Page 12 of Indecent Demands

Maybe it was time for me to use some misdirection.

I sat up. That wouldn’t hurt, right? If I could make Seth think that it was, say, the COO or someone, then that would buy me time to cover my own tracks. I pulled out my laptop and opened it, then logged into the company system remotely. Sure, that theoretically wasn’t possible, but I’d hacked out a bypass long ago so I could monitor my program from anywhere.

Once I was in, I got into the employee documents with my shiny new level four clearance. Interestingly, my history already showed that I’d been looking into some people—including some memos and emails by Damien Harcourt.

That had to be Seth using my clearance to stay under the radar. Why was he looking into Damien? Damien was the one who’d hired him—ostensibly as a ‘security consultant’ but in reality to find the thief. Why would Seth want to look into him? Did he think that Damien was hiding something?

I looked at the same memos that Seth had and saw they were related to Damien wanting to take the company public. Shit. That must’ve been how he realized there was a theft in progress—he’d looked at the numbers in preparation for the public offering.

Not sure that explained why Seth was looking at these memos, but it did explain why someone was now onto my activities.

I moved on and did some searching into the memos of the other C-level executives. If I was going to pin this on one of them, I had to make sure I picked the right one. The two professionals that Damien had brought on to give himself more experience and credibility were tempting, but when I checked their resumés, neither of them had worked for the same companies I had, so I couldn’t use my prior thefts to paint a picture of this being a pattern for them. They both had good records. Not spotless, nobody batted a thousand every game, but good enough that it would be hard to show they were the thieves, or that they’d done this before.

The two men that Damien had come up with, however…

Brian and Jackson were both in the same fraternity as Damien in college. Brian had convinced his dad to help them out by giving them some seed money to start the company. Both he and Jackson had been Damien’s wingmen on this.

But how loyal were they, really? It would be easy for a man to get tired of playing second fiddle. From what I’d seen of Damien, he didn’t like to share the limelight, or the wealth. It would make a lot of sense if one of them was to decide to line his own nest and screw Damien over in the process for various slights either real or imagined.

Hmm.Brian was the COO. It would be easy for him to get into any system he wanted and make changes without anyone questioning him.

But how to shift the suspicion to him, exactly?

I wasn’t looking for anything that would really hold up in court. That would take far more than what I could do all by myself. But it should be enough to get him questioned while I made a clean getaway.

Honestly, I should probably start planning my exit strategy, and a name change. Damn it.

I crafted some emails from myself to myself, but made them look like they were a back and forth between Brian and a hired hacker. I didn’t want to implicate anyone within the company itself. God forbid Tony or one of my innocent coworkers get in trouble. That wasn’t what I wanted.

If Seth was already hot on my trail, he probably knew that there was no way Brian or any C-level executive could pull this off without some serious technological know-how, and so the perpetrator had probably hired someone with that know-how to help them out. Even more damning, I was pretty sure Seth would soon figure out I’d used a program on a hard drive.

Well, it was just like magic. Keep the audience looking at your right hand so they didn’t see what you were doing with your left.

I talked about the hard drive in one of the emails in the persona of the hacker, explaining that this hard drive I was giving him would do all the work for him, he just had to insert it into one of the computers, let the program download, and then remove the hard drive again. I also crafted an email of Brian panicking about Seth, and the hacker telling him to just put the hard drive back into the computers, then erase the program from the company’s software and remove the hard drive again.

Simple. Easy-peasy.

Once that all was complete, I deleted the account I’d used to create those emails, leaving them up in Brian’s Cloud history. Again, an actual tech expert like myself, hired by the defense team, would be able to unravel it all and figure out these emails were really from a different account and that Brian was being framed. But that wasn’t my problem. It just had to distract them long enough for me to get away.

When I finished I shoved my laptop away and stared up at the ceiling, breathing slowly and deeply to keep the panic from setting in. I’d been doing this for years. It was only a matter of time until someone got wind of my work. This was something I’d been waiting for in the back of my mind and I’d always known it was a possibility. There was no reason to freak out.

But for all his affable nature and his charm, something about Seth Maxwell terrified me. Maybe it was all just in my head. Maybe I’d heard ‘military vet’ and was making assumptions. And yet, something in my gut told me that he was dangerous and ruthless and that I had to be careful.

I just hoped that I had been smart enough to get out of this.

The next morning I went into work the same as usual, only I bought a coffee for Seth along with my own.

He was back in the conference room. I waved at Tony as I breezed by, then entered without knocking. “Good morning!” I set the coffee down in front of him.

Seth took the coffee and tipped it towards me with a grateful smile. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Well, I wanted to.” I sat down across from him. “Um. So I logged in this morning and saw that you’ve used my credentials to look at some of Damien Harcourt’s stuff. You’ll… tell him it was you if he finds out and asks, right? I don’t want to get in trouble for snooping on my boss when I didn’t actually do it.”

“Don’t worry, if Harcourt gets his panties in a bind, I’ll be sure to let him know that it was me.” Seth took a drink of his coffee and leaned back in his seat. “I’m trusted to investigate all the ways that someone could gain access to sensitive files and that includes Harcourt’s things. He’ll understand that.”

I nodded. I had deleted my own snooping from my history on my account, but I’d left the stuff that Seth had done in my name. “Well, I’m going to get to work, unless there’s something you’d like help with?”

Seth drummed his fingers on the table. “I do have a question for you.”

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