Page 94 of Unexpected Hero

Chapter 17

She's not gonna be Jesse's girl

TOMER

Icheck the clock for the third time in the last sixty seconds. My knee bobs with impatience as Boss reads and rereads my report while pacing around his office.

He slams the papers onto the table and curses under his breath. Frustration crimps every line of his face, making him look older than his fifty-some-odd years.

This last month has been a reminder the size of a billboard an inch in front of my face as to why I can’t tell him about his daughter yet.

It’s a shitstorm at Redleg.

When he finishes reading the summary of findings aloud, he plops down at the table opposite me and pins me with a haggard look. “We vetted them, right? Did we miss something? How the fuck did this happen?”

I pick at the fabric of my pants, struggling to suppress my irritation. “We checked references, evaluated the specs, and ran a full battery of performance testing. Doug in Purchasing checked all the shit he normally does before entering a contract. The software and hardware were verified and verified again. I don’t think we did anything wrong.”

“If that were the case, I wouldn’t be hauled in for a deposition.”

“Boss, everything you need to defend our practices is in that file. All blame rests squarely on SECO Tech.”

“Let me get George on the horn. I need to get his take on this shit. Did you send your report to him?”

I nod. “About twenty minutes before I came in here.”

“Good.”

He presses the intercom button to call his assistant.

“Yes, Boss?” Peg answers.

“Can you get Lionheart and Klein in here? And then call our attorney George Lennox to see when he can talk to me about this damn deposition.”

“I’m on it.”

He clicks off the speaker and grabs the report again, his gaze sweeping over it studiously.

A month ago, one of our home security client’s residences was burglarized. And the system we’d installed didn’t register the break-in. Total system failure. The last month has been a shitshow of work. Klein and I analyzed every component to identify the breakdown.

Three days ago, we received word that the client is suing us and the manufacturer who designed the tech we used for the install. I’ve spent the last few days getting all the proof compiled for Boss to cover our ass. Even if I were an independent auditor examining this situation, I wouldn’t be able to find Redleg liable for this shit.

Big Al quickly flips through the pages. “Where’s the info on our biweekly system checks? We did that, right?”

“Page four. Section C.”

He moves to that section and drags his index finger over the page until he finds the report. “This is the full system check log, right?”

“Yes. And the daily error logs are in the appendix. You can see there isn’t even a blip. Everything was normal, including the day of the break-in.”

He grimaces. “That makes no sense. How could it...” His words trail off as he skims the logs.

“I have a theory.”

His eyes jump off the page at me. The intensity of his glare is intimidating. When he looks at me this way, I get sucked into the past. Suddenly, I’m an unsure teen standing in front of my angry father while he berates me for something I said or did wrong. Usually, it was a combination of things I shouldn’t have done.

Blinking, I yank myself back to the here and now. “I suspect SECO was cutting corners. The interface between their network and ours wasn’t properly supported on their end. Instead of maintaining it the way they should, they put a patch in place so it would look like the daily system verification was occurring, but it wasn’t.”

“Can you prove that?”

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