After Hodges hung up on me, I was a nervous wreck. I couldn’t stop pacing around my office like a caged animal. I knew that I had to do something, but I couldn’t think of what. And Seb hadn’t even shown up yet; I was wondering if Karen had actually found him. I thought of her with a touch of regret. Part of me thought that maybe if I’d treated her with just a slight bit of respect, we wouldn’t be having this problem.
Then I shook my head. Karen was a petty, jealous kind of girl. She’d always been like this. She was the kind of girl who would have been jealous of Audrey even if Audrey was sixty years old and four hundred pounds. It didn’t matter that I was sleeping with her. Karen just hated feeling replaced.
By the time Sebastian poked his head in, I was sitting down with my face in my hands.
“Yo, Enzo, what the hell, man?” Seb sauntered in. His skin looked tan and glowing, like he’d just come from the tropics.
I knew that I looked sallow and pale, a shadow of my former self. I glared at him. Seb and I had always been the golden boys of the office, and I almost resented him for being able to maintain that image while I was sitting there looking like shit.
“I need your help,” I said quickly. “I need to bring this asshole down.” Seb came behind my desk, and I pointed at my monitor. A picture of Richard Hodges, red-faced and grinning like a prize pig, was on the display.
“Oh no,” Seb said. He shook his head and grinned at me. “Whatever this is, bro, I don’t like the sound of it.” He pointed towards the photo of Hodges. “I recognize that asshole. He was here a few times last week.”
“Yeah,” I said, shaking my head, unable to tear my gaze away from the greedy gleam in Hodges’ eye. Despite the fact that the picture was an old one, I pictured him exactly like that: sweaty and proud of his own goddamn slimy behavior.
“Man, what’s wrong? You look fuckin’ rough today. Did something happen?”
I swallowed hard, reaching for a bottle of water on my desk. “It doesn’t matter,” I said darkly. “I’ll tell you later when all of this shit is taken care of.”
Seb crossed his muscular arms over his broad chest and lowered himself onto the black leather couch, kicking up his feet on one armrest and laying his head on the other. “Okay, say I agree to help you. What exactly do you need?”
“Something you don’t do anymore.” I got to my feet and paced back and forth in front of the couch. “This guy, he’s out to fuck me, and I can’t let him win. He wants this company, and he’s dead set on getting it. At first, he kept trying to get me to sell it to him, but I refused. And now he’s threatening me.”
Seb’s eyes flashed open, and he stared at me. “He’s actually threatening you? With what?”
I paused. I didn’t want to tell Seb about Audrey. I had a feeling he already knew, but better to keep this as simple as I possibly could.
“Don’t worry about it,” I told him. “I just need to focus on outwitting this guy. I need to dig up some dirt; I need to find things that he’s hidden and doesn’t want anyone to see.”
“I don’t like where this is going.” Seb shook his head. “If you’re talking about hacking, you know I gave that shit up.” He grinned at me. “Scout’s honor.”
“I wouldn’t ask you unless I absolutely had to, and I think you know that,” I replied quickly. “And, Seb, trust me, I’ve thought of everything. But I can’t think of anyone else who could help on such short notice. And I’m in trouble if I can’t fight this guy off. It would ruin the company and ruin me, and probably ruin everyone who works here. No more pensions, no more retirement. Nothing. Everything you saved would be gone.”
Seb winced. I knew that I’d finally gotten to him—he had over four million dollars invested in LennoxCo.
“I really don’t like the sound of this, man.” He raked a hand through his hair and stared at me. “I almost went to jail last time.” Seb let out a little nervous laugh. “And I definitely don’t want that happening again.”
I sighed. “I wouldn’t tell you this unless I had to, but… they’ve got Audrey, Seb.”
Seb narrowed his eyes. “That dowdy little secretary of yours? Why the hell would they even want her around?”
I silenced him with a glare. “Because they know she’s important to me,” I said icily. “And if I don’t act fast, she’s dead. Richard said I had twenty-four hours to turn the company over to him or else he’d kill her. He’s crazy, and I don’t want to call his bluff, but I’m not giving up on LennoxCo. So, I need to find some dirt on him.”
Seb closed his eyes. His face paled as he folded his hands in his lap. “I understand,” he said after a second. “I’ll help you, okay? Not that this is even remotely close to the kind of thing I’d consider again.” He let out a dry laugh. “Only for you, Enzo.”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
Twenty minutes later, Seb and I were stationed in the corner of a local Starbucks with his laptop, my laptop, and a hell of a lot of cords and wires. I didn’t even know the first thing about hacking, but watching Seb work was like watching the master. After I got a couple of lattes for us, Seb set up both computers and connected them with a fat, yellow cord.
“My computer is going to be the slave, and yours is the master,” he said in a quiet, low voice as he booted up my computer. “So yours will work through mine, through disguising software.” Seb looked up at me with a wild grin on his face and a glint in his eye.
Even though Seb and I had been friends for years, I’d never seen him his crazed. Not even when the two of us had embarked on a weeklong bender with tons of booze and strippers. It was like coding was what made Seb tick deep down, beneath his airs of being a sophisticated city guy.
I had to laugh. What was it that made me tick, exactly? When Audrey’s face flashed into my mind, I realized that I didn’t want to think about that anymore.
I watched in fascination as Seb logged on to a secure server. Five seconds later, RH Shoes was displayed in a fancy pink font across the screen.
“Bingo,” Seb said under his breath. He moved the pointer around the screen so quickly that I barely had a chance to see what he was doing. “See, Enzo, right now I’m bypassing his firewall and going straight where the secure FTP files are kept. We can take all of them, or whichever ones you want.”
My mouth went dry. I felt like I was finally on the verge of something really powerful. I pulled a flash drive out of my pocket and handed it to Seb. “Take them all,” I said. “And make copies, and send those copies to my secure LennoxCo email. You know which one?”
Seb nodded. For a moment, we shared a tense look. Seb had helped me before, and he’d almost gone to jail for it, but this time I had a feeling we’d both get off without consequence. After all, Seb was a master hacker, and Hodges was wanted by the police. What could possibly go wrong?
After Seb handed me the flash drive, I grabbed my laptop and darted back up to my office. Now that I wasn’t logged into Hodges’ servers anymore, I had to see what Seb had uncovered. I hoped it was enough to lock Hodges away forever, but until I looked at the records, I wouldn’t know.
My heart was pounding, and sweat broke out on my forehead as the elevator carried me up toward the executive suite. This has to be it, I told myself. This has to be it; you’ve got him now. Just check and make sure Seb did his work properly. That’s all you have to look for right now. Just make sure Seb did a good job.
When the doors pinged open, I broke into a run, dashing down the hallway and into my office. After slamming the door behind me, I put my laptop on the desk and whipped the flash drive out of my pocket. It seemed to take an eternity to load. I was bouncing one knee up and down and tapping my fingers on the desk as I waited for all of the files to load.
The folder was named Financial Records. I grinned. This had to be a good place to start!
Opening the first file, I began to skim down. There was a list of all business expenses and acquisitions, and right away I realized that the file didn’t make sense. The expenses were far more than what should have been listed for a shoe store, even a luxury shoe store, and the acquisitions were huge sums of money, often listed with code words. I grinned. This was going to be easy. Richard Hodges was mine.
I said a silent thank you in my head to Seb as I scanned through the rest of the files. The first one hadn’t been an anomaly; all of them were as indiscreet, full of large sums of money going in but not out. And even better, when I found Hodges’ fund records, I saw that he didn’t have nearly as much in legal savings as the sums being pumped into the shoe store. I couldn’t believe he’d gotten away with as much as he had—the money laundering on the statements was some of the most obvious that I’d ever seen.
I rubbed my hands together as a grim smile formed on my face. He may have gotten away with it, but that’s not going to last much longer, I thought. Hold on, Audrey. I’m coming soon.