“I want to believe that,” she said. “And I almost do. Because what I’ve seen, what you’ve been with me, it’s . . . I don’t know how not to believe that. Maybe I just need a little more time to be sure you mean it, before I can . . . let myself go.”
She looked up at him, saw him looking back, his gaze steady on her, and admitted it. “I’m scared to say it. I’m scared to feel it. I’m scared you’ll change your mind, and if I let myself love you . . . I don’t know how I’d get over that. Because have you ever lived with anybody? Have you ever even had a serious relationship with a woman, one that lasted a . . . a year?”
“No. Have you, with a man?”
“No. No, I haven’t.”
“Then we’re in the same place,” he insisted. “New at this. Born-again virgins, trying it out together, seeing where we get.”
She had to smile. “Born-again virgins? Is that what we are?”
“Yes.” He was smiling back at her, and the relief, or some other emotion she didn’t dare name . . . whatever it was, it was filling her now, rich, and strong, and . . . wonderful.
“Born-again virgins,” he said again, “trying something brand-new. Think you could do that with me?”
She looked at him, all the strength and all the sweetness of him right there to read in his face, and made her decision.
“Yes. I think I could.” She reached a hand out for him, felt his palm closing around hers, his fingers threading through her own. “Born-again virgins. I could do that. I could try.”
All the Time in the World
“And that’s it,” Alec sighed nearly four weeks later, pushing away from his desk with both hands. “We’re there.” He looked at Joe, shoving back himself with his own satisfied smile, and laughed out loud. “And it’s good.”
“It is.” Joe reached two massive arms over the shaved dome of his scalp, interlaced his fingers, and stretched. “We’ll look at it again next week, start picking holes in it. But, yeah. It’s damn good. What time is it?”
“Uh . . .” Alec looked at his monitor. “After eleven.” The outer office long since emptied on this Friday night, even Rae having left hours ago.
“So, hey. We made it before midnight,” Joe said. “I’m going home, working out, and crashing. And I’m not planning to drink another cup of coffee all weekend, or look at a single screen. Turn my phone off, stick the laptop in the desk, go climb a mountain or something. You?”
Alec had stood, was walking around the office now. He didn’t feel tired, he felt energized, though he knew it wouldn’t last. “Taking off too. Going someplace,” he decided. “For sure.”
Joe shut down, put his laptop away, swept the empty Red Bull cans and the pizza box into the wastebasket. “Going alone?”
“Haven’t decided,” Alec lied. He wished he could tell Joe, that he could trust him. But it wasn’t only his secret to keep.
And the next day, he was at Point Reyes. Taking Rae away for the weekend, walking barefoot on the beach holding her hand, just as he’d promised her. Everything in his life coming together, better than he could have hoped. And the open space, the salt in the air, the grainy firmness of the sand under his feet, the resonant thunder of waves hitting shoreline, the quiet, soul-deep pleasure of having her beside him for all of it—it was all carrying him up, so buoyant he could have floated away.
But in the afternoon, he got jumpy again. At first he’d thought it was just the unaccustomed idleness, being at loose ends after working flat-out for so long to finish the beta. Finally, though, obeying an instinct he couldn’t explain, he went back to the inn with Rae, got the laptop he hadn’t, after all, been able to leave behind, and drove to a place where he could change the folder’s password. Thought about calling Joe and telling him he’d done it, but then, Joe had said he wouldn’t even have his phone with him, let alone be online.
He’d tell him Monday. Monday was soon enough.
The planner did the work at his kitchen table, as always. Transcribed the last careful character from the piece of paper lying next to him and waited, breath held, for the microsecond it took for the screen to appear. And then the smile bloomed. It stayed on his face as he located the folder containing the beta version of the code, clicked on it, and encountered the password screen.
He typed in the password. And watched the red-bordered box appear, with an additional note.
Password incorrect
Too fast. Too eager. He retyped, more carefully this time.
Password incorrect
He checked his caps lock. Off. Risked a third try.
Access denied due to multiple incorrect attempts. Please contact your system administrator.
He swore again. Sat and thought it through. And then went with Plan B.
Alec took Rae out for a long, late dinner. They ate crab cake salad and blackened wild king salmon and tiny baby vegetables, and drank a whole bottle of chilled Chardonnay. Held hands across the white tablecloth and, afterwards, shared a delicate crème brûlée and drank snifters of Grand Marnier, just because it seemed like a good idea. Left the restaurant at last, its final customers, and walked the few blocks to the inn in no hurry at all, both a little drunk, and very happy. Tilted their heads back to see the stars overhead, clear and bright in the night sky here at the edge of the world, got a little dizzy, and laughed.
Back at the inn, they filled the huge soaking tub, lit all the candles, poured in the bath salts, and lay together in the warm, aromatic water. Slow kisses, languid touches, murmurs and sighs. Until the water cooled and they climbed out, toweled each other dry with huge, fluffy white bath sheets, pulled the quilt back on the big bed, and made long, slow, languorous love, quiet, and peaceful, and beautiful. And knew that they were each with the person they most wanted to be with, and that they had all the time in the world.
Full Disclosure
That was Saturday. And on Monday morning, they were summoned to an emergency meeting of the venture capital board.
The five faces around the table were grim, Alec saw, and he had a moment of disorientation, almost vertigo. The beta was finished, and it was the best work he and Joe had ever done. They were on the verge of something huge, a game-changer. He knew it. What could possibly be wrong?
It didn’t take him long to find out.
“At 11:43 on Saturday night,” Ron began without preamble, “Alec’s credentials were used to log into the server, and the entire alpha version of the code was downloaded to a hard drive. You didn’t know we were tracking that,” he told Alec, “but ever since that first event, we’ve been doing our own separate, very detailed monitoring of your systems. And the primary thing we’ve been looking for is any downloading of the code. Maybe you’d like to explain, after our discussion of security, why you did that.”
“I didn’t,” Alec said. The alpha was gone? He was always cool, but he wasn’t cool now. He was sweating, his heart pounding with anger, and fear, and an overwhelming wave of relief that he’d changed the password on the beta.
Ron looked hard at him. “You trying to tell me that you gave somebody else access to your credentials, or that somebody guessed them?”
“Absolutely not. I’ve been changing my password every few days, and I’ve been randomly generating a nine-character series. Nobody could have guessed that.”
“You can remember a random series that changes completely every few days?”
“I’m very bright.”
“Then you must be bright enough to see that, if your credentials are secure, and nobody else could have downloaded the code, it had to have been you. Please explain why.”
“I can’t explain it,” Alec insisted, “because I didn’t do it. If somebody did, we have to find out who, and how, and right now. A keylogger, I assume, to capture my credentials. We need to trace that.”
“Nobody could have shoulder-surfed you?”
“Again, absolutely not. Not even anybody in this room. I don’t let anybody watch me log in.” Except Rae, but it wasn’t
Rae. He needed to find out who. And then he needed to kill the bastard.
“It can’t be a keylogger,” Ron said, “because DatAssure has been all over the records, backwards and forwards, to check. So I’m sorry, Alec, but we’re left with you. Denial isn’t going to work. Tell us now.”
“Why would I take my own code?” Alec asked in frustration. “Why are we wasting time on this?”
“Why would you take it? To sell it. I believe that’s the usual reason.”
“To sell it? Again, why? What would I get for it that I wouldn’t get when we’re bought out, or when we go public, whichever happens first? And why the alpha? Why wouldn’t I take the beta?”
“Maybe you thought you’d get both. Maybe that’s why you took the alpha. Tell the buyer it’s the beta, and they go to market with it, get people excited about the idea, prime the pump. You come out in a few months with the much improved version, and you’re paid twice, aren’t you? You weren’t counting on anyone finding out that both versions were your own handiwork, and that you’d been double-dipping.”
For once, Alec couldn’t think of an answer. His mind was always faster than anybody else’s. He had the answer to the next problem while everyone else was still asking the last question. But right now, he had nothing. Because what Ron had said made a kind of weird, twisted sense, and he couldn’t think how to refute it. Except to say that he hadn’t done it, which was just about no good at all. And as long as the board was focused on him, they weren’t solving the problem.
“It wasn’t Alec.” It was Rae’s voice, and he looked up fast.
“I’m sure none of us wanted to think so,” Ron said. “Unfortunately, there’s no choice.”
“It wasn’t Alec,” she said again. The tiger eyes were steady on Ron across the entire length of the table, two dots of color in her cheeks the only sign that she wasn’t as cool as she looked. That, and the barely audible click of her ballpoint. “It isn’t possible, and I can prove it.”
“Rae,” Alec said, urgent now. “No. Don’t.”
Ron waved at him to be quiet. “If she can prove it, I want to hear it.”
“Desiree.” Alec was standing now. She couldn’t. He couldn’t let her. “No. It’s not worth it. We’ll figure it out. Don’t.”
It was as if he hadn’t spoken. “I know it wasn’t Alec,” she said, “because he was with me on Saturday night. The Pelican Point Inn at Tomales Bay, to be exact, which doesn’t have internet access. He has the receipts to prove it, and he can show them to you.”
The board members were looking at each other now, and nobody spoke for a minute.
“You’re kidding me.” That was Brandon, sitting on Rae’s other side. The other man’s face was flushed red, and his usual cocky smile was replaced by outrage as he stared at Alec. “Not only did you sell us out, but you slept with Rae just so she could alibi you? You’d do that to us, to Joe and me? Not that it’s much of an alibi. How hard was that, to drive off once she fell asleep, log in from someplace else? She wakes up when you come back to bed and, what, you were in the bathroom?”
Rae didn’t answer him, not directly. “What time did you say the code was downloaded?” she asked Ron.
“Eleven forty-three.”
“He didn’t drive anyplace else,” she said. “At 11:43, Alec wasn’t driving, and he wasn’t logging in. He was making love to me.”
And that’s when Alec sat down. Because he had nothing to say. Because she’d put it all on the line. Everything she’d worked for. Her reputation. Her security. Her net. And she’d done it for him.
He sat and looked at her, her color still high, her eyes still blazing. And her pen still clicking.
The quiet around the table was broken by Ron. “Well,” he said, “now we have a real mess.”
“No,” Alec said. “Now we have some answers. You all know it wasn’t me. And that it wasn’t Rae either,” he said as an afterthought. “Unless you think we were in it together.”
“Which is a possibility,” Ron agreed, “but a less likely one.” He looked at Rae, the disappointment evident. “I can believe you’ve used some incredibly poor judgment, but it’s hard for me to believe that two people whose integrity I would have sworn to are both bent.”
“Thank you,” she said quietly. “For that.” Alec could see her shaking a little, and he wanted to hold her, to tell her it would be all right.
“Give us time to figure it out,” he told Ron. “A few days. There’s got to be an answer.” He looked at Rae, and she nodded.
“More investigation,” she said. “Interview everybody. Check financial records. We can do it, but we’ve got to move fast, contain the damage.”
“We’ve got a mess here,” Ron said again, shoving his chair back from the head of the table. “The board needs to discuss this. Could the four of you go into the outer office and wait, please.”
Alec looked at the iron-hard set of the older man’s features, and knew that argument would be fruitless. He didn’t answer, just stood, and Rae, Joe, and Brandon followed his lead.
They sat for twenty endless minutes, unable to hear anything from the soundproofed room. Rae silent and poker-straight in her chair, her expression closed. Joe’s face thunderous, which usually meant he was thinking furiously, and that he’d talk only when he was done thinking. And Brandon a pointed distance away, thighs spread, forearms on knees, staring at the floor.
And when Calvin Tang opened the door again and beckoned them back inside, his expression had nothing welcoming about it.
“Here’s what we’re doing,” Ron said when they were seated again. “You’re shut down.” He held up a hand when Alec would have spoken. “For at least a few days, probably a week or more. Rae’s right. Interviews, investigations, going through those logs with a fine-tooth comb. But none of you can be involved, because as far as we’re concerned, you’re all compromised until we can prove otherwise. We can’t go forward with this kind of uncertainty, and we’re too far in to think of cutting our losses without more investigation.”
Well, Alec thought, that was one small mercy.
“So,” Ron said, shoving back from the table, “go home. We’ve already shut the office down, and we’ve got the locksmith up there now. No access until the investigation is done. Your servers are being wiped as we speak. We can’t take the chance that there’s malware lurking on there, some kind of backdoor access. Everything’s wiped and re-installed, and we’re not starting up again until we’ve got the answer.”
“The beta,” Alec said.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Ron said. “We’ve got the beta. Let’s just hope nobody else does.”
The four of them walked out of the conference room in silence, through the office, out the double doors and into the marble-lined corridor. They stopped in front of the elevator, and Alec pushed the “Down” button, still stunned. Still shaken to the core.
But when it came, Brandon stepped back.
“I can’t do it,” he said.
“What?” Alec stared at him.
“I can’t ride with you. I can’t stand next to you. I can’t pretend this didn’t happen. How could you do it?” Brandon demanded. “How could you sell us out?”
“You heard me. I didn’t.” Alec felt the helpless rage rising. How did you prove a negative? How did you prove that you hadn’t done something? You couldn’t, not if what Rae had done wasn’t good enough.
“Yeah, I heard you,” Brandon said, “and I heard what Rae said too. I heard that you got her to lie for you, or to work with you, or that you fooled her too. I don’t know which one it was, and I don’t care. I trusted you, man. I believed in you.”
Alec stepped into the elevator, which was now protesting Joe’s restraining hand with a loud, insistent pinging. Joe and Rae followed, but Brandon didn’t.
“I’ll wait,” he said, and the doors closed on his confused, angry, wounded face.
Alec looked across at Joe. “Want to get out at the next floor? You want to avoid me too
?”
Joe shook his head. “No. I’ll ride.”
He hesitated, though, when they got to the lobby. “We should talk,” he told Alec.
Alec sighed. “Go home. We all need to clear our heads. Something will come to us. There’s a way to figure out who did this. There’s an answer. We just have to think of it.”
He watched Joe leave the building. “My place?” he asked Rae. “Or yours?”
“Yours,” she decided. “More central.”
He nodded, walked out with her, turned right without thinking about it, his mind racing. “We know it wasn’t me,” he said slowly, “which means it has to have been someone who could get my credentials. Which means it has to have been someone with admin privileges.”
“Or someone working with someone who has admin privileges,” she suggested.
His feet were still carrying him, but he barely noticed. “Thomas. Chinese, admin privileges. What’s the worst thing that can happen, security-wise? You compromise a developer, or . . .”
“You compromise someone in IT,” she finished. “The very worst.”
“We thought Michael was stupid, right, to use an FTP site to transfer the files?”
“Right. You’re saying he wasn’t. That somebody else was leaving breadcrumbs.”
“And making us think that once we’d caught Michael, we’d solved it.” He picked up the baton from her and ran with it. The question is, Thomas all along? Or Thomas and Simon?”
She’d stopped at the light, was waiting to cross Market. “No,” she said, and she was grabbing his arm now. “No. I think that’s still not it. Not quite. We need to go get your car. Because I think I know. I think I see. The only person. The person who makes sense, who fits. Using the person who could be used.”
Nothing Personal (The Kincaids) Page 25
