Page 89 of Death Wish

Boudreax swaggered closer. “You can be tied up again, Porterfield. Don’t threaten the boss.”

Daley waved the security chief off. “Out. You have two hours, Simone. If you’re not finished by that time, I’ll turn Boudreax loose on you.”

“I’ll be ready. Go.”

The other men left the room and locked them in again.

Jesse settled back into his chair. “You don’t want to push them any farther, Simone.”

“I won’t have to. My sweep is finished. Now, I’m going to run the actual program to see if it works as Beckett wrote it. If it doesn’t, I’ll have to diagnose the problem.”

“And if it does?”

“I’ll add my special touches.”

She ran through the program and watched the result on her screens. Nope. Beckett had made a couple of mistakes near the end.

Simone corrected them and ran through the program again. No problems this time. Excellent. Satisfaction swept through her.

She rubbed her hands together. Now, to set up the program so it would work until it was transferred from this computer to any other device, including a flash drive or the cloud, and accessed without her help.

Simone went back to work, frequently checking the clock. Occasionally, she received an update from Fortress through her watch. Most of the time, Fortress didn’t disturb her.

Finally, she wrapped up the final finishing touch and sat back. “Done,” she murmured.

“Fifteen minutes to spare.”

“Maybe they’ll let us go when Daley gets the program.”

“You know better.”

She sighed. “Yeah. Figured. What will we do?”

“They won’t shoot us here. Too messy and they’d have to clean up evidence of the deed. My guess is they’ll take us off site.”

“Daley must pay me or he won’t get the program. Nonnegotiable, Jesse.”

“Why do you care?”

“The money isn’t going to my account. It’s going to the account of my favorite charity. They can use the extra donation.”

He squeezed her hand. “I should have known you’d do something selfless.”

Simone shrugged. “I don’t want tainted money but the literacy fund will use it well. They won’t care where the money came from.”

“You’re doing a good thing, baby.” He tugged Simone into his arms, holding her close. “I’m proud of you.”

“Why? I’m a programmer. This is what I do.”

“But you don’t normally write computer programs under such heavy duress. You did an outstanding job.”

“Let’s hope it passes muster with Daley.” She looked up at him. “We have to find a way out of here. Without a key card, we won’t be able to accomplish that unless you have a magic trick up your sleeve I don’t know about.”

“We’ll do what’s necessary to survive until help arrives.”

The door unlocked, and Daley and his cronies strode into the computer lab. “Well?” Daley demanded. “Is it finished?”

“Come look.” Simone booted up the program for Daley and set it to run with a few taps of the keyboard. When the program ended, she said, “Satisfied?”

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