Page 10 of Indecent Demands

The first row yielded nothing. Neither did the second. Or the third. By the time I checked the last row at the end of the room, I had to satisfy myself that there was nothing and no one, and it was just paranoia.

Then I heard the door to the room click shut—for a second time.

I whirled around and raced back to the front of the room, yanking the door open, but there was no one in the hallway. The elevator at the end of the hall was closed and silent. The person must have taken the stairs. They could be on any floor by now. Shit.

Shit.

I leaned my forehead against the wall and took a deep breath. All right. So someone was in here, someone who didn’t want to be caught, fucking around with the hardware. That meant I was on the right track. Someone had probably gotten spooked seeing me around and asking questions, so they’d come down here to cover their tracks.

Now I had to find out what it was they’d done.

I examined all the servers, and finally plugged into one that handled the processing for the accounting department. This was going to take a while. I was grateful to Ariana for bringing me that coffee.

What if I asked her down here to help me? It would be nice to have the company even though I didn’t really need it. In fact it would be easier for me to focus if I was alone. But I wanted her company.

Damn it, man, focus.

I exhaled a deep breath. If I was correct in my suspicions, then someone in the tech department was probably an accomplice of this thief, and if Ariana knew about it, she might spill the beans somehow. It could even be her manager Tony. He’d seemed like a good guy, but as a manager he could get into anyone’s code or accounts and fiddle with things after hours or behind people’s backs.

I had to keep this to myself.

Sitting down with my back against the wall, I pulled out the laptop I’d been working on and plugged it into the server. It took me a minute to get into the network, and from there I started on the actual hacking and exploration.

Everything seemed fine.

That couldn’t be right, though. I had heard someone in here. I knew that something was getting fucked with.

I looked at the clock. Damn, it was getting late. Was I willing to spend the entire night on this thing?

Well, it wouldn’t be the first all-nighter that I’d spent working through some technological snarl. At least this time there weren’t lives at stake or actual weapons involved. I cracked my neck and knuckles, then settled in for the long haul.

The thing was, nothing digital could really be erased. Even if the file itself was deleted, for example, there were still ways the impression or memory of it was left behind. It was like writing on a piece of paper and then erasing what you’d written—the indents from the pencil would still be on the piece of paper. Or, if you ripped the paper up and burned it, the paper underneath would have the impressions from the paper above, and you could possibly make out what had been written.

It was going to take a while, but I was certain I’d be able to find whatever had been done to change the numbers for these various accounts. I could see the log of the manipulations, automated or manual. I suspected manual, since it would take a hell of a lot of coding work and skill to make an automated system, but sometimes people got lazy—especially the rich and powerful like company owners—and they just wanted something that generated it for them and they didn’t have to think about it. Passive income. That was why they were all into ‘investing’ and stocks. It was making money without actually doing any work for it.

I ended up ordering my dinner delivered to the office so I could grab it and keep working one-handed while I ate. I felt like I was back in college trying to pull an all-nighter.

Of course, back then I hadn’t been getting paid for it.

It took me a long time to sort out the changes that had been made. Whoever this person was, they were good. I was more and more certain that whoever had done this had a tech person on their side helping them out. But who?

When I finished my dinner, I set aside the programming and instead pulled up the internet so I could do some background searching on the men in charge of this company, to see what I could scare up.

Harcourt had kept his team small, which made sense since the company was still on the small side and not yet as big as he’d probably like it to be—but it was growing quickly. He’d need to expand the board and possibly wanted to take the company public.

Actually…

I used Ariana’s newly granted level four clearance to log in and pull up some memos and emails that Harcourt had sent. I skimmed through them… and sure enough, my hunch had been right. He wanted to take the company public.

That was going to be a big move. No wonder he was anxious to have this thief discovered. That might even have been how he had figured out that someone was stealing from him—if he’d gone through the financials in preparation for a public offering, organizing everything, he might have realized that something fishy was going on.

Perfectly on the up and up, of course. But I still felt like I should look into him. Something wasn’t quite right, and I always trusted my gut.

When I did my research on the other four people who were in charge at the company, I got the usuals. Two of them had come up with Damien as a part of the company and he relied on them. They’d been in the same frat house together at college and were tight knit.

The other two people had been brought on when the company had really gotten going, both of them experienced with smaller companies and start-ups. I checked up on the other companies these two had helped to nurture into success. They hadn’t worked together before explicitly, although they’d run in the same circles, and while not every company they chose was a success, enough of them were one that I didn’t think there was a real pattern of thievery from either of them.

But hey, there was a first time for everything.

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