Page 11 of The Suit

“Stop whining. You were outside for forty-one seconds.” Cody threw me a bottle of water, which I caught mid-air while I walked over to the end of the room where all the action happened.

“Shouldn’t have been outside at all seeing as I own this place you’re in, you cocky shit.” I grinned at him, taking a seat at the desk I had in here, and put my feet up on it.

He grinned back showing off very straight, white teeth. For someone who spent eighteen to twenty hours in front of a screen and barely saw daylight, he looked surprisingly healthy and sprightly, when in fact he should have resembled a sailor in the eighteenth century who’d returned after a year-long voyage. Maybe those revolting Silicon Valley powdered nutrition drinks he knocked back on the regular really did work.

My throat convulsed to halt the vomit in its tracks at the thought of drinking one myself, and swiftly glugged my water to remove the imaginary taste from my mouth, and sat back. There were three desks in here; mine, Cody’s, and Diego’s, the latter of which was currently empty.

“Where’s the big man? I thought he’d be here.”

“He’s coming,” Cody replied, although his focus was still on the screen in front of him.

“Okay, so what have you got for me?”

His fingers clicked across a wireless keyboard which he picked up with him as he stood, then sat his ass onmydesk instead ofhischair, just as the images on the left half of the thirty-foot wall of screens changed from security feed to what looked like emails, but I wasn’t quite sure because each screen was different.

When Cody came to work for me, he gave me very clear specifications on what he wanted based on what I needed from him. Top of the list was secrecy, followed by security, followed by close to three million dollars’ worth of tech equipment. I didn’t ask why he needed that much when he’d hacked into Interpol with a broken HP Notebook in a gite in the south of France, because I finally had my Bat Cave. The secrecy was required because a) I was using him in the exact same way the CIA used him, except I didn’t have the backing of national security, and b) it was cool, plus I hadn’t yet found a legit use for the basement.

“What am I looking at?”

He started to answer but then we both noticed a large figure walking down the corridor to the wall. I glanced over to Cody to see how long he’d make him wait, only to witness him stretch behind and across the desk to press his thumb on a sensor pad. The wall slid open before Diego even reached it.

“Hey! Why does he get let in immediately?” I grumbled.

“He has my lunch.”

I sat up and stared at him. “Lunch? You mean you eat solid food?”

His boyish grin hit each cheek again, although it was rare to not see him smiling. He was far too laid back for someone working in the echelons of national secrecy and security. “Yeah, when someone brings it to me.”

“Hey, man,” Diego nodded to me as he walked through the opening and placed the paper bag on Cody’s desk, then sat at his own. The chair creaked under his weight even though it was bespoke to fit his size; Diego was quite simply the most enormous man I’d ever met, possibly anyone had.

A wall of muscle more solid than the reinforced steel and brick one which slid open to grant us entry to this room, Diego was an ex-NYPD detective and one of the toughest guys on the force. I’d worked with him on a couple of cases when I’d first become interested in focusing on pro-bono law not long after I’d graduated. When I’d decided to set the firm up, I’d almost begged him to come and work for me as an investigator, something which didn’t take as much persuasion as I thought it would have done, given that NYPD detectives are detectives for life.

However, what I hadn’t realized was that his wife was also looking for him to take something a little ‘safer’, seeing as six months before he’d been shot in the leg while making a massive arrest of a heroin cartel, and ended up in hospital for two weeks while they rebuilt the muscle around his femoral artery the bullet had nicked. Coupled with the fact his eldest daughter was off to college, and his wife had just discovered she was accidentally pregnant with their fifth child, I simply had to wave a high six-figure salary in his face, plus the promise of a hundred percent bonus, and he requested early retirement and started his new job with me the very next day.

He’d settled in surprisingly well to not having his life in danger quite so regularly, or at all. Since Cody had come along, they’d forged quite the team; one of the reasons we were the number one pro-bono firm in the country - we never lost. As we’d grown as a firm, he started to build up a small team of investigators, although this room was strictly reserved for the three of us only.

“What we lookin’ at?” Diego crossed his enormous biceps over his chest, although they weren’t so much biceps as ballistic missiles. When Cody had gotten his equipment down here, Diego had requested a fully stocked gym that would rival any pro-athletes’. It was also where the boys and I trained too, because apart from my present company, they were the only other people granted access to here.

“Dunno yet…” I nodded over to Cody to begin.

“Gentlemen, this is a selection of email exchanges between the attorneys in the divorce division at FSJ…”

Diego and I waited for his dramatic yet predictable pause, seeing as him breaking into our competitors’ servers to give us an edge was almost the sole reason we hired him. Was it legal? No. But we didn’t use the information directly, just as a base to get the legitimate intel. Breadcrumbs if you will. Sometimes it was harder to find a lawful path to the truth than it was to discover the truth in the first place.

The ever-present grin Cody was now sporting could only be described as mischievous. “Want to know which senior partner is having an affair with a second-year associate?”

Diego inhaled a patience-leveling breath, but he should have known Cody would be putting on a show. He never gave up the good info that quickly. “No.”

“You sure? These emails are pretty fucking hot. It’s like reading porn.”

“Jesus, you better not have been jacking off in here,” Diego growled, then started looking around as if trying to find the evidence.

I smirked at his face of disgust. He might look like a Rottweiler, but he was merely a Golden Retriever in disguise with a bark muchmuchworse than his bite, and Cody liked to wind him up; something he fell for every time.

But wewerepressed for time, and I wanted to know what we were working with.

“Get on with it, Cody.”

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