She nodded.
The waiter came and poured the wine. Rob held his glass out to her and she lifted hers. “We can drink to second chances, then,” he said.
“Sounds good.” They clinked their glasses together.
Rob took a big drink. The wine tasted especially good. “I promise never to do that again,” he said.
“What?” she said softly.
“Break up with you.”
She smiled weakly.
“No, I really mean it. I swear to God, I’ll never send you away again.”
They both sipped their wine, staring at each other.
“You know what? I wish we could do this without all the secrecy,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be nice to just come and go as we please?”
“Yes, it would. But don’t you think that adds to it? Heightens the tension?”
He sighed. “I guess, but it’s so limiting. A real pain in the butt.”
“For me, it’s everything. Without it…I don’t know, you’d just be another boring middle-aged man trying to score with a younger chick.”
“Thanks a lot,” Rob said, laughing.
“You deserved that, as well,” she said, and joined him in laughter.
Rob suddenly assumed a serious expression. “Hey, who’s boring?”
“Don’t worry,” she said, “I’m kidding—about the boring part, that is. Dull, maybe.”
The waiter came back and she ordered a sushi appetizer. Rob grimaced.
“You must try it. It’s really very good—you’ll like it. Would I steer you wrong?” She held his gaze, but her smile had turned playful.
“You? Of course not,” he said, and chuckled. He had no intention of trying the sushi, though. “You know what they say about girls who like sushi?”
She smiled, tipping her head to one side, and reached out to take his hands. “No. What do they say?”
Normally he would’ve giggled or broken eye contact at this point. Instead he surprised himself, squeezing her hands and holding her gaze. “They’ll eat anything.”
She just laughed lightly, and squeezed his hands in return.
A few minutes later, the waiter came back with the appetizer. They continued to hold hands across the table. Rob mumbled thanks, but neither looked up at the waiter. The young man set the food down and left.
She picked up one of the rice-encrusted sushi discs and held it across the table, motioning for him to open his mouth. He obliged her. He had never done this sort of thing, but the sushi was surprisingly good. She fed him some more. He realized the wine must be going to his head and that the business lunch pretense had now gone completely out the window.
Gwen slipped off her shoes and slid her feet up his thighs. One of her stockinged feet found its way into his crotch—surely not by accident. He assumed a puzzled expression, as if to ask, Do you know where your foot is? and she wiggled her toes in response. They had gotten good at communicating without words; their new vocabulary consisted of facial expressions, glances, and nods.
“This is nice,” she said and sighed. “I told you you’d like the sushi.” She smiled broadly.
He returned her smile, but dropped it abruptly. “I just had the weirdest thought,” he said. “You’ll think bad of me, though.”
“No, I won’t. Tell me.”
“Cindy will be flying home from California tonight, you know.”
Gwen recoiled slightly, camouflaging her reaction well with a smile. “I know.”
“Sometimes…”
“What?” she coaxed.
“Well, sometimes…” He took another drink of wine. “It just seems that things would be so much simpler if her plane would just crash.” He surprised himself for saying it and added quickly, “Is that horrible, or what? Does that make me a monster?”
“Godzilla, I think. But I think I understand.” Gwen looked away. “It’s sad, really.”
Rob shook his head. “Sorry to bring her up. It’s just that I feel I can tell you anything, even my deepest, darkest thoughts.”
“It’s good to be honest,” she said, although she was still gazing across the room.
More wine came and he lost count of how many glasses they drank. The rest of the meal was a blur—another hour flew by. This was probably the most enchanting lunch he had ever had. He reached across the table, lifted one of her hands to his lips, and kissed it.
She smiled and looked down. “What was that for?” she asked.
“Just because you’re so kissable,” he said.
“Save some of those,” she said, her voice taking on a husky tone.
He felt the full effect of the wine when they rose to leave—he was light-headed and unsteady on his feet. He left a wad of twenties on the table that would more than cover their bill, and they left the café arm in arm, using each other for support. The waiter told them to have a nice afternoon and sent them on their way with a curious smile.
They made their way down a corridor of rooms. The doors were open to some of them, as housekeeping readied the room for the next occupant. Rob glanced inside one of them, eyes lingering longingly on the bed. When they came to the end of the corridor and ducked into an empty stairwell, he took her into his arms and started to kiss her as soon as the door closed behind them. She murmured and moaned, and kissed him back with equal passion.
“Thanks again for meeting me here,” he got out between kisses.
“Sure,” she said.
“I love you, you know.”
“I know.”
They kissed for several more minutes. She pulled back and looked at him, as she slid her hand down the front of his pants and caressed him. He had never been harder. Now it was his turn to moan. All thought vanished from his brain other than the wide-open sensory channel to the only part of his body that counted. Nothing was going to stop this runaway train.
Suddenly he pulled her hand away. She looked at him with surprise, but he took her by the hand and led her back into the hallway. Soon they came upon a housekeeping cart parked outside an open room. The high-pitched voices of two maids arguing in Spanish spilled out into the hall. Rob pulled Gwen into one of the other open rooms across the hall. It was empty. He stuck the Do Not Disturb sign on the outer knob and slammed the door shut, then locked it and put on the safety latch. They both giggled uncontrollably. He pushed her against the wall and they began kissing each other.
Shortly, her hand returned to its rightful place in his pants, touching him. Soon she was kneeling down and undoing his belt buckle. He moaned in anticipation. She looked up at him with a mischievous smile. “And you were right about girls and sushi.”
The mouth and tongue that he was so fond of kissing were now engaged in other work—indescribable work. His eyes rolled back and he began to pant. She brought both of her hands to bear on him and he groaned in exquisite pleasure, knowing he wouldn’t last long. He had never seen a woman enjoy this part as much as she did. Was that possible? Surely he was dreaming. The dream ended explosively, as waves of ecstasy rocked him.
Several moments later, her voice penetrated his stupor. “By the way, I love you, too.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 4:30 A.M.
The pencil-thin beam of light danced about the pitch-black office. Benjamin Harris twitched his head after it, trying to get his bearings in the unfamiliar room. It’s gotta be here somewhere, his mind, juiced up on adrenaline, repeated for the tenth time in several minutes. Desks, chairs, bookcases, and row after row of squat metal filing cabinets whizzed by at dizzying speed as Ben whipped the beam around. Finally the light came to rest, or at least as still as his shaking hand would allow, on a bulky CRT monitor and a computer standing next to it. “Eureka!” he blurted, and instantly regretted his outburst.
While he pumped his fist in celebration, the penlight squirted out of his hand and dropped to the floor. As soon as his finger left the spring switch, the room was once again immersed in darkness. Ben crouched down and groped around the car
peted floor like a blind man, searching for the penlight. When he found it, he turned the light on and played it on the computer. He noticed the familiar Apple logo and smiled. A Mac, he thought. How nice.
There wasn’t a computer on the planet that was safe from Benjamin, but as a young boy he had cut his teeth on Macs and they remained his first love. It was an older model G5, probably ten years old. Cheap bastards, Ben thought, but also marveled that the machine was still in service. He ran his hands over the smooth metal casing. As a boy, Benjamin had shown incredible talent for computers, impressing his father and teachers. After leaving high school early, he had graduated after three years at MIT last spring with a degree in computer science at the ripe old age of twenty.
Ben hit the power button and simultaneously pressed a couple of virtually unknown command keys to silence the startup jingle. He was on his first covert op and couldn’t afford any more extraneous noises or slip-ups like that “Eureka” to alert the bad guys. The old hard drive whirred and squeaked to life and the monitor flickered and came on with the start-up screen. He checked his watch while waiting—4:30 am. He still had about two hours before anyone showed up for work.
He took a big breath. His heart hammered in his ears, but he felt more alive than ever. This is what it must feel like to be a full-fledged FBI agent, kicking through the door into the unknown beyond. He had dreamt of this moment ever since he was a teenager. He’d been unbeatable when playing Rogue Assassin or Perfect Dark on his Xbox, something he’d done nonstop.
Ben knew he was a genius at computers—he had understood this from early on. He had parlayed this fact into a job with the coveted Bureau. The FBI always needed highly skilled computer people. So he had signed up and found his niche, working in the Bureau’s newly formed Medicare fraud branch. He could’ve taken a job in the private sector—the insurance industry, for instance—for twice the money, but those jobs didn’t have the pizzazz he was looking for. An actuary for John Hancock just didn’t have the same ring to it as Special Agent Harris of the FBI. Of course, he wasn’t actually a special agent yet; he was still an intern. You had to be twenty-three and go through an extensive training period first, including firearms, before you became a special agent.
Ben looked around the room, which was now dimly lit by the monitor screen. He hoped the faint light wouldn’t be too visible through the window. Suddenly, he stopped breathing and tensed, hearing something in the hallway that sounded like footsteps. He listened for several seconds. Nothing further. Just the sound of his heart pounding in his ears, he told himself. Relax, Ben. The Bureau’s field manual on covert ops came to mind—Ben had long since memorized all the pertinent manuals—A good field agent must keep their cool at all times. Be cool, Ben. Drawing a deep breath, he went back to work, fishing around in his pockets for his flash drive. Where was it? It had to be somewhere.
Ben remembered thinking at first that the whole Medicare billing thing seemed kind of boring—sifting through countless reams of electronic billing records, searching out irregularities. Even the prospect of designing complex, irregular pattern matrix software for huge data arrays was only mildly tempting. However, when his superior threw in the possibility of fieldwork, Benjamin had jumped. It had seemed like a fair trade—they would get his computer skills and he would get his shot at real-life adventure. Plus the stories he could tell couldn’t help but impress the babes.
When red flags began appearing in the anesthesia billing records for Swatara Regional Hospital in Hershey, Pennsylvania, Ben pounced on the idea of an inside investigation. At first, his boss had said, “No way, Ben, it’s too dangerous.” But his pleading finally paid off. He was dispatched complete with Elizabethtown college credentials identifying him as a premed student doing a rotation at the hospital. His mission was simple: gain access to the anesthesia department’s billing office, interrogate their computers, and determine if any shenanigans were going on.
Ben had spent several days learning the department’s layout and determining the whereabouts of the billing computer. It turned out the computer was not even in the hospital, but in the Medical Arts Building adjacent to the hospital, where the anesthesia billing office was located. By Thursday night, early Friday morning, he had been ready to launch his first field mission—eager, really.
Ben finally found his flash drive in his back pocket and plugged it into the computer’s USB port. The tiny drive contained his proprietary virus, which he had dubbed SoftPartner. The virus inserted lines of code deep into the operating system where it would never be found, and essentially deputized the computer. Ben sat back in the chair for a moment and exhaled a sigh of relief. He owned the billing computer now. If he didn’t give it regular “all clear” signals, the computer would secretly call for the cavalry and download any and all hard drive activity to the “mothership”—Ben’s high-powered computer back at headquarters.
His buddies at the Bureau made fun of Ben and his active imagination. And of course, they had a field day with SoftPartner. “Sure, it’s cool code, Ben, but like, you’re not being sent to Afghanistan,” they would say. Ben usually responded with something like “Never underestimate the enemy” or “A terrorist attack can come from the least likely places.” Someday, he vowed, he would show his coworkers, and earn their respect.
SoftPartner beeped like a hound dog catching the scent, bringing him back to the present. His program scanned the hard drive for any levels of limited access, security layers, pass codes, or any encrypted files. Apparently it had already found some. The screen lit up and began flashing JACKPOT in huge, colorful letters; a pulsating border mimicking a casino marquee rippled around the edge of the screen. “Hmmm,” Ben muttered, “I may have to tone that down a bit.” The garish show on the monitor cast flashing lights around the room.
The jackpot screen vanished as quickly as it had come, replaced by list after list of encrypted files followed by their encryption technique. Ben glanced down the list and smiled to himself. Child’s play.
Noting that one of the files was heavily encrypted with multiple algorithms, he concentrated on this one first, following his instinct. After all, what separated a good agent from a mediocre one was instinct. You could train all you wanted, but what happened in the field, sometimes in split seconds, often spelled the difference between mission success or failure. There was just no substitute for boots on the ground.
“Why so secretive?” he murmured as his code-breaker subroutine sank its teeth into this one. Maybe he was onto an Al Qaeda sleeper cell and this was the dirty bomb file? Or maybe he would uncover schematics for flying a plane into the White House and taking out POTUS? He imagined the beautiful, exotic Mata Hari that he would have to befriend and seduce in order to gain access to the terrorists. Ben smiled again. He didn’t think any of these scenarios were very likely, but hey, you couldn’t blame a guy for dreaming, right?
SoftPartner beeped and the decrypted file appeared on the screen, revealing several terse email correspondences. As he read them, all notions of Al Qaeda flew from his head. He sat mesmerized and a low whistle escaped his lips. “Holy Mother of God!” he whispered. He really had hit the jackpot. This was not boring Medicare billing fraud stuff. This was the real thing—the big leagues. Ben knew protocol dictated he should get on his cell and call this in pronto, but he couldn’t resist checking the other files—again following his instinct. Who knew what else he might find?
He jumped as the door flew open behind him. Lights popped on, blinding him. All he could recognize were heavy footsteps thudding through the doorway. Squinting in the blinding light, one hand over his thick glasses, Ben barely managed to hit the abort key with his other hand.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 5:00 A.M.
“Caught you, young man!” a gruff, heavily accented voice shouted. “Don’t touch computer!”
Ben whirled in his chair, almost falling off. Though his eyes had not fully adjusted, he peered up at the man: thirty-something—Rus
sian, perhaps—definitely Slavic. “W-what are you doing here?” Benjamin stammered.
“No, the question is, what you are doing here?” Ruskie said sternly. He walked over to stand behind Ben and clamped one hand on his shoulder. With the other hand, he patted down Ben’s pockets, finding and confiscating his cell phone.
“I’m Tony Jones, a premed student from E-town,” Ben answered, and swallowed. God, his cover sounded lame; he’d have to work on that. And he wished he had completed his firearms training and had a service revolver secreted in a shoulder holster. “Just doing my homework, sir,” Ben added weakly. He put on his most innocent smile as he reached for the mouse.
“Don’t touch mouse!” Ruskie yelled, increasing the pressure and digging his fingers into Ben’s shoulder.
“Ow,” Ben said, pulling his hand away from the mouse. He turned and looked at the man, his face now eerily lit by the colors coming from the screen. He could read the hospital name badge dangling from his shirt: Nikolai Andropov, Hospital Orderly.
Nikolai’s face relaxed, even gave a hint of a smile as he looked at the screen. “Well, well, my boy,” Nikolai said. “Looks like you are studying human anatomy.”
The stunning nude shot of Pamela Lee Anderson languishing on the beach with the surf foaming about her legs shone forth from the monitor in vibrant 64-bit color. In spite of himself or the precarious situation, Ben suppressed a smile and noted with a touch of pride that SoftPartner was performing admirably.
Nikolai dialed his cell phone and jammed it up to his ear. Seconds later he said, “It’s me. We got problem.” His eyes darted around the room and his free hand returned to his pocket. “I found this kid here snooping around computer. I came in early and saw funny light bouncing around window.” Nikolai paused to listen. “He said he is student doing homework, but I not think so. I do not know how he got through key card lock.” Nikolai listened some more while his hand fidgeted with something in his pocket.
Nikolai grunted and shook his head. “He doesn’t smell like Fed. No gun. He is probably twenty and looks like big nerd. What you think we should do?”
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