect that lured her more than any other feature a person might possess.

  “You betcha. Pure gold. You’re lucky to have me.”

  “Duly noted.” He shifted a little, the beans in the beanbag rustling softly. “Do you think you could get me a glass of water, please?”

  She looked at him, thought it over and eventually said: “Yes.”

  “Don’t strain yourself, there.”

  “I’ll try not to. Are we talking tap water, or do you want me to run out and get you something fancy?”

  “Tap water’s fine.”

  “Because I can go if you want. There’s a little shop on the corner, or those cafes across the road. I could bring you back something nice.”

  She wondered why her heart was beating so hard, wondered also at this profound wash of pleasure that suffused her. How was it that every other conversation she had had in the past two weeks had left her feeling angrier and more hostile than when she’d started, but a little chat with him could relax her so much as to actually enjoy herself when she should be feeling the exact opposite? What special power did Mike Summers have over her? She could feel her cheeks grow warm at the thought, particularly when her mind answered without hesitation: ‘raging sex appeal’.

  And it was true. Men who looked like him were few and far between, and those with the intellect and drive to run a business and do it well – albeit unconventionally – just as rare. Her mind admired one set of characteristics, and apparently her body was slavering over the other. An inconvenient infatuation.

  “Don’t spoil me now. I was just getting to like your blasé attitude. Or hey, wait. Is this just a ploy to get out of the building?”

  “Who me, your loyal employee, try to escape? Not a chance. I enjoy my bondage. Servitude is totally my thing.” She stared him down saucily, curious to know how he’d treat the innuendo when offered by a female member of his staff.

  He left it completely alone. “Good to know, thank you,” he said in a tone as dry as bone. “Tap water is fine.”

  “Coming right up.” She swung about smartly, took the stack of glasses by the top and bottom ones, trusting the rest to cooperate, and headed for the kitchen. Leaving them stacked on the bench she found a fresh one, and stole a lemon from the employees’ fruit bowl so she could cut a slice and make a pretty curl of it on the edge of his glass. Then she filled the glass with water and took it back to him, anticipating another exchange all the way there.

  She swung into the room, pigtails flying with the motion, and strode to his dim corner, where she held it out to him almost as a challenge.

  “Nice,” he said with raised eyebrows, taking the glass from her one-handed and nudging the lemon meaningfully with the side of his index finger.

  “See. A real asset,” she bragged, propping one hand on her hip and raising her chin with a smugly prideful air, full of self-mockery.

  “Pure gold, didn’t you say?”

  “Worth my weight.” She went back to her task of clearing the room without the indignant stamping and clashing of objects, feeling the better for her snippy little dialogue. More human, though also acutely conscious of him, of his presence, the thought he might still be watching her. There was silence from him for a long moment, then he set the emptied glass on the carpet and the gentle tapping of keys resumed.

  But after a few moments of mental review she pursed her lips then sighed at her own impulsivity. There was no helping her, there really wasn’t. She knew her ultimate goal here, so what was she doing risking it?

  Head down, mouth closed, do your job and stay out of sight. Was that so hard? Apparently so. She sneaked a look at Mike,
but he was completely absorbed in his work again. With any luck she hadn’t made any lasting impression. After all, the man had dozens of subordinates. It’s not like a single cog in the machine was worth noticing, however prone to backchat.

  At the end of her workday she walked to the Central Library, only eight city blocks away. On the first level up there was a table she liked, with a power plug underneath it, which left her sitting almost in the corner with her back to the wall. Perfect. No one could look over her shoulder that way or sneak up on her.

  She set up her gear quickly and logged on to the internet using the free Wi-Fi. It was the work of moments to obscure her location even further by tunneling through multiple hosts scattered around the globe. When that was in place she called into the server she’d set up online, to see if she’d managed to subvert any more of the developer’s computers with the root kit on her USB.

  Yes! Tui’s and Jay’s had both called in, and double yes, Jay was on a different network, giving her access to . . . eight more computers. Feverishly she scanned through their drives, praying one of them was in the Datacentre and would unlock the way to the others.

  But no. More of the same. More code that was all about the appearance, the surface functions of the program, like the layer of gift-wrap on a present. No sign of library of source code that existed under it all, that great treasure trove of command that lay behind each finished product. She could see the connections, the fragments of it strictly necessary to the developers’ work.

  This was killing her! It really was. As far as she knew all the developers’ computers were now friendlies, and still she had nothing. None shut her out or refused her instructions, but what did it matter when the real and pure source code was elsewhere, hidden behind multiple firewalls and impenetrably secure?

  There was still the chance she could break through that security. Yet it had resisted all her efforts so far, to the point she was beginning to doubt it was possible. If all else failed there remained the option of a physical hack – stealing a swipe card and getting into the locked Information Technology area. Yet that area and the Datacentre within were sheathed in glass and anyone around or in the IT area would clearly see her in a locked section where she had no clearance. She’d have to empty the building with a false fire alarm or something of the sort, and that carried its own dangers if the Datacentre had a fire protection such as flooding the room with nitrogen.