Page 50 of Big Bad Bully
Her shoulders sag, and she shakes her head. “We’ll talk more later,” she says as she moves away.
I glance at Jamie. “If I can pull this off, what do you need me to do?”
“There’s a jump drive in my coffee cup,” she nods to the paper cup she left beside the bench. I didn’t even notice it. “Once you’re in, you’ll insert that into any server. It’ll give me a back door window into their entire network.”
My mouth goes dry as I process what she's telling me. I’m basically helping her hack into a billion-dollar company. “Are you sure?”
“You got this,” she says.
I nod and pick up the cup. It rattles a little—there’s no liquid inside, just the jump drive.
Yeah.
I’ve got this.
I owe it to artists around the world. It’s not right for a big corporation to steal their work and then stalk its former employees to intimidate them out of whistle-blowing. It’s not right, and someone has to stand up to them.
I have an in there.
It has to be me.
Chapter Fifteen
Billy
I take the elevator up to the rooftop helipad at six p.m.
I missed Aubrey leaving my place, but I put a tracker in her phone.
What? I’m not obsessed. I just have trust issues, and I’m controlling as fuck. Aubrey works for me now, which means I need to know what she’s up to. Whether she can be trusted.
By the time I got off my afternoon video call, she was at Penn Station. She didn’t take a train, though. Judging by the way her tracker stayed in one place for twenty minutes then exited the station, it looks like she had a meeting with someone.
In the busiest train station in the city.
If that’s not highly suspicious, I don’t know what is.
I also didn’t buy her story about painting a mural for Sentience. A woman like her–a social justice warrior / artist–wouldn’t take a job for them out of principle.
They are the devil to the lefties. They exploit child labor in third world countries to scan and upload the information they feed their artificial intelligence, and everyone knows they don’t compensate the original creators of that content.
She, as an artist, would take exception to their blatant thievery.
So that makes me think she’s there for subterfuge. I searched her bag this morning while she was using the bathroom and found one very interesting item–a keycard to Sentience with the photo of the bastard she’d given a hug to the night I picked her up.
I still want to stomp him into the ground, but my wolf nearly did a backflip when I realized she might have hugged him to steal the card.
The alternative thought is that they’re screwing, and he left it at her place.
Maybe she went to Penn Station to meet him to return it.
Fuck!
If that’s the case, I will throw him off the roof of the Sentience building and watch him scream.
Right now, the tension of it all has me nearly feral, which is why I have to get to the woods. My wolf needs to be off-leash.
The helicopter touches down on the roof helipad. We have one here and one on the top of Moon Co. When I called the company pilot, John Acker, to pick me up, he said he was already scheduled for a trip out to the Adirondacks, but there was room for one more.
