Nothing Personal (The Kincaids)

by James, Rosalind

  Two Heads Are Better Than One

  Somehow, after that, it worked out that he was spending every other night with her—and, all right, both nights on the weekend. Almost always at her place, just because his apartment was too big, and too cold, and too unfriendly, and her cottage was so much better on all counts. Not to mention that it had her in it, and if the choice was falling asleep alone, or falling asleep holding Desiree, well, that wasn’t really a choice at all, was it?

  But it was driving him a little crazy that he always had to invite her, or more accurately, invite himself. She never seemed to be counting on it, although she always said yes. When he brought a few things over so he wouldn’t have to go home to change before work, she emptied a drawer for him in her tiny spare bedroom, and cleared space in its closet, and his toothbrush, his razor, his shampoo all found new homes in the feminine territory of her bathroom. But she didn’t give him a key.

  He could almost see her hovering, halfway out the door, ready to bolt. He’d had some kind of half-assed idea that he should try not being so available, maybe make her miss him a little, but then she took the weekend off to go see her grandmother, and even though he’d gone up to Truckee in desperation and helped Gabe build Mira a white picket fence, that had still been one hell of a boring weekend. And there he’d been on Monday night, right back with Rae again, and that had been the end of that one.

  Meanwhile, he kept suggesting dinner, and he even went to a few more yoga classes. He figured she’d eventually realize that if it was Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, he was going to be around. So when he got that other call on a Wednesday afternoon a few weeks later, it didn’t take him long at all to figure out how to respond.

  At least he hadn’t been thinking about her at the time. He wasn’t that far gone. He was still able to work, and he swore when the distinctive chime of his phone broke his concentration. Damn. He’d been this close to getting that sequence.

  He glanced at the screen, a moment of surprise followed by a faint but unmistakable sinking of the heart, a new emotion to associate with this particular name.

  The phone chimed again, and he considered ignoring it. No, she deserved better than that from him. He picked up.

  “Hey, Claudine. How’s it going? Where are you?”

  “In town. And I need to meet you for a drink tonight.”

  “Probably not the best idea,” he said cautiously. “Things have changed a little in my life.”

  He heard the impatient sigh. “I got that last time, remember? No designs on your virtue, lover boy. But there’s something you need to know.”

  “What? You got hot gossip?” His mind wandered back to that sequence again.

  No answer for a couple of seconds. “Something you need to know,” she repeated. “But not on the phone.”

  He sat up straight, the code forgotten. “Something about me, you mean. Personal, or business?” Rae? Were people talking despite their caution?

  “Both, I think. Tell you tonight, in person.”

  “It’s bad, then?”

  “It could be.”

  “All right. Ziggurat at six-thirty?”

  “No. Someplace quieter. More private.”

  “Look,” he said cautiously. “You know I’ve enjoyed it, but . . .”

  She sighed again. “I told you. Your beautiful body’s ancient history to me. I’m trying to help.”

  “All right. But if it’s something about the company, I’m bringing Des— Rae.”

  “Uh-huh. Because two heads are better than one. Right.”

  Claudine had always seen too much. And right now, she was seeing that he didn’t want to meet her alone, without Rae, and have Rae learning about it and wondering why. And anyway, if it was something about the two of them, she needed to hear it too.

  But probably not. Probably just another rumor started by a competitor, casting doubt on AI’s progress. But even if that were it, Rae needed to be there to ask her own questions, because she’d think of something he wouldn’t.

  “Yes,” he told Claudine now. “Because two heads are better than one, especially if one of them’s hers. I’m bringing her.”

  Alec saw Claudine coming in the front door of Dagustino’s, touched Rae’s hand to alert her. He’d chosen the North Beach restaurant where he’d taken Rae for that first late-night dinner. A back table again, same candlelight, same quiet intimacy, but a completely different mood. Rae tense beside him, not touching her wine. They hadn’t been talking, just waiting. No point in speculation until they knew what they were dealing with.

  He stood to meet Claudine, gave her a kiss on the cheek, watched her reach across the table to hug Rae. And she still looked good. She dressed much like Rae, in fact, though the clothes looked a little different on her curvier figure, and no question, the blonde hair that fell in carefully tousled waves halfway down her back was sexier. So why was there only one woman at this table that he wanted to take home tonight?

  He forgot all about that, though, within seconds of the waiter delivering Claudine’s martini and leaving the table again. As soon as he heard her news.

  “What?” Alec stared at her, exchanged a startled glance with Rae. “Where does this come from?”

  Claudine waved one manicured hand in a dismissive gesture. “Where do these things ever come from? It’s not even a rumor. Just a whisper.”

  “That our code could be for sale.” Alec felt the cold rage welling. “To whom?”

  “Don’t know that either. Sorry, all vague.”

  “But you believe it.”

  She hesitated. “It feels real. It feels bad. You know I have to go with my gut.”

  He nodded. Successful salespeople always did, and nobody was more successful than Claudine.

  “The Chinese,” Rae said. “Probably.”

  “That’s usually who it is,” he agreed. “But who’d have access, and how would they have got it? We’ve been careful, as careful as I’ve ever been.”

  Rae pulled out her phone, began taking notes. “I’ll call Eric Lindquist over at DatAssure in the morning, get him to run some forensics. We’ll think it through, start narrowing it down.”

  Claudine tossed off the rest of her martini and stood. “I’ll leave you guys to it. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. If I hear anything else, I’ll let you know.”

  “Stay and have dinner,” Rae urged. “Since you’re here. We don’t have to talk about this.”

  “But you want to. Anyway, I’ve got dinner plans of my own. Had to do a little reaching out, once I lost my San Francisco Treat. And even if I didn’t . . . getting a distinct fifth-wheel vibe here.”

  Alec looked at her sharply. “That’s not out there, is it?”

  She smiled. “Nope. Your secret is safe with me.”

  “The Chinese,” Rae said again when they were alone. “That’s who’s buying. They’ve got practically a whole industry built up around stealing code. And you know who they usually go for.”

  “Chinese nationals,” Alec said. “Or Chinese Americans.”

  “And disgruntled employees, or former employees,” Rae said.

  They looked at each other, said the name at the same time.

  “Simon.”

  But when DatAssure came back with a name, it wasn’t Simon’s.

  “I have to assume the guy’s better at programming than he is at industrial espionage,” Eric Lindquist said on Monday morning. “Or you’d have fired him the first week.”

  Rae studied the sheaf of papers Eric had handed across the desk, with Alec looking over her shoulder. “He used an FTP site to transfer the files? Isn’t that . . . ”

  “Moronic?” Eric asked. “Yeah. On the other hand, it made for a pretty easy investigation. But then, you were watching for flash drives, right?”

  “Could have put it in his underwear,” Alec pointed out. “Stupid bastard.”

  Rae looked across at him, startled.

  “Hey,” he shrugged. “Obvious loophole. But what are we going to do,
strip-search everybody?”

  He was trying to play it cool, but inside, he was seething. Michael. Who’d been given this opportunity, this kind of access. And had paid them back with treachery.

  “You’ll want to talk to him, and, I assume, to fire him,” Eric said. “Make sure there’s nobody else in it with him. Be aware, though, it’s going to be hard to prove, and hard to prosecute. But it doesn’t look like you lost as much as you could have. I think we caught it early.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Alec promised. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

  “I have some recommendations as well,” Eric said. “Ways to step up your security, on an ongoing basis. Just in case this isn’t an isolated event. Because where there’s a buyer, there’s a problem.”

  He went on for ten minutes to outline scrutiny of the logs, extra layers of protection, and at the end of it, Alec nodded.

  “Do it,” he said. Signed the contract Eric pulled out, and left DatAssure’s office with Rae.

  “Time to bring everybody in,” he said, reminding himself to slow to her pace for the walk back to the office. He wanted to walk fast, though. He wanted to hit something. He wanted to hit Michael, and to keep on hitting him.

  “I agree,” she said. “We need to tell Brandon and Joe, and the board too. It was one thing when all we had was a rumor, but with proof . . . we need to disclose.”

  He nodded unhappily. “Before we talk to Michael, even. Because Joe will want to be in on it, and the board will want to know what we’re doing, and what we plan to do. Let’s just hope,” he said grimly, “that the son of a bitch talks.”

  But when Michael was brought into the conference room, was sitting across the table from Alec, Joe, and Rae, he didn’t admit anything. Just stared at them as if he were facing a firing squad, disbelief and horror written clearly on his young face.

  “But I . . . I didn’t,” he stammered. “I wouldn’t. You have to believe me. I want this job. I want to do this. Why would I risk my whole future?” He was babbling now. “It wouldn’t be worth it. I wouldn’t. I didn’t.”

  “It’s right here in the log.” Alec pointed to the damning proof. “Your login, transferring the files. And you were here.” He reached a hand out for the time record, and Rae handed it to him. “In the office. You did it, and we know it. Time to talk about it.”

  “There is one way out,” Rae said when Michael continued his denials. She’d been designated as the Good Cop in this exercise. “If you tell us who you sold the code to, we can make this a lot easier on you. And if you tell us if anybody else was involved. Was this Simon’s idea? Tell us,” she coaxed, “and it’ll be easier.”

  “But I can’t.” Michael was crying now, and Alec looked at him with disgust. Weak. A follower, not a leader. “I can’t, because I don’t know, because I didn’t do anything! Why won’t you believe me?”

  “Tell us who you sold it to, you little punk,” Joe growled. “Now.” He looked meaner and bigger and madder than ever. The Bad Cop, and he did it well. Michael ought to be quaking in his boots, and from the looks of things, he was.

  “Nobody.” Michael was still crying, but he was defiant. “You can beat me up or whatever you want to do, but I can’t tell you, because I don’t know. Because I didn’t do it. I swear I didn’t. I swear on my . . . my mother’s life.’

  They kept at it for a while, but it was no use. The board hadn’t wanted the police called any more than the three of them did. Having it hit the grapevine that their code had been compromised . . . People said that any publicity was good publicity, but they weren’t talking about this kind. This kind spelled nothing but disaster.

  In the end, Alec fired Michael to the tune of more tearful protests, watched Security walk him out, then went back to the conference room with the others for a postmortem.

  “I don’t know,” Rae said, looking unusually unsettled. “He was pretty convincing. Do you think he’s that good an actor?”

  “No,” Joe said. “I think Simon was in it with him, calling the shots, making it happen.”

  “He probably didn’t realize everything Simon was doing,” Alec agreed. “May not even have got a cut, who knows. A pawn, for sure, but he was part of it all the same. And of course he’s upset. He’s very, very upset that he got caught. That isn’t hard to fake at all. We’ll probably never know the whole story, but we have to assume the worst. This is too important to take chances.”

  That was the bottom line. They talked to the board about the additional measures they were taking, and Rae talked to the security desk about being even more thorough with their checks. That was all they could do, except to be grateful for Claudine’s warning, and to hope that they’d seen the end of it. To hope, but not to know. And not knowing was no good at all.

  Just Only Me

  “How about going away with me this weekend?” Alec asked Rae a week later. The investigation and its aftermath had shaken even his optimism, and he didn’t like how tense she’d been looking. It would be good for both of them to leave the City for a day or two, even if there were some work sessions involved.

  They’d just come from his place, where they’d showered after another yoga session, during which he’d actually managed to balance on one leg, lean forward, stick both arms and his other leg into the air, and stay there, which he’d been fairly proud of. He didn’t know what it was called, but he’d done it. And watching Rae in her stretchy little shorts, twisting her sweat-soaked body into those interesting positions, always gave him good ideas. But right now, he was taking her out to eat, which was another of his favorite things.

  “I was thinking about Point Reyes,” he said. “Remember that thing about walking barefoot on the beach? We haven’t done that yet. I’m falling behind here.”

  “That sounds wonderful,” she said with a little sigh, “but I told my grandma I’d come visit. It’s the three-month anniversary of her heart attack, do you realize?”

  “Yeah, I can certainly see why she’d want to celebrate that milestone.”

  She laughed, took another bite of roasted rock cod with Italian peppers, another sip of Chardonnay, and he watched her savoring both. “She does want to, though. A survival celebration, I guess, and I thought I could take her out to lunch on Saturday with the girls and Lupe, let them splash out a little. That’s my big weekend plan.”

  “Well,” he found himself saying, “I should probably visit my folks too. Why don’t I take you, give us both some company on that drive? Much as I know you enjoy driving your clown car. We could go up Friday night, come back Sunday afternoon. Sound good?”

  You are so screwed. Gabe’s words after that Christmas lunch were right there in his head, loud and clear, and he knew why he was really offering. Because he didn’t want to spend the weekend without her.

  And it was even worse than that, because he ended up taking them all to lunch. Rae and her grandmother, Lupe and Mrs. Sanderson and Mrs. Chang, and Mrs. Calhoun too, the fourth member of the pinochle group.

  He wasn’t even sure how it had happened. He’d started out by offering his services as a chauffeur so the ladies could have a drink, all except Rae, the other designated driver in the party. He’d ended up, somehow or other, at a big round table in Olive Garden with five women. And when he’d convinced Rae that she really ought to have a margarita or two and let him worry about the cars, with five toasted women who hadn’t made more than a token effort at the “lunch” part of the outing.

  “He was scampering down that corridor,” Mrs. Sanderson was saying now, barely able to get the words out, her gray curls shaking, “naked as a jaybird, laughing his fool head off, with two nurses running after him, shouting, “Mr. Williams! Mr. Williams! Get back in here!”

  The others were holding onto the table, tears running down their cheeks, and an older man sitting with his wife at the next table caught Alec’s eye, shook his head with a resigned smile.

  “This is . . . empty,” Rae said when her laughter had subsided. She pic
ked up the margarita pitcher and waved it in an extravagant motion. “That is so sad. Don’t you think that’s sad, Alec?”

  “That’s sad,” he agreed. He raised a hand for the waitress. “Another iced tea for me, please,” he told her. “And another pitcher for the ladies. Another virgin margarita for you?” he asked Dixie.

  “Oh, I’d better.” She wiped her eyes. “One’s my limit now, and that’s what’s really sad.”

  “You know what, Alec?” Rae asked him, midway through the next round. She’d grabbed his arm, was looking up at him seriously.

  “No, what?”

  She snorted a little, worked her face into seriousness again. “You’re very, very handsome. Everybody wants to go out with you, but you know what?”

  “No, what?”

  “They don’t get to,” she proclaimed. “Not any more. Just me. Just only me, did you know that?”

  “I did know that.” He grinned back down at her. “Just only you.”

  He turned to Dixie. “What do you think? Time to go?”

  “Oh, honey,” she laughed, “I think we’d better. Desiree’s going to have a headache tonight, that’s for sure. Never seen her so silly.”

  When the waitress came with the check, Rae lunged for it, missed completely, and Alec handed it back along with his credit card.

  “I’m supposed to pay,” she told him plaintively. “I always pay.”

  “Nope. Not any more,” he told her. “Just only me.”

  It was a bit of a hilarious effort sorting them into his car and the waiting taxi, but he managed it in the end. Sent Rae, Dixie, and a sleepy Lupe off with a word to the cab driver, installing Rae in the front seat, of course, and delivered the other ladies himself, with Mrs. Sanderson as his final stop.

  “We had an unexpected change of plan,” he told the old man who’d come to the door of the mobile home at his wife’s rather noisy entrance. “I’m afraid your car’s still at Olive Garden. If you want to give me the keys, I could get a cab back there to pick it up.”