In Too Deep: A Romantic Suspense Novel (41 page)

I hung a right, catching the updraft coming off of the Huddleston Subway Terminal to get my final approach on my target. Landing was really the only tricky part of the entire flight. The top of the Hamilton Building wasn't at all like a lot of the other skyscrapers around town, with helipads and open gardens dotting their roofs. Nope, the Hamilton Building was covered in pipes, conduits, and a bunch of other crap that more or less make landing a very tricky proposition indeed. To do it the way I wanted, I actually needed to come in lower than the roof, then quickly pull up and bleed off speed to gain altitude, hopefully just clearing the lip of the building before settling down. I'd done a similar landing before on the top of our roof, which was much more comfortably laid out and was about ninety stories shorter.

Pulling back hard on my control bar, I cleared the lip, and found I was still too fast. I was going to keep gaining altitude, damn! Reaching out with my arms, I let go of the control and pulled in on the wing deployment, cutting the surface area in half within a blink of an eye. With so much less fabric to support my weight, I dropped somewhat under control, landing with a bit of a thump along the conduit lines that fed the building's backup generators. "I'm in."

"That's good. So I don't have to worry about the muttered
fuck
that I just heard then?" Sophie replied. That's the problem with throat mikes, if you want a truly hands-free experience, you have to transmit constantly.

"Nah, just came in a bit fast. But I'm down and safe. How about you?"

"Oh, nervous, sweating, and wearing nothing but those pajama pants that you like so much," Sophie teased. "Want me to tell you about it?"

Her next chuckle made me realize that I had probably groaned deep in my throat, and I tried to put my mind off of the image of my beautiful fiancée sitting in loose cotton pant and nothing else. Trust me, it was more difficult than I had hoped it would be.

"I swear," I finally told her once I had my glider stashed and my small satchel ready, "when I get home I'm going to make you pay for all this teasing."

"I look forward to it," Sophie replied. "But on to business, your target is five floors down. How're you planning on getting access?"

"Elevator shaft," I replied, pulling up a building schematic on the small tablet I had with me. I knew Sophie could see what I saw on her computer, which was hot-linked to my tablet. It allowed her to also send me data updates as well if she wanted to. "Just making my way down the stairs would be too big a chance of triggering some sort of alarm or getting caught by a patrol. And that whole rappel over the side and slide down a rope act may work in the movies, but I don't put a lot of faith in it myself. Nor do I plan on trying to cut holes in reinforced glass."

I went over to the elevator shaft, which hulked out of the top of the building. It's one of the classic challenges of an elevator system, namely, where do you put the motors and the cable? The easiest is to have them both stick out the top of your building in a miniature room. The bigger the building, and the bigger the elevator, the bigger a room you need. I found the elevator I wanted, which according to the schematics was marked as an executive elevator. I wanted that one because I didn't need anyone suddenly interrupting me while I was trying to work.

The cable descender I used is another one of the toys that I have come to enjoy about my new crusade against crime in the city. Made of a special type of braided nylon and Kevlar blend, it could support a full one thousand pounds while being flexible enough and small enough to wind onto a reel roughly the size of my hand. Really, more space was taken up by the ascender and descender mechanisms than by the filament itself. I used a carabiner to lock it onto the overhead beam of the shaft, then made my descent. It was easier than you'd think, I just had to hang and let my harness support me. Pretty soon I was five floors down, right where I wanted to be. Looking down the shaft, I double checked that I was still safe before jimmying the doors open.

It was strange, really. The place I was breaking into was one of the main computer centers for the Confederation, so security should have been tighter than Fort Knox. Instead, they went with hiding through deception, and made it no more noticeable than any other mainframe center in the city, just another one of thousands. If anything, I had expected that the elevator shaft doors themselves should have been rigged with an alarm. Instead, I was soon making my way down the corridor to the mainframe room, where I quickly picked the lock and went inside.

I had to expect that I'd tripped something by that point, so I didn't have a lot of time. Instead of trying to go databank by databank, I pulled out my little secret weapon; the cracker computer that I used for this sort of work. Not much bigger than an old Sony Walkman, it was packed with enough power and an adaptable AI that I could hack my way into almost any system within seconds. But I just needed data, so I slipped my cracker computer into the data port on the nearest mainframe and let it go to work.

The cracker program was able to get to the level of reading file folder names quickly, and then flash copied them to a custom made three terabyte USB flash stick. In less than a minute, it beeped, indicating that the job was done. I tapped in one more little program, uploading a file that buried itself quickly into a backup server. Easily traced, but that was what I wanted. I wanted the owners of the databases to know who had been there.

I made my way out to the elevator just as the radio in my ear buzzed again. "Hey, my systems are saying that you're going to get company," Sophie said. She had tied into the building's security system through their armed guard company, which was a private corporation with an office off-site, but not too great of a cyber security setup. "How far are you from extraction?"

"Twenty feet from the elevator, and then the roof," I replied. "You're going to drop off in the elevator shaft again. Too much metal and stuff in the way."

"All right. They're taking the freight elevator up, so you should have time. Maybe thirty seconds."

I hummed my understanding and got back to the elevator, where the doors had been left shimmed open. I clicked into my filament and carefully swung into the shaft. The scariest part was when I tapped the shim holding the shaft doors open with my foot, and the thin piece of wood went tumbling down the shaft. It was a long, long time before I heard it hit something below, hopefully shattering into a dozen pieces. Either way, I hadn't touched the wood with bare hands, only gloved.

Hitting the retract button on my belt, the powerful coiled springs whisked me up the shaft, stopping with my head six inches below the metal beam I had anchored to. I could hear the deafening roar of the freight elevator in the shaft next to me, and the rapidly approaching lights on top of the car. They had picked the right elevator, the rapid freight car would get them up faster than anything else. They just hadn't anticipated me.

I pulled myself back over and out onto the roof, finding my folded up miniature glider. I stepped off, letting my speed gather before pulling back and swooping off into the night, and I headed to my planned extraction point, a large self-storage company three miles away that happened to have five shipping container sized units rented out to me. "I'm away and safe," I told Sophie. "I'll be home before midnight."

"Good, I'll have our bath waiting for us," Sophie replied into my ear. "So did you get the little package in there?"

"Yeah, they're going to love that," I chuckled. The
package
was technically a virus, although all it did was change all of the system sounds of any Windows unit that downloaded it to
Do You Wanna Build A Snowman?
Sophie and I were having fun poking our targets.

Tonight's raid had been the data collection center for one of the biggest rackets run by the Confederation in the city. While insurance fraud had been one of their most profitable scams for years, recently the Confederation was getting pressure from Owen Lynch, who was using his political connections to revamp the state's insurance laws, limiting payouts. To counteract this, the Confederation was going back to an old stand-by, one that had been in use since the Roman Empire days, padding work claims and then short shifting the system. With hundreds of public works contracts, especially in the construction industry, they could easily say they sent eight people and only send seven. That doesn't sound like a lot, but when every crew was ten to twelve percent understaffed, it totaled millions of dollars a year.

I had downloaded all of their contracts, hoping to track down who was legit and who was a scam. And of course, left my little calling card. "Remind me again when I get back," I said as I approached the self-storage site, "I've got to do some musical research."

"Oh, what for?" Sophie asked. She could keep her headset in even as she moved around the house, and normally did whenever we were separated like this.

"I've got to find something more bad-ass than a song from a Disney movie as my calling card. Isn't there any heavy metal or something that uses the word snow?"

"I think the Red Hot Chili Peppers did something," Sophie said. "And of course, you could always use songs by the Canadian reggae guy, Snow."

"Ah hell no," I groaned. "I'd rather stick with Disney songs at that point."

"Well, get home quickly," Sophie said. "I've got the bath ready for you, with all your favorite oils and herbs on standby. And of course, two hands that are more than ready to give you a massage."

"I'll be there as soon as I can. I love you."

"I love you too."

I
was
kind of nervous as I waited outside my apartment for Scott to arrive. I was wearing one of my more polite first date outfits, a knee length decorated denim skirt and a white Bohemian-style top. It wasn't quite a poet blouse, but I couldn't call it a peasant blouse either. Either way, I liked it, and had worn it for years.

Scott was three minutes early by my watch, or as my Daddy used to say, right on time. He pulled up not in the pickup truck I'd expected, but a Buick Verano. I was surprised, I hadn't taken Scott for being a Buick type of guy.

"Hi," he said, getting out. At least he was wearing what I'd expected, black denim jeans and a khaki shirt with a green nylon flight jacket. He wasn't quite
GQ
, but he wasn't straight country either. Instead, he was somewhere in between, and he was handsome as hell doing it. "You look amazing."

"Thank you," I replied, giving him a little curtsey with my skirt. "And may I say, you look quite dashing as well. Is that jacket real?"

"If you mean is it really a military jacket, yes it is," Scott replied. "I had to laugh when I heard designers were coming out with six and seven hundred dollar imitation flight jackets when I was able to go down to an Army-Navy surplus store and get the real deal for under a hundred and fifty bucks. You like it?"

"It looks authentic on you," I replied honestly. "No froo-froo crap for you."

"Thanks," Scott replied. He led me around to the passenger side door of his Buick and held the door open for me like a real gentleman. "So what does it mean that I'm driving a Buick then?"

I waited for him to come around and sit down in the driver's seat. "It means you're looking for luxury, but are also smart enough to not over extend yourself by signing a lease for a BMW or Audi or some other sixty thousand dollar car," I replied. "I call that smart in my book."

Scott grinned at me, and turned over the engine. "Thanks. Now, how about some Italian?"

"Drive on, oh brave sir!" I said, both of us snickering at the jokes. It didn't take us long to drive to Mar De Napoli, and I had to admit, it was a cute little place. Near the Northside where the docks gave way to the beaches and the high-end houses of the Heights, it was built to look like a Mediterranean Villa, complete with white walls and blue accents. The smells coming from the pizza oven drifted deep into the parking lot, and I knew immediately what I wanted.

"Yeah, it's that good," Scott said, reading my expression. "Come on, we've got a table already reserved."

The atmosphere inside was quiet, mostly due to the design of the tables. The restaurant had done a masterful job of sound baffling, so that instead of echoing ceilings and sound drifting all over the restaurant, conversations were muted and you didn't feel like you were yelling over everyone else. The lights weren't exactly dim, but they weren't glaring either. Maybe the best you could describe it would be
cozy
. "So how'd you find this place?" I asked Scott after we had been seated.

"We do the HVAC for the restaurant," Scott said simply. "I wish that would score me some free food like we get from the chocolatiers near the Gaslight District, but I guess I'll just have to be content with the pizza instead. I'm just glad it wasn't the calzone."

"Oh, what's up with the calzone? Is it terrible?" I asked, curiously munching on a delicious oregano and parmesan breadstick.

Scott shook his head. "No, exactly the opposite. But, a pizza is big, it's open, it's supposed to be shared. A pizza is for a date. A calzone is closed up, it's by itself. It's the meal I order when I get stood up or I break up with someone. Trust me, I'm happy to be ordering a pizza tonight."

I was touched by his thinking, even if it was a bit weird. "As long as you don't like anchovies, I think I'm happy about it too."

"I promise, no anchovies. Hey, can I ask you a question?"

"Of course. Isn't that what dates are for, getting to know someone else," I said, taking a sip of my ice water. "And it's a lot more fun than just filling out a paper questionnaire."

"That is true," Scott told me, "then I know you'd turn me down due to my horrendous handwriting. I'm the sort of man that keyboards were invented for. But anyway, what led you to the financial services industry? You told me your family had car dealerships, and I understand not wanting to go into that if you don't want to, but why finances?"