A Better Life

by Liza O'Connor

  Davenport seated them on Angel’s side. He then walked to the monitor and placed a disk into its side.

  “This is the monitor which registers an admin login.”

  “It’s been tampered with. I did not do this,” Leon stated, but the dullness of his voice indicated he no longer expected anyone to believe him.

  “Note the time,” Davenport stated. He then stopped it and placed in another disc showing Angel typing with Sinclair and Leon staring at her monitor with faint smiles.

  He stopped it and pointed at the clock stating the same time.

  Instead of relief, Leon went rigid with fury. “If you’ve known it wasn’t me, why the hell have you been torturing me?”

  “We didn’t know until Angel risked her life and confessed to a serious protocol breach.”

  “She didn’t do this. I damn well would have stopped her if that’s what I saw on the monitor.”

  “Same here,” Sinclair added.

  “The breach is allowing others to use her computer,” Hamilton stated.

  Leon slammed his fist down. “The rule says you may not leave your computer unattended or allow others to use your computer without supervision. You cannot change the damn rule just because she ruined your attempt to railroad me for something I didn’t do.”

  Angel glared at Hamilton. Was that true? Had he just been jerking her chain?

  Yet the surprise in his face indicated he had not known the actual wording of the rule. He stared at Braddock, who stared at Davenport.

  “I’ve put them all to memory but let me get my book.” He had barely left the room when Sinclair slammed a paperback volume on the table. “Look it up. Leon’s right.”

  Hamilton took the book, found the rule, read it silently, then handed it to Braddock who frowned heavily as if trying to intimidate the book to rewrite itself.

  Now it was Angel’s turn to get angry. “So that’s why Tom didn’t stop me. I wasn’t actually breaking protocol.”

  Leon glared at the two men and leaned back, his arms crossed in anger. “No, you did nothing wrong. They just did this to scare you out of proving me innocent. I can’t believe the lengths the government will go not to pay my pension. First, you give me an ultimatum to sign on for five years in hell or quit a year before I retire. And once you get me down here, you swap out the real monitor film with old footage of me. Hell, my hair’s a half inch shorter than it is now in that ‘proof’ you have.”

  Braddock stood and placed the first disk inside. He stopped on a good facial shot of Leon and studied it. “When do you think this was taken?”

  “Someone has whited the background, so I can’t say for certain, but by my pissed off expression, I would say this was taken during my last job. Until yesterday, I’ve just been bored senseless here. Then finally, I have a good day and I think things have turned up and maybe these last five years of my career are actually going to be fun. So naturally, I’m woken up in the middle of the night and a whole new level of hell begins.

  “I would like to resign from this job,” Sinclair stated.

  “Me too,” Leon snapped.

  “No!” Angel cried. “Then the person who set you up wins. The three of us can make a real impact here. We can do an incredible amount of damage to the bad guys. That’s why we were targeted.” She gripped Leon’s hand. “We had fun yesterday. We did good. We can have more good times.”

  “Except they’re railroading you out, too,” Leon reminded her.

  Just then Davenport returned with his copy of the protocols and handed it to Braddock. “Our manuals are different.”

  Hamilton slammed his fist against the table. “Son of a bitch!” He then glared at Angel as if he blamed her for Max’s sabotage, and this change in the protocol sounded very much like Max’s cleverness.

  “We can survive this attack,” she insisted. She looked at Sinclair and Leon. “We’ve all been part of a clever manipulation that was meant to undermine our trust and dedication to the project.”

  “Then it worked,” Leon grumbled.

  “It only works if you let them win. We can still turn this around. You saw the tape they had of you logging in as an admin. That person approved a major transfer of money. That person set you up. And I think it was because they could tell we were going to kick ass and put a serious dent in terrorism.” She gripped his hand. “We can still do that. You can retire feeling incredibly proud of yourself. You can have five great years.” She turned her focus to Sinclair. “We’re a good team.”

  “We’re a great team,” Sinclair corrected. “I retract my request to leave, as long as we can continue working as a team.” He looked at Leon. “We have to have you. Bob and Scott are good, but they don’t hold a candle to you.”

  “Can’t leave my partners hanging.” He sighed and looked at Hamilton. “I withdraw my request to leave. But I want an apology. I have dedicated my life to my country, and you should have shown me your ‘proof’ at once, because I could have shot it down in a second. And I wouldn’t have even had to drag Sinclair and Angel into this mess.”

  Hamilton didn’t blink or hesitate. “You have my heartfelt apology. We’ve all been manipulated by a master chess player. However, I am glad Angel entered this fray, because I am certain that one protocol isn’t the only difference in these books.”

  He rose and walked to their side of the table. “As of now, you three are my ace squad. You have passed through fire and survived the test.” He shook hands with each of them. “Davenport, take my ace squad back to the lab so they can kick ass. Send Tom in.”

  Angel’s brow furrowed in worry.

  He touched her cheek. “Trust me.”

  She nodded and left with Leon and Sinclair.

  When they returned, Bob and Scott had both broken through two supplier companies.

  “Can we help? Our specialty is moving money, but we aren’t complete idiots. Toss us the companies that look less interesting. We’ve been watching you all morning. I think we can do the supplier level.” Cole looked to Davis and he nodded in agreement.

  “That’s a great idea.” She sat next to Bob and assessed the company he’d broken in. “This one I think Sinclair should tackle.”

  Bob nodded, and with a few strokes of the keys, he passed it to Sinclair and began a new search for a backdoor.

  She sent Scott’s back door to Davis and Cole to work on it together.

  She turned to Leon. The tired and bedraggled fellow had his computer up and searching for a new backdoor.

  Angel glanced over at the other team. They all sat before their computers, but no one was typing. Clark watched team three with worry.

  Max, is it really you doing all this harm?

  Tom spoke to Davenport and a moment later, Team Two and a half was removed from the room.

  Sinclair huffed. “Goodbye negative energy.”

  “I’ll second that!” Angel declared and kissed Sinclair’s and Leon’s cheeks.

  “You shouldn’t kiss, Leon,” Scott warned. “He looks seriously ill.”

  “I’ll risk it,” Angel replied.

  “And he’s really ugly,” Bob added.

  “Is not,” she countered.

  That earned her a half smile from Leon. “Our lady is more impressive than we thought.”

  “Because she’s blind?” Cole teased.

  “Exactly,” Leon chuckled.

  ***

  They worked until seven and then the grumbling of Angel’s stomach caused them to call it a day.

  Angel high-fived them on all the great work they had accomplished. As they headed off to dinner, she recalled her boys would be expecting a game. “Oh crap!”

  “What?” Sinclair asked.

  “I promised my boys I would write them a Find the Money game.” She explained her desire to teach them forensic auditing through a game.

  Instead of rolling their eyes, her team wanted to help her. So, while she ate dinner, they worked on her kid’s program. Leon insisted before they find the money, they
should have to find a secret island and discover its password. Sinclair wrote the forensic part and Cole and Davis added a section that moves the money to a safe temple.

  When she finished eating, she reviewed their game. “This is wonderful. I’m taking it to my boys right now.”

  “And girl,” Tom spoke softly.

  She nodded. She had no idea if Kelly had any interest in numbers. To be honest, she had no idea if a five-year-old or the eight-year-olds had any interest in number games either.

  But she had promised them a game, and against all odds, she had one. While she planned to add more to the program for the next night, at least it was a start.

  The moment they entered her home, three boys and Kelly waited on the other side. “Do you have our game?” Stevie asked.

  “I want to play first,” Tommy insisted.

  Tom ruffled the boy’s hair.

  Angel laughed at their anticipation. “Let’s go to the kitchen table, and let the games begin.”

  Chapter 9

  Angel gathered her children around. “Now you are all FBI agents, but not just any FBI agents. You are the smartest, cleverest, and most determined agents we have.”

  The children sparkled with happiness, jumping excitedly from one foot to the other.

  “There are bad guys out there.”

  “What type of bad guys?” Stevie asked.

  “We don’t know yet. We just know they are giving money to terrorists, but we don’t know anything about them right now. It’s your job to find out who they are and remove their money, so they can’t cause further harm.”

  She eyed each child. Right now, they were hooked. She only hoped she could keep them so engrossed.

  “Now we have three jobs in the team that need to be filled.” All the kids raised their hands.

  “Don’t worry. Some jobs can use more than one person.” She wrote the jobs on slips of paper and asked her children to draw one.

  “I’m a hacker!” Dare declared, and then frowned. “Wait, isn’t that a bad guy?”

  “Not when you work for the FBI.”

  Dare chuckled and looked at his dad. “I’m going to be a hacker for the FBI.”

  Derrick ruffled his hair. “Good for you!”

  Kelly was a Forensic auditor. “What’s that?”

  “It’s kind of like the CSI people, only we analyze numbers and we do it through the computer.”

  “Is that what you do?”

  “Yes.”

  Suddenly all the children wanted to be ‘foresting audios’.

  Angel laughed. “It’s forensic auditor, and we only need one.”

  “I’m a money mover,” Tommy declared and then looked at his dad. “Is that good?”

  His father nodded. “That’s a very important job. You have to move the money to someplace safe.”

  Tommy’s eye’s rounded. “You know how to play this game too?”

  “A little.”

  “Can you help me?”

  “Us too!” echoed the other children.

  Angel laughed. “We are all going to help each other because we have a better chance of winning if we do.”

  “So, let’s gather around Dare and Stevie and help them look for a backdoor.”

  Stevie shook his head. “We don’t have a backdoor.”

  “Not a physical one…” She then explained what a backdoor meant in their game.

  “Like an invisible hidden door,” Dare suggested.

  “Exactly.”

  “But how are we going to find something no one else can?”

  “Well, that’s the trick. Ready to play?”

  They all nodded happily.

  With Stevie and Dare sharing the chair before the computer, Tommy lifted up by Tom, and Kelly standing to the right, she pulled up the program.

  Scott had insisted on a graphic front. “It’s just not a game, otherwise.” They appeared to be falling into a black hole. In the very center, after a long fall, it said, “Welcome Agents of the Future. Prepare to be challenged.”

  Kelly read it aloud. She put a great deal of drama in her voice.

  When they clicked ‘ENTER’ a black screen with the words,

  “Find the Backdoor,” flashed, then a list of numbers and alpha strands appeared, only instead of thousands of screens long, it had ten possibilities.

  There was a link on the bottom corner labeled ‘Clues’.

  Stevie clicked it.

  Clue One: Make use of smart people. Ask them questions.

  All the children turned to her. “What do we need to know?” Stevie asked.

  She chuckled at how fast Stevie got around the point of this exercise. “No, you have to ask specific questions, not general ones.”

  He huffed. “What does Alpha strand mean?

  “It’s a selection of letters from the alphabet, which may or may not create a word.”

  “What do those numbers mean?” Tommy asked.

  “Hey! I’m supposed to ask questions!” Stevie objected.

  “That was a very good question, Tommy, but you are helping Stevie, so if he’s pondering what questions to ask, you should have suggested it to him.”

  Tommy rolled his eyes. “Stevie, ask mom what the numbers mean.”

  Stevie shook his head.

  “Stevie, Tommy’s your teammate, and he gave you an excellent suggestion. Now if you don’t want to be a good team member, we can stop the game now, because you can’t do this by yourself.”

  “Sorry, Tommy.” He then turned to his mom. “What do the numbers mean?”

  She leaned over and pulled up an example page and went through what the various sections of numbers meant. “Now some companies use other codes, but this is the most common breakdown of the numbers, and luckily I happen to know this company uses this coding system.”

  Now understanding the numbers more, they returned to the computer screen and studied the numbers. They discussed it among themselves, determined to figure out which might be the backdoor.

  “Can’t we just try them all?” Dare asked.

  “You could, but one might be a trap door that alerts the company an intruder is trying to bust through its firewall.”

  “What’s a firewall?” Stevie asked.

  “A thinking electronic barrier that catches almost everyone who tries to get in without permission.”

  “How are we going to get in?”

  “That will be tomorrow’s game. Tonight, we have to find the backdoor.”

  Their questions were endless, but eventually the whole team agreed upon which was the true backdoor. With trepidation Stevie clicked it.

  Congratulations! You found the backdoor. Password Please.

  “What’s the password?” Stevie asked.

  “We don’t know. But tomorrow night, we will discover ways to determine what the password is.”

  “Why not now?”

  “Because it is bedtime, and if you don’t get your rest, you will be too sleepy to think when you try and break the password tomorrow.”

  With a great deal of grumbling, the children went to bed. When the last one was tucked in bed and kissed goodnight, she eased out of the room.

  Tom pulled her into his arms. “You are amazing.”

  “The only impressive thing about that game was Scott’s introduction.”

  “Are you kidding? You taught those kids things I didn’t know.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like what all the sections of numbers stood for and that there is some commonality between companies.”

  “Don’t get too fond of that idea. There are about twenty standards which are commonly used. Leon has a program that can analyze the numbers and determine which standard they are using, and then it identifies the entries which are most likely the backdoor by searching for specific criteria. It’s really brilliant. Leon’s really brilliant.”

  Tom chuckled. “According to Davenport, until you arrived, Leon was a grumpy old man waiting to retire.”

  “Well, honestl
y, if you had made me perform within those protocols, I would have probably become the same. This job is either extraordinarily interesting or exceedingly dull. There’s not much in between.”

  He led her to her bed and joined her. “Six more days,” he whispered softly in her ear.

  “Seems an eternity,” she replied. She couldn’t wait until she was cleared for sex either.

  ***

  Hamilton frowned and stared at Davenport. “Find out what is happening in six days.”

  “That is when Dr. Hanson says Angel can have sexual relations.”

  Hamilton remained worried. “Are you a hundred percent positive that is what they were referring to?”

  “Two hundred percent certain. And if you ask me, I can give you the countdown to the hour.”

  Hamilton huffed. “I’m not entirely comfortable with you being intimately involved with our asset.”

  “Well, Angel would have an issue if I refused her. She requires physical proof of love on a regular basis. If deprived of such, she becomes depressed, stops eating, and will cease to be a valuable asset.”

  “Is that why Max allowed her to sleep with Tom and the other men in the house?”

  “Yes. She promised him faithfulness on her wedding day, but after six months, he declared her needs more than he could handle alone.”

  “So, the profiler was right when he called her a nymphomaniac?”

  “I believe he was entirely wrong. She is not mentally ill, nor in need of intense psychiatric care. She just needs multiple verifications that she’s loved. Without that, the ugly truths about her life start to wear her down.”

  “What ugly truths are you talking about?”

  “That people continue to search for her, so they could either kidnap or kill her. That they might use her children to force her to do whatever they wanted. That Max intended to kill her rather than allow that to happen, but there was no certainty he would keep her children safe in the process. And possibly, deep down, she fears that Max does not love her for herself, but only for her value to the country.”

  “You can stop with the list. That was sufficient to depress any sane person. I suppose I should be relieved she has found a way to keep herself distracted from all that.” He paused. “Only all those dangers are gone now.”