To avoid any undue suspicion, she went back to work as if nothing happened, plugging away at changes to the project and running and testing code like the bad-ass programmer she was hired to be. She kept her head down and didn’t talk to anyone. Just worked.

What she did at lunch was a different story.

She left the building and walked six blocks to the mall where she purchased a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and three burner phones with their own internet access. She also bought a Visa check card and put seven hundred dollars on it that she had stashed away in cash. That way, if she needed to use a credit card, she’d have something that wasn’t traceable back to her.

She stopped in at the nearby Starbucks, bought a Tall cup of their strongest brew with a double shot of espresso and hid out at a table in the back with one of her new phones. She needed to know why the name Delta Shandong was so familiar to her and there was no way she would take the chance to research it on her personal phone or at work. Starbuck’s open Wi-Fi network was perfect, paired with her ability to cover her tracks online. No one would be the wiser.

Opening the tiny browser on the phone, she did a Google search. It yielded very little, mentioning only an economic zone in China. That was no surprise to her, as many Chinese websites and servers were blocked from the west. She went to Yandex next and found a few more articles and a company website. What she saw made the blood drain out of her face.

Closing the flip phone, she opened the back and pulled out the SIM card. She dumped the used burner phone in the trash can before grabbing her bag to get the fuck out of there. In an alley a few blocks away, she pulled out her pack of cigarettes and lit one up. She didn’t smoke it. That was for show. She used the lighter to burn the SIM card. No one was getting a chance to figure out what she had just discovered.

Because it was much worse than she thought.

* * *

She plopped down in the chair and shivered from head to toe. It was a warm, spring day, but hell, this kind of thing chilled her to the bone. She hadn’t felt this way since her mother—

Right there in front of her was the “Janine’s Bride Tribe – Nicole” water bottle sitting on her desk like a fifth-grade participation trophy.

Scheming fuckers.

It had purposely been placed there after she left for lunch. Someone had made a distinct point of letting her know where they’d found it. Bob, Doyle, Bernhardt, Ryan, or, hell… even Matio could have returned it to her desk as a clear and concise message.

They know.

Nicole tried to compose herself when all she wanted to do was run screaming out of the building. She needed to do something – fast. Protect herself. Cover her bases. Fuck that, cover her ass.

She gathered her things together and slid her messenger bag and purse over to the far side of her cube. She made sure her keys were securely in her pocket, as well. Returning to her chair, she logged on to the network and started up her programming software—that was monitored at all times—and clicked some autocode to run automatically to check over the work she’d done over the weekend. It would buy her some time to figure out what the hell to do.

Milton, a junior level programmer, stopped at her cube. “Hey, Nic,” he said. “Did you hear Sherman blew chunks all over the kitchen at lunch and they sent him home? Stomach flu.”

“Gross. Poor guy. I hope the rest of us don’t get it.”

Milton shrugged. “Did he give you the specs for the firewall coding for TDE-5X?”

“No, sorry, he didn’t.”

“No worries. I’ll ask Ryan. Can I help you with anything?”

She didn’t need a thing from Milton, although he’d told her everything she needed to know. Sherman’s cube was open and available. He was the only non-manager on the TDE-5X team with a higher level clearance than her. Perfect.

“Actually,” she started. “Can you go down to the server room and reboot drive K? It’s running a bit slow and probably hasn’t had a good cold start in a while. And, please stay with it to make sure it’s back online.”

“That’ll take forever.”

“Fifteen minutes, at the most,” Nicole said with a sweet smile. “Please?”

Milton blushed and said, “Anything for you, Nic.”

She watched her colleague walk off and then moved into action. To protect herself, she needed a trump card, an ace up her sleeve, and other analogies that added up to she didn’t want to be up shit’s creek without a paddle. Safeguard herself at all costs. She opened the top drawer to her desk and retrieved a brand new USB drive and put it in her pocket.

Hitching her bag up onto her shoulder, she crouched down a bit, looked both ways, and covertly went to Sherman’s desk. He had a messy cube in the corner behind the tall filing cabinets, so Nicole figured she’d be out of sight while she did what needed to be done.

Dancing her fingers quickly over the keyboard, she noted that Sherman hadn’t logged out of his system before the great barf-fest and his dismissal for the day.

“Amateur,” she said with a snicker. Sherman damn sure knew better than that. He must have been awfully sick to do something so stupid. Her luck, though.

She snuck over to the security logs that were kept in the staff forum. They were there in case anyone needed proof or justification of work hours on certain client projects. Nicole scrolled through the data and saw her own access leaving the building Saturday morning. Page back, she noted an access around six a.m. of only Bob Worthington’s card. Nothing about registering Luis or the three Chinese men. Oh wait, there was a screen capture of Bob entering the building with the men. Three excellent shots of the faces of Mr. Wu and company. She did a print screen and swiftly tabbed over to Cooper’s graphics program that was opened and pasted in the shot.

The overhead announcement buzzed out, taking her attention away. Madison’s voice said, “Would Nicole Hunt please report to the executive board room. Nicole Hunt to the executive boardroom.”

“Oh, hell no. Not again,” Nicole said and sped up her process.

Right now, she couldn’t dig too far on who the Chinese men were. She had a bigger prize to nab. She went to the DOS prompt screen and initiated a backdoor workaround into the secure server where all of the files to TDE-5X were stored. With her breathing out of control and her stomach doing nervous somersaults—God, don’t let me puke all over the place like Sherman—Nicole pulled an encrypted thumb drive from the pocket of her blazer.

She had to do this.

She had no choice now.