A Matter of Time 07 - Parting Shot (MM) (25 page)

While he went to look, I tried to figure out where the search function was. I had to see what I could find on Evan Polley before Clay Wells figured out a way to get in. By the time Aaron joined me, I could barely see. Even the light from the computer monitor was painful, and I had more than a headache.

“Hey,” Aaron said softly, returning with two bottles of chilled water. “There’s a small refrigerator downstairs, but there’s only water in it. And the storage room has cables and things like that, probably for the TVs and computers at the front desk. There’s also cleaning supplies and crap like that.”

“Okay,” I sighed, squinting at the monitor.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t give me that. Your color is for shit. You’re actually gray, and your pupils are just—baby, you need to lie down.”

“I can’t lie down,” I snapped. “I have to—”

“Let’s just trade places, and you can put your head down, all right? You can stay right here with me.”

“I know more about this than you do.”

He scoffed. “Oh, I doubt that. This is surveillance. I have corporate security, and I have spies who do some serious hacking.”

I twisted around to face him. “Are you breaking the law?”

“Yes.” He smiled at me. “Now move.”

“That’s bad,” I said, sliding over into the other chair as he took my spot.

He scoffed.

I realized how lame I sounded.

“That’s bad?” he repeated.

“I’m dying,” I muttered. “Gimme a break.”

“You’re not dying,” he said seriously. “But yes, it is bad. I promise to start being a much more solid citizen now that I have secured my place at Sutter, have controlling shares, and most importantly, have a hot boyfriend.”

“Really?”

“What?”

“You are acting so weird.”

He shrugged and then started typing seconds later. The weird B-movie villain laugh came shortly after that. “Oh, Keystone, my old friend.”

“What’s Keystone?”

“It’s a surveillance program we used to run at Sutter, before we upgraded to Você, that monitors all our in-house cameras, as well as all the devices in Sutter Plaza.”

“You mean your program basically is on everyone’s computer at your company.”

“Yes,” he answered, not looking at me. “Except mine, Levin’s, Miguel’s, and Margo’s.”

“And do your employees know it’s on there?”

“I’m sure they can guess, but you can’t see it. Even if you’re good, you can’t.”

“You can’t just know all their private stuff.”

“If they’re doing private stuff on my time, on my computer, I have every right.”

“I don’t think so.”

He grunted.

“Aaron, that’s an invasion of privacy,” I chastised him.

“They can have no expectation of privacy while they’re on my clock,” he replied, still typing, looking for Evan Polley in the database. “And by the way, there is no audio on this surveillance.”

“Not that it really matters anymore but that’s good.”

He typed furiously.

“Okay, wait.” My brain hurt, and I put my head down on my folded arms and closed my eyes. “You said
all
the devices at Sutter Plaza.”

“I did.”

“So just what’s on the premises, or what comes in too?”

“You’re very quick, Detective.”

I growled.

“But yes, everything.”

“So, cell phones too?”

“The program checks all devices for any crumb connected to Sutter. So say, while you’re in my building, you even text a word about Sutter, the program is alerted and your device is scanned.”

“How?”

“Wi-Fi.”

“It just accesses the device without you knowing?”

“Yes.”

“So my phone, because I have your number in there and I’m at Sutter, the program is basically hacking me to see what information I have about your company?”

“No.”

“But you just said that all devices—”

“All phones belonging to law enforcement personnel are off limits to the program, Detective.”

“I have sensitive information on my––”

“Are you listening to me? We don’t scan any devices belonging to anyone in––”

“And this program just knows that, does it?”

“Don’t sound so snide.” He chuckled. “Of course it knows.”

“How?”

“I’m sorry, Detective; I think I’ll need to put you in contact with the people in my tech department if you need a full explanation of all the ins and outs of a program I did not, in fact, create.”

“You know that’s bad, right?” I groaned, feeling the splintering headache starting to make me nauseous. “God, I think I actually have a concussion this time.”

“What can I do?” he asked sharply.

“Nothing.”

He took a breath, and I felt his hand in my hair. “I have to do something.”

“Just keep doing what you’re doing and talk to me.”

“Okay.”

“So how does the program work?” I changed the subject.

“I don’t—”

“Just dumb it down for me.”

“I would never have to do that with anything.”

“Yes, that’s very nice,” I placated him. “Just talk.”

“Fine. It works sort of like a virus,” he began. “We had a couple of really great hackers try to get in to Sutter about three years ago. They were good, but our firewall held, and we were able to track them down to this tiny little ass crack of a town in Brazil—Caetés, Pernambuco.”

“And?”

“And I hired them, of course, and they made me Você, which we market a scaled-down version of called Bloodhound to the masses.”

“So you have Você at Sutter, and you sell Bloodhound.”

“Right.”

“Okay, so Bloodhound is what Wells has?”

“No. Like I said, he has what we used to use five years ago when I took over Sutter.”

“And it does what?”

“It only does surveillance, not the web. It’s all internal; nothing external.”

“Okay.”

“But the one thing they all have in common is the program lets you monitor everything from one centralized interface.”

“Which is how you’re messing with it.”

“Yes.”

I made a noise and then just listened to him type for a while until he gently shook me.

“Head hurt?”

I made a noise of agreement.

“Maybe you should drink some water?”

“Yeah, okay.”

I drank half of the twenty-ounce bottle and then put my head back down.

“If you have to pee, I’ll get you another bottle.”

“I’m okay,” I whispered.

“Okay. Rest some more. I’m transferring different chunks into one file. If I could just get to my phone, we could have Internet.”

“And, ya know, backup,” I teased.

“Well, yes, there would be that.”

“So you found Wells and Polley together already?”

“I did.”

He didn’t sound happy. “What’s wrong?” I asked, rolling my head to look at him.

“There’s someone else on the surveillance too.”

“Oh? Who?”

“Nick McCall.”

I groaned loudly. “Are you kidding?”

“No.”

“I totally bought it. The whole concerned friend thing. Fuck, I’m an idiot.”

“You were a horny idiot,” he said playfully, kissing my right eye closed because I was turned that way. “Lucky I didn’t let you fall into his clutches.”

“Yeah, because hanging out with you is so much safer.”

He laughed and so did I, even though it hurt.

W
E
COULD
drink water and pee. The problem was, after three days, we would need food. I also suspected from the way I was losing time my head was in worse shape than I thought.

“You have a serious concussion,” Aaron assured me. “You get beat up too often.”

No argument there.

“Hey,” I began, watching as he continued to type. “I wanna tell you about my juvenile records, if you still want to hear.”

“Yes, please.” He cupped my face, giving me all his attention.

“Check on the door real fast.”

“There are only maybe five men out there now; the rest of them went with Wells to walk around the grounds. Maybe they’re looking for a rocket launcher.”

“What?”

“Or a bazooka.”

“Really?”

“Would a flame thrower help?”

“You’re not funny.”

“I’m a little funny,” he said, sliding his thumb over my eyebrow. “You know, if I haven’t said it enough, you are just beautiful.”

“You’re biased. I’m yours, so you gotta think I’m pretty.”

He stiffened.

“What?”

“You belong with me.”

“We already settled that.”

“No. I mean….” He took a breath. “When we get home, just move in.”

“If we get home.”

“No. When.”

“Let’s talk about it later,” I placated him.

“I want to talk about it now.”

“Aaron,” I began. “You––”

He laughed. “It’s going to suck for you.”

“In what way?”

“In the being taken seriously way,” he snorted out a laugh.

“I can shoot somebody. I bet that would let them know I mean business.”

“Stop. Just think about it a second.”

“Gimme an example.”

“Okay, let’s say you show up at a crime scene, and before you can even ask a question, the press is there and they’ll yell out crap like ‘Hey, we saw you on TV at the black-tie event to open the new exhibit at the Field Museum. How were the hors d’oeuvres, Detective?’”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “And you’ll go places with me and I’ll get out and then you, and you think they went after you in Vegas? Oh, baby, when you’re in your tux standing next to me, it will be insane.”

I absorbed that.

“Your days of ever going undercover again are over.”

But I already knew that.

“We’re talking about newspapers, magazines, the web…. I mean, people will Google ‘Aaron Sutter’s boyfriend’, and your picture will pop up.”

Yes, it would.

“I mean, are you getting this? Are you truly understanding—”

“I got it,” I said, reaching for him, sliding my hand inside the collar of his shirt so I could touch his warm skin.

He flinched.

“What’s wrong?”

“Your hands are freezing.” He sounded worried. “Why are you freezing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you hold me?”

“Sure,” I grinned.

“No, idiot. I mean, will it hurt you if I get in your lap and give you some of my body heat?”

“No. C’mere. Make with the heat.”

“Such a hedonist you are.”

“I dunno what that means,” I said, leaning back so he could get up and then sit down in my lap, straddling my thighs. “You wanna maybe—oh.”

He wrapped me in his arms, and only with him against me did I realize how cold I was.

“You feel so good,” I said.

“So do you, Detective. Now tell me about your juvenile record.”

“Okay.”

And he listened attentively, never once glancing away, as I recalled the greatest horror of my life. When I was done, I waited for his response, the outrage, the righteous anger for me and for what had happened, the yelling that was the usual reaction of everyone I ever confessed the truth to.

“He must have loved you so much,” he said gruffly, tears in his voice as he leaned forward to hold me as tight as he could.

No doubt about it, Aaron Sutter knew my heart as no one ever had. I was never going to let him go.

T
HE
following morning, Saturday, I understood the mess we were actually in when I woke up and realized the image of the outside door I was looking at had changed. “What happened to the camera angle?” I asked Aaron.

“They shot down the camera over the door last night.”

I jolted. “Why didn’t you wake me?”

“For you to do what?” Aaron studied me. “Yell? You needed your sleep and I can still see them, just now from a little further away.”

“Aaron––”

“Lay down,” he ordered me. “Everything will be fine.”

He was being very optimistic but the reality was that Clay Wells could not let us out of his surveillance tower.

Wells wasn’t stupid; he probably had a pretty good idea why a homicide detective would have gone in there and what I was after. He also had to have figured out that either Aaron or I could work the interface. He was probably kicking himself for not putting a passcode on it. His biggest problem, however, was time. Monday morning, Aaron Sutter was supposed to walk off the property. Miguel Romero would be waiting for him at the gate in forty-eight hours. If Aaron didn’t show, Miguel would start with a call to Special Agent Summers, move on to a press conference, and end by calling the governor. It was, Aaron assured me, Miguel’s SOP to basically scramble the marines. There was no way that Clay Wells had ever had such a public figure as Aaron Sutter on his property. There just weren’t a lot of billionaires wandering around, and even if he had, inviting my boyfriend had been a mistake, one I was certain he regretted. We could see him pacing the grounds close to the tower.

Even though they had shot the camera down over the door so we couldn’t see, there was another higher up that no one had yet bothered with and another in a jacaranda tree across the way. Clay Wells probably didn’t even know it was there. I couldn’t imagine anyone could just sit down and recall how many cameras there actually were on any one property. We could see him walking up and down, flailing his arms, worrying his bottom lip, and kicking at the ground. The man was getting more and more wound up by the second.