Wrong Place, Right Time(65)

Other than the fact that this particular employee spends a lot of time doing her online shopping at work, I don’t see any cause for alarm on her computer; but just to be sure, I take the thumb drive that I brought from my purse, plug it into her tower, and upload the virus. When it’s finished doing its thing, I look over at Lucky. “I’m cloning this machine. Are you cool with doing that one too?”

Lucky looks over at me. “What do you think? Should I?”

I shrug. “I don’t see anything going on with this station, but just to be sure, I’m going to go ahead and clone it anyway. It can’t hurt, right? It’s just going to take a little bit of extra time.” I want to get out of here as soon as possible, but that doesn’t mean I want to shortchange the operation. Having clones will make it possible for us to monitor what’s going on later and dig deeper off-site. And if we don’t need them, we can just delete them.”

“If you think we should do it, then I’ll do it,” Lucky says. “Do you have another one of those thumb drives?”

I nod, reaching down to dig in my purse. I pull out the second thumb drive and hand it to him. “Here you go. Just double-click on that executable file, and it’ll do the rest.”

“And there will be no evidence that they can see that this has been done?”

I go back to my computer and ensure that the process is finished before shutting things down. “No, there shouldn’t be. It’s a pretty decent program. I checked it at home before I left.”

“Do I want to know where you got it?” He’s smiling, so I know he doesn’t mean anything bad by it.

“Let’s just say I got it from a trusted source.”

In fact, I got it from one of my former coworkers. There are a few kids barely out of high school working for my old employer who spend way too much of their free time wreaking havoc on the Internet. They aren’t bad kids, per se; they just lack the maturity needed to restrain themselves from causing trouble out of pure boredom. Lucky for me, they looked up to me as a kind of mother figure when we worked together, so it wasn’t too difficult to convince them I needed their help.

They actually thought it was funny when I asked for the program. I told them that I was making a clone of my daughter’s computer so I could watch what she was doing in chat rooms and such. Because they know very well the kind of garbage that’s out there on the Internet, they were more than happy to act as big brothers and step in with a solution to my “problem.”

“Okay, I won’t ask any more questions.” Lucky puts his thumb drive into the tower he’s working on and starts the virus running.

I look down at the schematic. “Where to next?”

Lucky’s attention is on the computer when he answers. “Wherever you want to go is fine with me.”

I pick the next logical spot, trying to move around the room in an orderly fashion, taking my purse with me. This is already going faster than I thought it would. We might even be out of here by midnight. I hope it’ll be early enough to catch May while she’s still awake so I can talk to her about whatever Dev said.





CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

I’m in one of the back offices finishing up cloning the last drive when a strange sound comes from the end of the hall near the back door. My hand freezes on the mouse.

Holy crap. What was that?

Lucky is in a different part of the office working on another computer. After three hours of working together, I calmed down enough to agree to work separately, but now I’m definitely regretting that decision.

All of my attention is focused on that hallway. Did I hear something or am I just imagining it because I’m so tired? I want to call out to Lucky, but I’m afraid if somebody is coming in, they’ll hear me.

I grab my cell phone from the desk next to me. Thank God I brought it with me. Unfortunately, I left my purse and everything else in the first office that we started in.

I quickly type out a text message to May, cursing myself for not getting Lucky’s number. I turn off the sound on my phone and send the message. It’s one in the morning, so May is probably sound asleep, but maybe I’ll get lucky and this message will wake her up.



Me: At Blue Marine. Someone coming in. Don’t have Lucky’s number. He’s in the other room.



More sounds come from the hallway. Someone is definitely breaking in. There are two voices, and they’re speaking in hushed tones. My palms start sweating and my heart races. My worst nightmare has come true. We’re busted!

I reach over and turn off the computer monitor, pick up the paper with passwords on it, and drop down below the level of the desk. I’m tempted to hide completely underneath the thing, but I want to verify whether I’m just imagining things, and I need to be able to see over the desk to do that. I wonder what Lucky’s doing. Is he panicking like I am? Is he sending a text to Ozzie? Is he calling the police?