by KG MacGregor
"Here comes another one. Only three to go." Henry logged the report and put it in the queue for processing.
Each Friday between five and six o’clock Eastern time, product managers from all of their plants submitted final inventory figures for the week. The complex system that Spencer and Henry had designed tracked not only production, but materials, thereby automating the inventory control and accountability. Tracking inventory was a continuous process, as each new unit of materials was earmarked to a specific product, and to a unique lot number. Should quality control issues arise, line producers could easily isolate the affected shipment. Another benefit of their system was that supplies and materials were automatically reordered as they were consumed, assuring continuous production and cost flow.
The Friday report was an executive summary of sorts. The product managers at each of the Margadon plants, which were scattered throughout the country and abroad, were required to constantly monitor the inventory for their line of pharmaceuticals, but senior managers in Bethesda wanted production summarized on a weekly basis.
"What are we missing?"
"Let’s see…the Dolicaine…the Kryfex…and the…wait, here comes the Dolicaine now. And there’s Topectol. So it’s just the Kryfex."
Kryfex was Margadon’s new wonder drug for the Dawa virus, an auto-immune disease that was prevalent throughout eastern Africa. Last spring, the company had won a massive government contract to distribute the drug through diplomatic and humanitarian channels in Ethiopia. In return, the US military was given permission to locate a permanent air base in the northeastern part of that African country, an area essential to operations in the Middle East.
"Come on, guys! Find your butts and get them in gear." Spencer had a party on tap tonight, and she’d promised Elena she’d try to get there early to help set up.
"Why don’t you go on? I’ll wait."
"Nah, then I’d owe you, and you’d ask to borrow my bike."
Henry chuckled. "Perish the thought." He had no interest at all in borrowing the big Kawasaki. It was all he could do to get on behind Spencer just to go to lunch.
Twisting in their chairs, they chatted another ten minutes as they waited for the last report from the plant outside of Little Rock. "I think I’ll give ‘em a call," Henry finally said.
On cue, the phone rang and Spencer lunged to grab it first. "Margadon, Spencer Rollins…oh, no wonder." Holding the phone aside, she explained the holdup to Henry. "It’s Tim Wall in Little Rock. Somebody dropped the bar coder and they didn’t have another one that worked. They had to do it all by hand."
"Do they have the numbers?"
"Yeah, he’s going to read them off. I’ll pull up the screen." With a few short keystrokes, Spencer accessed the Kryfex form. "Okay, Tim, go ahead."
One by one, Spencer entered the numbers into the corresponding fields, watching the "Cost" columns fill automatically. That was the beauty of a well-written program, she thought, mentally congratulating herself and her partner. The final report would show the week’s production of Kryfex, its expenditure of resources, and its corresponding cost and net for the company. Only a handful of people at Margadon got to see these figures. In fact, when the data were uploaded from the barcodes, the reports were generated automatically, going directly to their boss, James Thayer, the company’s controller; and he would then route them for distribution to "eyes only."
Spencer and Henry figured out when they were testing the code that they could just about deduce the chemical formulas for nearly every product on Margadon’s shelf, using only the gross quantities of ingredients and the size of shipments. As the dock manager read off the figures, Spencer found herself playing the game in her head, trying to guess the number in advance, knowing approximately how much of each component would be used for the week’s total. She was close on each part until they got to the cytokines, which was the active protein used in Kryfex. By the quantities already listed in the report, she expected a larger number than the one Tim supplied.
"Wait a minute…let me have the cytokines again." She backspaced to clear the field and waited for Tim to find his place again on his sheet.
He repeated the number, and she verified it. "Does that sound right to you, Tim?"
He had no idea. Clearly, Tim didn’t play these formula games in his head. His job was to get the shipments in one door and out the other.
"Okay, go ahead." Spencer tabbed to the next field and the most amazing thing happened.
"What the fuck? Sorry, Tim…hold on." Spencer backed up again to the cytokine field and hit the delete key. "Give it to me one more time."
Spencer grabbed a pencil to jot the number down this time, but Tim was growing impatient and let it show. "Look, the only reason I’m still here tonight is because you dropped the goddamned bar coder and broke it! So just give me the number one more time."
The unusual outburst got Henry’s attention and he quickly came to stand behind his partner. He watched as she entered the number and tabbed to the next field. The number changed!
"Did you guys switch suppliers on the cytokines, or did they change the packaging or something?"
The dock manager wasn’t about to have his head handed to him again, so he calmly answered her question. No, nothing had changed as far as he knew. He finished his list and Spencer finally let him go.
"Something’s fucked here, Henry."
"Cool! I was looking for something to do this weekend," he joked.
"I mean really fucked. If this is doing what I think it’s doing, it’s so fucked we may be looking for work next week."
Spencer re-entered the numbers and watched as both the quantity and cost column inflated when she moved to the next field. "That’s how many there should be, but that’s not what he said they used. And somebody had to write something in our code to change that number." Now she was pissed. It wasn’t cool to patch someone else’s program when the original programmer was still available to do it.
"Pull up the code."
She did and they pored over what would be gibberish to most, but what to them was a source of immense pride. Line by line, they studied the program. Nothing in their code explained the adjustment on the data sheet.
"Look at Alvadin. It’s set up the same way," she said.
Henry sat back down and called up the weekly report for Margadon’s protease inhibitor at his terminal, studying the field calculations. "This one’s okay. See, the cytokines…," he deleted the field and re-entered. "They stay the same."
"So what the fuck’s going on with Kryfex?" Spencer scrolled down to the bottom of the program to see if any comments were written to connote changes, though she didn’t expect to find any.
"I don’t know what’s doing that. We didn’t write it. Unless…."
"Unless it’s calling a different mod." Mods were modules — lines and lines of syntax that caused a program to do what it was supposed to do. Coders worth their salt never used a whole word when half a word would do.
"Exactly."
Henry opened the global file, the one they applied to all of the uploaded data in order to generate the weekly reports. Without this master program of macros and loops, they’d have to repeat procedures for each product manufactured by Margadon. "It’s calling the right mod."
"Then where the hell is the new number coming from?" Spencer used the calculator on her partner’s desk to compute the number change for the cytokines in Kryfex. The altered figure was one-fourth higher than the one she’d entered. "Okay, watch this."
She entered 80 and hit the tab. The number changed to 100, and its cost increased by the same percentage. Then she entered 100; it changed to 125. "Somebody’s fucked with it."
"Tell you what," Henry offered, "why don’t you let me look at this? You’re going to be late for your party."
"I can’t just leave you with this mess."
"I don’t mind. It’ll be fun. Besides, if you’re late, Elena will think it’s my fault and kick my ass."
; "I don’t know why you’re so afraid of her. She’s only this high." Spencer held out her hand shoulder high, gradually moving it upward until it passed her own five-foot, ten-inch frame.
"Yeah, and not only is she taller than you, she carries a gun."
"That’s just to pick up chicks."
Henry laughed. "Go on, really. I’ll work on this and park what I find on the server so you can look at it over the weekend."
The two had set up their own server years ago in Vienna when they took on a small contract for after-hours. Last year when Margadon implemented a new policy restricting file access to the local area network, they had gotten into the habit of parking bits of code on their server so they could work on things from home. The company would have a fit if they ever found out, but no one at Margadon knew of the server except Henry and Spencer; and besides, programmers were notorious rule breakers.
"This really pisses me off, Henry!"
"Fuggedabouddit! Go have fun. If it’s really fucked, it’ll still be here on Monday."
Spencer picked up the black helmet beside her desk and grabbed her denim jacket. "Okay, but call me if you need me."
"I will. Tell Elena hi."
"Thanks, pal. I’ll tell her."
* * *
The tall programmer bounced down the steps of the fire escape and exited through the back door to the employee lot. Her red Kawasaki 650 was squeezed into a corner alongside two other bikes, both Harleys. On occasion, she would arrive or leave at the same time as the others and would have to endure their ridicule over her ride. But Spencer liked the feel of the Kawasaki, and the brand would always be her sentimental favorite because it was the kind of bike her father had ridden, and the first one he’d bought for her.
With rain and a cold snap in the forecast for tomorrow, tonight would probably be her last ride before parking the beast on the patio of her garden apartment and covering it for the winter. Next week, she’d be sitting in a long line of commuters in the car she’d picked up eight years ago as her "basic transportation." The jibes she got for the Kawasaki were nothing compared to those for her Chevy Cavalier.
Spencer’s best bet for getting around the rush hour traffic tonight to Alexandria was to hop on the George Washington Memorial Parkway, as most of the commuters would be pushing their way out of the city in the opposite direction. In just under thirty minutes, she was squeezing the bike between two cars parked in front of her friend’s townhouse.
"Agent Diaz?" she called playfully, letting herself into the foyer.
"Thank god you’re here," a woman’s voice called from the kitchen. "I’ve got six bags of ice melting in the trunk of my car. Will you bring them in and take them out to the back porch? The keys are by the door."
Without taking another step forward, Spencer grabbed the keys and headed back out and down the steps. Making yourself at home had a whole new connotation at Elena’s house. Clutching a ten-pound bag of ice in each hand, she made the first of three trips up the stairs and through the kitchen, stopping to greet her former lover with a quick kiss on the lips.
Women and men alike fell prey to the beauty and charms of Elena Diaz, an IRS criminal investigator whose wide brown eyes could slay from across the room. Spencer knew from experience what it felt like to have those eyes on her, and for a very brief time, she thought that she might be just the one to tame this creature. But it wasn’t to be.
"You only invited me for the heavy lifting, didn’t you?"
"Don’t be ridiculous. You’re here in case I get dumped by my date."
"Serpiente." Even before they became lovers, Spencer learned of Elena’s love ‘em and leave ‘em reputation, and dubbed her The Snake. The IRS agent had insisted that the Spanish word was much more flattering, so it became her moniker.
Spencer tossed the two bags into the large cooler and returned to the kitchen, this time wrapping her arms around the taller woman from behind. Elena was one of her favorite people in the universe, someone Spencer trusted with her life and limb, but not with her heart. The word "monogamous" just wasn’t in the Latin woman’s vocabulary.
"Kelly asked a few of her friends over." Kelly Kuykendall was Elena’s Woman of the Month.
"You mean there’ll be people here you haven’t slept with already?" the programmer joked.
"Aren’t you funny?"
With a snort, Spencer bounded out the front door again for a second load, then a third, finally stopping in the kitchen to await her next orders.
Elena stopped her preparations to address her friend. "I was just thinking that if one of Kelly’s friends turned out to be cute, you might be able to turn on that charm of yours and get lucky tonight."
"God, it’s been so long since I’ve been lucky, I wouldn’t know which end to fuck."
"Oh, now that’s charming!" Despite herself, Elena laughed at the crude remark. "Just keep talking like that and you won’t have anything to worry about."
In the deep recesses of her heart, Elena Diaz knew that one day she would regret not accepting the simple gift of love that Spencer had offered seven years ago. Like all of the other relationships in her life, she and the beautiful brunette had started out as passionate lovers, getting to know each other as more of an afterthought to their sexual adventures. But the more they talked about their lives, their interests, their values, the closer they drew; until one day when Spencer had uttered the words that gave a name to what they had together.
"I love you."
"You shouldn’t say that, you know."
"I can’t help it." Twisting in the bed, Spencer rolled on top of her naked lover and pinned her in place. "And I don’t want to share you anymore."
Elena reached up and pulled her down, tucking her dark head to the side so she wouldn’t have to look into the insistent blue eyes. "You know I’m no good at that kind of stuff, Spence."
Elena Diaz could give her heart easily to the likes of Spencer Rollins, but she knew herself well enough to know that sooner or later another pretty lady would turn her head. She wouldn’t risk hurting someone she loved by making promises she couldn’t keep.
With the realization that they couldn’t go forward, Spencer had taken the painful step to end what they had. She wanted more out of love than what Elena could offer, and she couldn’t ask her to be someone else. In the end, they’d forged an unbreakable bond of friendship and trust, and they’d finally gotten past the lustful pull.
It was hard, though, for each woman not to wonder what would happen if the door between them were to open again.
CHAPTER 3
REDUCED SPEED AHEAD.
It seemed like every time she’d start to gather speed on the outskirts of a small town, another sign would appear to announce the next wide spot in the road. Ruth was firm in her resolve to stick to the back roads, though. Practically all of the major highways running through New England were toll roads, and that meant stopping, being seen, and worse, being caught on a surveillance camera in a car no one would otherwise recognize as hers.
The blonde-haired child beside her was asleep on a soft pillow with a light blanket pulled up to her chin. They had talked and laughed and sang until almost ten o’clock when Ruth could hear the tired lilt in Jessie’s voice. Even with the back seat folded down to make room for all of their things, the passenger seat reclined a good bit, and leaning it back had been the impetus for the little girl to finally call it a night.
Welcome to Sturbridge, Massachusetts!
At last, Ruth could pull onto an interstate without worrying about tolls. From what she could tell on the map, I-84 would take her across the corner of New York and into Pennsylvania, where she could pick up something going south. She hadn’t quite worked out where they were headed, assuming that if she didn’t know, no one else would be able to figure it out either.
All she knew for sure was that she wanted to start a new life far away from Madison, Maine. She wanted her daughter to have a happy childhood, and to be safe from the angry man her father had beco
me. Ruth tossed her head in disgust at that thought. Skip Drummond had always been angry; no one could please him, and everything he’d ever done was in order to manipulate someone else.
But Ruth couldn’t lay all the blame for this mess at her ex-husband’s feet. No, she had to own up to her own mistakes, of which she’d made plenty.
The Fergusons were not well off by anyone’s standards, but they had always gotten by. Ruth’s father Roy had worked his whole life at the paper mill, bringing home a check just big enough to cover their bills, but not to provide many extras. Still, her mother Mildred had been resourceful, making many of their clothes at home, and finding ways to save here and there for coats and shoes or something new for the house.
They were a close-knit family; Roy insisted on it. Ruth, named for the faithful Biblical figure, was expected to spend most of her free time at home, even when her high school friends begged her to come along to football games or parties. Roy and Mildred favored a strict setting for their daughter, and guarded her virtue by refusing her permission to go out with boys until she reached the age of seventeen years old. Even then, the young men in question were scrutinized and given a rigid set of rules.
Her parents were angry and dismayed when Ruth graduated high school and soon after moved out into her own small apartment, taking a clerical job at the Bank of Madison. The division deepened when it became obvious that she’d abandoned the lessons of her upbringing and started going out to dance clubs and bars in Augusta with her new friends and coworkers.
Skip Drummond was her only real boyfriend of any duration, and he turned out to be the one she’d saved herself for. Skip’s family owned the area’s biggest home appliance and electronics store, and his future was carved out in retail before he was even born. Four years ahead of her in school, the 24-year-old was considered quite a catch in this small town. He was good-looking and popular; he played in all the sports leagues at the recreation center; and he liked to go out and have a good time.
