Page 36 of Wicked Love
“Oh, that sort of thing happens to me all the time. Good thing you realized before we left.”
She waved me off, and I kept my game face on until I’d turned away. Even then, I restrained a grimace at my lie, far too aware of the hospital staff, patients, and visitors milling around the lobby.
I headed back the way we’d come as if I really were going back to the exam room, but I quickly turned down a different hallway—one with fewer patient rooms and more admin offices. It was almost lunchtime, which I hoped would work in my favor. I brushed my hand across the USB drive in my pocket, reassuring myself that it was still there, as if I hadn’t felt it moments before.
I knew nothing special about computers and nothing at all about hacking, but I knew how to insert a flash drive. It would be hard to screwthatup.
All I needed was to find an unmonitored computer accessible enough for me to insert the drive. Beckett had said that the way his techie colleague had programmed it, the app on it would run automatically and insert the necessary code for our purposes in less than a minute.
I had to walk confidently and briskly as if I belonged here to avoid getting questioned by the staff, since there weren’t many visitors wandering around in this section of the hospital. I picked up my pace when I spotted a nurse’s station with a few computers up ahead, the chairs currently empty. My heart thumped faster.
Jackpot.
But just as I stopped on the opposite side of one of the desks from the computer, dipping my hand into my pocket and glancing around to see if I could lean over the counter to plug it in, a man in scrubs hustled into the station. “Can I help you?”
Shit. “No,” I said, pasting on a smile. “I almost forgot the room number I needed, but it came to me the second I decided I had to ask. Isn’t that always the way? Sorry to bother you.”
“No bother at all,” he assured me, but I hurried off with a false sense of purpose in case he watched me go.
Farther down the hallway, a woman strode out of a room, leaving the door ajar. Did that mean it was empty now? I slowed down just enough so that she’d pass me well before I got to the room and approached it cautiously.
I could see a computer on a long desktop just beyond the door. Was there anyone else in the room?
I rested my hand on the door—and a voice spoke from right behind me. “Were you looking for Beth?”
It took all my effort not to jump out of my skin. I turned with as much self-control as I could summon and smiled at the man who’d approached me.
What was a decent excuse? “I was just going to see if she wanted a coffee,” I said brightly. “It looks like she’s stepped out, though. I guess maybe she went to get her own.”
The guy dipped his head. “Probably. I’m sure she’d have appreciated the thought, though.”
I forced myself to walk onward and turned into the next stairwell, since I’d almost reached the end of the hall.
Plug in a USB drive. It’dsoundedeasy, but locating a computer where no one would see me pull off the maneuver was proving next to impossible. I wasn’t some magician who could flick it in there while talking to the person at the keyboard. Although right now I really wished I was.
Mom was waiting for me at the car. I could expand my lie, make up a reason it’d taken me so long, but with every passing minute, that lie would become harder to make convincing. Maybe I should have taken Logan up on his offer to come along and create some kind of distraction, but that’d seemed so irresponsible in a hospital where lives were on the line.
That thought had barely finished passing through my head as I strode down the new hall I’d come out into when the PA system crackled to life.
“Code blue,” a voice announced. “Second floor, corridor three, outside room two-seven.”
The woman who’d been poised behind the nurse’s station up ahead sprang into action, rushing away from the desks toward the emergency. The two other staff I could see farther down vanished into a side hallway.
The nurse’s station was totally empty.
Guilt jabbed through my gut at taking advantage of someone’s potentially fatal event, but I didn’t have time to weigh the morality of my choice. This could be my only chance.
I darted forward and leaned over the counter toward one of the computers, fumbling for the drive at the same time. It didn’t have a lid on it, thank God. Where was the port? There.
I shoved the drive into place, wiggled it to make sure it was all the way in and steady, and tugged the computer just a smidge to the side so that it was less likely anyone would notice the new accessory. I couldn’t risk sticking around while the program did its work. When someone did find it, it was apparently programmed to look totally empty unless you knew how to crack its secrets. It’d be dismissed and thrown away with no one the wiser.
My pulse racing, I pushed away from the counter and spun around. I half expected a staff person to be charging toward me with an accusing yell, but there was no one around except for a nurse who was just backing out of a room several doors down. She hadn’t seen anything.
I dragged in a breath and marched back to the stairwell, already formulating my excuses to Mom in my head. At the same time, I pulled out my phone from my purse, where I’d actually left it.
Everything’s in place, I texted Logan.Ready for the next phase of the plan.
CHAPTERSEVENTEEN
