CHAPTER TWELVE

Drake

 

I woke the next morning feeling like the sky had fallen on my head. I was wrecked.

“Come on, Ainsley,” I said, noticing none of my messages had been answered from yesterday. “Don't walk away – not now.”

It was the joy of finding her again, I realized, that had kept me going through this awful tension. And now I'd gone and spoiled it.

“Drake Leblanc. Total asshole.”

I sighed and slid out of bed, rolling my stiff shoulders. I'd slept badly that night, with uneasy dreams.

In the kitchen I put the kettle on to make a proper cup of coffee. I breathed in the deep, earthy scent of the coffee-grounds and sighed, letting the caffeine-scent weave through my brain and wake me up. I should phone her. I should visit. Send her flowers. I sighed. I didn't know what to do. I wasn't ever very good at being romantic.

“You never complained about that,” I said, sighing, as if I was talking to Ainsley. I'd taken for granted how accepting she was, always. I'd put her through so much shit and she'd just smiled and welcomed me back.

Kelly wouldn't have done that. She would have bust my ass.

I chuckled. After Ainsley, Kelly was a cross between Godzilla and Tinkerbell. I had been completely unprepared for her. She'd told me as much, too. Said I'd been spoiled. I had been.

Ainsley Johnson. If I could think of something to show how sorry I am, I'd do it.

I was sitting at my kitchen table with a coffee and muesli, feeling sorry for myself, when the phone rang. I jumped up and ran to it, knocking over the cereal-box and spilling wholegrain muesli everywhere. I didn't even notice.

“Ainsley...” I pressed answer.

“Hi,” Liam said.

I let out a long sigh. “Liam! Hi,” I said weakly. Dammit! Why did it have to be him now?

“Hey,” he said. “How's it going?”

“Not terribly,” I said pragmatically. “More importantly, how're things your side?”

“Okay,” Liam replied. He sounded wired. “That's why I called. I think it's okay.”

“You do?” I felt my whole body relaxing. I hadn't realized how much I'd been worried about that. “How d'you know?”

“I know because no strangers have come knocking at my IP address.”

“Oh.” I frowned. “Plain English, please?”

“I mean, no-one has managed to trace the hacking back to me. To us. We're okay.”

“Whew.” I sat down heavily, wincing as my shoes crunched wholegrain into the floor. “You know that for sure?”

“As sure as I can be, Drake,” he said. “Wanna go celebrating?”

“No,” I said loudly. I sighed. “I mean, no. I don't think that's a good idea yet. We don't know it's okay yet. Okay?” Dammit, why was I so tired? I could barely think straight.

“Okay,” he said. I could hear the raised eyebrows and confused expression down the phone. He was clearly upset and I couldn't blame him. Was that any way to thank him for all his stress and hard work?

“Look, Liam,” I sighed. “I'm sorry. Things are just a bit stressful at my end just now. Not that I think they're not at yours,” I added with a chuckle. “Thanks, man. Really. I appreciate it. As soon as things are settled down here, we have to meet up. I have to talk to you about...my findings...too.”

“Uh huh,” he said. He sounded contented now. “The contract.”

“Exactly,” I said, wincing slightly at his mention of it. I knew I was being paranoid – who would bother to bug my phone, for pity's sake? – but I couldn't help it.

“Well? You have a plan about that?”

“I do,” I said confidently. My plan was to fly to Brazil and pay a visit to the mine, take a team of journalists and capture evidence on film – but I wasn't going to talk about it just yet.

“Great,” Liam said. “I trust you.”

“Thanks,” I said, feeling moved by that. “Glad someone does.”

He chuckled. “Wanna talk about it?”

“I would,” I said with a faint smile, “if I knew what I was talking about.”

Liam laughed. “That bad, eh?”

“Very much that bad.”

Liam sighed. “When I see you, we'll talk about that, too – whatever it is. Put our feet up, have beer and talk. Sound good?”

“Sounds like paradise,” I said feelingly.

“Right,” Liam said briskly. “Well, maybe we can meet on Friday, after work. Then we can go to paradise, eh?”

I laughed. “I'll do my best to make it.”

“You do that. Bye.”

“Goodbye.”

We hung up. I sighed, leaning back in my chair. I felt as if a huge weight had been lifted out of my chest. At least we knew that side of the business was safe. No one had managed to trace Liam's incursions – at least not as far as we knew. That was worth celebrating.

“I'd like to see Liam,” I said to myself. “But I'd rather not be free on Friday.”

I would rather, I thought as I grabbed the broom and started sweeping up the breakfast-cereal, be spending Friday night with Ainsley.

“Some chance of that happening,” I said aloud. I knelt down on the floor with the brush and dustpan, then stood up, sighing as I noticed the dust on the knees of my new black trousers.

Sometimes nothing goes as you planned. I threw out the dirt, bent down and dusted my knees and then headed down to the car.

An hour later, after being stuck in traffic, I was sitting behind my desk at work.

“Mr. Leblanc?” a voice said behind me.

I jumped and almost spilled my coffee on myself. “Yes? What?”

The man looked at me with round eyes and then chuckled. “Sorry, sir,” he said.

He was a young man – in his late twenties, I thought – with a bald head and a gray t-shirt with some slogan on it. He looked slightly uncomfortable. I frowned.

“Were you looking for me?” I asked.

“Uh, yeah. You're Drake Leblanc, right?”

“That's me,” I said grimly. “Why do you ask?”

He chuckled. “I'm the technician, sir,” he said. “I was told we needed to check your PC. If you don't mind?”

I frowned. “Check it? What for?”

“Just a warning we had. You saw this big deal about the hackers? Well, it's about that. If you can let me sit down? It won't take five minutes.”

“Why my PC?” I asked. I couldn't help how my heart was pounding. I knew it was ridiculous – why would anyone suspect me of anything? – but I couldn't help it.

“I don't know,” the young man said. He looked at his hands. “Just routine, I guess.”

Routine? This was the first I'd heard of a routine like this, and I'd been with the company for two years.

“Okay,” I said unhappily. “Go for it. I'll go grab a coffee or something; come back when you're done.”

“Perfect. Thanks, sir.”

“Pleasure,” I muttered under my breath as I headed off to the coffee-room.

While I was in there, the coffee hot and scalding my lips, I tried to figure out what this was all about. I was fairly sure there was nothing “routine” about what the young man was checking on my PC. I saw Shane walk past and called to him.

“Shane?”

“Mm?”

“You also been kicked out of your office?”

“Also? No...have you?” He grinned lazily.

“Some guy came in to check my PC,” I said. “Technical support or something. I guess they're checking everyone following this hacking thing.”

“No,” he said with a frown. “Just you, by the look of things.”

I shrugged. “That's weird.”

He gave me an odd look. “Yeah, it is.”

I coughed uncomfortably. Great. Talk about giving people ideas. I was a regular master of subterfuge, wasn't I?

“Oh, well. Probably nothing to do with that. Maybe I managed to send something to print twenty times again, and they're trying to figure out how I do it,” I quipped.

He grinned. “Probably.”

“See you,” I said, heading back to my office quickly.

I was hoping to catch the technician in action, but by the time I got there he was already offline, just pushing in my chair.

“All done,” he said with a nod.

“Thanks,” I said. “I think.”

He laughed and went out.

When I sat down again I couldn't help feeling a bit uneasy. What had he been doing on here? I felt like my privacy had been violated. Every file I opened or every document I worked on, I had the sense that someone else had been into it before me, looking through and critiquing it.

This is stupid, I told myself. If you keep this up you're going to go nuts. Stop being so paranoid.

I decided I should try and tell Liam as soon as possible. Maybe I could sneak him in here to see what there was to see. Actually, Liam had a remote login for my computer. He could connect up right now if he had to, and tell me what was going on.

I messaged him.

Just had a visit from some tech guys looking on my PC. You couldn't maybe log in and see what they've been doing?

He messaged back in a minute or two. In a meeting. Will do when finished. Give me ten minutes.

I sat at my desk for fifteen minutes, trying to focus on the email I'd just received from the accountants, asking me about some legal issue pertaining to tax. I could feel by brain starting to burn – corporate tax law was never my favorite part of the picture – when my phone made a message-tone again.

I reached for it and checked the messages at once.

I can't.

I frowned.

Sorry? Not sure I know what you mean here..?

He sent a message back immediately.

I mean I can't log in. Someone's locked me out.

Oh. I put my phone down heavily and sat there, stunned. I didn't know what to do or think about that. My heart felt like it had stopped. If someone had just gone onto my PC and just shut Liam out of logging in, that meant that they knew about him. Would it be possible, then, for them to link the hack to my PC, and thus to me? If they did that, it was only a matter of time before they started going through my files and finding all the information I'd collected to make the case.

Dammit! My heart was thumping as I quickly grabbed a flash-drive and went to copy the information onto it.

Gone.

I stared. No way. No absolute way. I navigated to the directory in my head. “Home. Documents. Misc. Case.”

There was no such folder. It had gone.

My brain stopped working, lost in a jelly of panic. If they had found that – if they had actually looked for it in my files, and wiped it off my PC, that meant someone knew.

“Oh, my...” I leaned on my desk, making myself breathe. In. Out. In. Out. My heart was thumping in my chest, big slow thuds that surged through me. What was I going to do?

“Mr. Leblanc?”

“Oh, for...” I jumped in the air and then whipped round to see Mrs. Slate at the door. “Sorry. What?”

She laughed. “I'm sorry, Mr. Leblanc. But you do look funny when you get a fright...” she was laughing at me, full-lipped mouth covered with a well-manicured hand.

I wiped the scowl off my face. She was a sweet older woman and I didn't want to offend her. “What is it?” I asked. “Is someone looking for me?”

“Oh, no...just need your signature on these papers...They need looking over by our legal expert. You must really concentrate, you know,” she said, still chuckling. “I've never seen someone jump like that when I call their name...” She trailed off, still giggling at me.

I sighed. “I'm having a bit of a day,” I said tightly.

“Oh. Oh, I am sorry. Is there something I can do? I can get you a cup of coffee?”

I smiled warmly. “I'm okay, thanks. Any more coffee and I'll start flying. Now, what are these?”

I took the papers from her and heard her still giggling as she went out.

I read through the documents with a distracted air. They could have been mortgaging the company for a sack of potatoes and I wouldn't have actually noticed at that moment. I signed them anyway.

The sooner I can get finished in here, the better. I looked at the clock. It was just before lunch hour. I would try and finish up with the contract I was writing and then go to lunch. I needed to get out of here before my nerves actually wore through altogether.

I finished the contract, grabbed my coat and headed down the hallway, wanting to put as much distance between the building and myself as possible.

“Hey,” Shane called me from his office as I hurried past. “You're in a hurry.”

“Yes.”

“Where're you going?”

“Out.”

I didn't want to stop and talk. I wanted to get out of here as quickly as possible.

When I hit the sidewalk, I found I was walking toward the car-park at full speed. I stopped and made myself slow down and think. There wasn't any point in escaping. Nothing would look more guilty than just running right now. What was I even running for?

Could they actually fire me on the strength of anything in that file?

Dubiously. None of it was actually secret information – most if it was records of interviews with older employees, detailing things they remembered about the time the shady deals supposedly started – but the fact that I'd put it all together in one place made it fairly clear I was gathering information for something.

I am a lawyer, and I know that they don't have much of a case against me right now.

It would take some supreme stretching of the facts to actually prove I was up to something. For the moment I came off as weird and snooping, but not actually breaking any laws. Whew.

There's only one thing I did that was actually illegal. And that was giving Liam remote login capabilities on my PC.

As I'm not particularly computer-literate, I wasn't sure if they would be able to see for sure that I'd helped Liam to set that up. Maybe they'd assume he was some kind of crazy computer-whiz who'd done it all by himself. Maybe he'd just happened to choose my PC as his point of entry into the network.

At the moment, there wasn't anything concrete to show what I was trying to do. Which was good, because I needed to stay out of the firing-line long enough to get myself to Brazil and find out what was going on in the mine – Blue Vales.

“Hang on. Where am I?”

In my headlong flight from the office, I'd just carried on walking. I stopped and looked around. I was somewhere up near the end of Flagler street, cars whizzing past me, people talking at pavement cafes or into their cell phones. I was a single point of silence in the seething, chattering hordes. I stopped and stood still. It was a weird feeling. A bit like being invisible, I reckoned. Me and my problems were a silent, tiny island, isolated in this sea of chatter.

I wish Ainsley wasn't mad at me too. If she wasn't, maybe I wouldn't feel so isolated. With heavy footsteps I headed back up the street the way I'd come. There was no point in standing about on the sidewalk missing lunch. Maybe if I had something to eat and a good cup of coffee, I'd be able to think of what to do to fix things with her.

I retraced my steps to Starbucks, heading inside. Checking my phone showed me she hadn't answered my messages yet. I really was alone. But I wasn't going to leave it. I'd run away from her too many times and this time I was going to do what I hadn't done before. I was going to be honest.