A Matter of Trust (4 page)

Leaning back in the contoured black leather chair, she was alone in the polished, elegant office that was so perfectly appointed it deserved a center spread in
Architectural Digest.
After so many years, however, she was immune to the physical manifestations of her success. She didn’t see the room; she didn’t even see the spectacular sunset. What slowly came into focus just behind her nearly closed eyelids was J. T. Sloan’s face. Strong, certain, a hint of aggression—the head of Sloan Security certainly inspired confidence.

Michael hoped that her assessment of the woman she had hired the day before was correct. She indeed was going to need help.

“I’m leaving,” a soft voice behind her announced, mercifully interrupting her introspection. “The agenda for Monday’s meeting just went to Development.”

“Yes, fine.” Michael swiveled away from the window to face the door. She smiled tiredly at the brunette in the doorway. “Thank you.”

Michael’s executive assistant studied her. “You look beat. Why don’t you go home?”

“I will, soon,” Michael lied, appreciating the concern in the other woman’s voice.

Why should I? Nicholas probably won’t be there, and if he were, I wouldn’t want to see him. It’s easier to relax here.

Michael was suddenly more conscious of being alone than ever before. It wasn’t because of the imminent loss of her marriage, but the absence of the intimacy that she and Nicholas had never truly shared—an intimacy that until now she hadn’t been fully aware of missing. She forced a smile and waved good night, waiting only a moment before turning down the lights and closing her eyes in the welcoming darkness.

*

“Damn, I’m sorry,” Sloan exclaimed, watching Michael jerk awake and blink in confusion.

She automatically brushed the dimmer switch, muting the lights she had turned up full when she walked into the room. It was nine o’clock at night, and she hadn’t expected anyone to be in the office. Certainly not the CEO of the company, alone in a darkened room on the deserted floor of her office building. Sloan couldn’t help but see the fatigue, merely hinted at the day before, much more apparent now in her client’s face. Faint purplish shadows bruised the perfect skin under her eyes, and there was a weariness in the way she pushed herself upright in her chair.

“It’s okay,” Michael assured her, rubbing her eyes and trying to orient herself. She glanced out the window.
Dark. Nighttime.
She sat up straight, brushing her hair back with both hands. “What are you doing here?”

Sloan grinned her trademark grin. “Working. When we spoke on the phone this afternoon, we agreed I’d get started by running a preliminary systems review, remember?”

“I didn’t realize you meant tonight,” Michael said, firmly in control again.

“No point in waiting. By the way,
computer
security isn’t your only loose end around here. The guard downstairs let me in at the mere mention of your name and kindly directed me to your office. Never even asked for ID.”

“I’ll speak to him about that.”

“Good.” Sloan set a large leather briefcase down on the floor. “So...I figured I could get an idea of what I’m up against when most of your staff was absent—less traffic on the network, fewer people around. That way I can cover some of my tracks when I need to start pulling the system apart.”

“I understand that,” Michael said a touch impatiently, “but what are you doing in
my
office? The IT center is at the other end of the hall.”

Sloan leaned one jeans-clad hip against the arm of an expensive leather couch and took inventory. A low glass coffee table occupied the space in front of the sofa with other butter-colored leather furniture flanking it. Directly across from the seating area, Michael sat behind a huge pedestal desk that held the usual array of phones, folders, and stacks of papers. She looked sleek and stylish in an ocean green silk pantsuit and low-heeled pale leather shoes, her blond hair looking slightly disarrayed as if from recent finger combing. The momentary disorientation Sloan had glimpsed upon startling her had been replaced with a calm expression, but for an instant, she had appeared vulnerable, and very young.

Ignoring a slight pulse of attraction, Sloan hastily averted her gaze. The room was huge, windowed on three sides, with a small alcove kitchenette/bar arrangement to her left and to the right, beyond the seating area, an impressive workstation with several computers, large flat-screen monitors, and drafting boards.
Impressive. The corner office, indeed
.

She realized that Michael was still waiting for a further explanation.
“Your
computers are the logical and easiest place to start. I need to see how secure you are. Plus, I can’t very well look for tampering if I don’t look here. It’s where the money is...so to speak.”

“Of course.” Michael watched Sloan grin that damnable grin again. Irritated to find herself smiling back, she rose to gather her papers into a small portfolio. “You’ll need the passwords.”

“I’ll find them. It’s a good way to test how adequate your current safeguards are.”

Michael looked up sharply. “No one knows mine. Not even my executive assistant.”

“How often do you change them?” Sloan asked mildly, crossing to the console.

“I have no idea.” Michael shrugged dismissively. “Whenever the system prompts me to. I’ve never paid any attention to the way the network was constructed. It’s just a tool to me—I know as much about it as I do the engine in my car.”

“You’re not much different than most business execs in that regard,” Sloan observed, completely without censure. Settling into the molded leather chair, she spent a few seconds with the keyboard and mouse, and the 19-inch flat-screen monitor leapt to life. After downloading a program from the Web designed to crack passwords, she began routing through the files, muttering absently. “Information is almost never truly deleted, merely layered over. This is a little like archaeology—you just have to dig down to it.”

“Wonderful,” Michael commented acerbically. “I should at least be happy that Nicholas doesn’t have much more interest in the finer points of these things than I do.”

“He doesn’t need to.” Sloan looked over her shoulder at the woman behind the desk, thinking once again how damned lovely she was, even with the lines of stress etched a little deeper around her eyes tonight. “He can hire someone.”

“Yes. Exactly as I did.” Michael worked not to let her uneasiness show. She didn’t like the idea of drawing battle lines with Nicholas, or of living in what could amount to an armed camp until their affairs could be disentangled, but she had to protect her business. It was all she had.

“What you should be pleased about is that you hired me first,” Sloan joked. She frowned at something that appeared on the screen, clicked through a few items, then pushed back in the chair to look at Michael again. “Is this where you do most of your project designs?”

“Here or my laptop at home. I just synchronize the files when I come in. The division heads get summaries of future lines of development, but no hard details. I work them out alone.”
Like I do almost everything,
she thought.

She had been an insular child, an awkward teenager, and a reclusive student until Nicholas had taken the time to listen to her. Somewhere in the last fifteen years she had grown up and, in turn, outgrown her simple need for his validation. And when that had happened, they had little left to bind them.
A shell of a marriage, and now, not even that.

She was suddenly aware of Sloan’s deep voice. “What? I’m sorry, I was...wandering.”

“I was saying that one of the first things we need to do is beef up your personal security.”

“How?”

“Encryption, for starters.”

“Which will do what?”

“Plenty,” Sloan muttered, still mentally cataloguing her work list. “It can authenticate user identity, protect e-mail transmissions, assign cryptographic document signatures, and verify authorship. When you’re interfacing with multiple systems, user-to-server security is key. Plus, it adds one more layer around your sensitive data that a hacker needs to wade through.”

“Okay,” Michael murmured. On the surface it sounded good. The details eluded her, which was precisely why she’d hired an expert.

Sloan stared at the monitor, scanning through files, looking for traces of tampering or unauthorized entry. This was what she loved—the hunt, the chase. The thrill of finding the hidden secrets. Some of her less kind critics had said that was what she loved best about women, too. The hunt. Had she cared at all about public opinion, it might have bothered her.

“And,” she said, “we really need to get you an ID chip to lock down your hard drive, too.”

Michael raised an eyebrow. “Meaning?”

“An electronic chip keyed to a unique identifier like your fingerprints or an iris scan, for example, so that you can be positively identified and anyone else locked out. We need something like that to prevent anyone else from doing just what I’m doing now—breaking into this drive. It will dissuade hands-on intrusion from inside. It won’t protect you from outside hackers, but that’s going to take me a bit longer. I’ll see what I can come up with.”

“Can you tell if someone’s been in here?” Michael felt violated just thinking about someone tampering with her work. “Figuratively speaking?”

“Sure. Given enough time.”

“And this ID chip—is that the kind of thing they’re using in some airports now?”

“They call it biometric scanning. It’s pretty commonplace in highly secure environments, these days.”

“So you could just install one?”

Sloan was silent as she searched around in her tool kit for a temporary fix. When she had the intrusion detection program loaded, she looked up. “Absolutely,” she answered, an amused glint in her eyes.

“And they’re completely legal for private users, I presume?”

“Of course, and even if they weren’t...” A grin now.

“How did you get into this?” Michael asked, fascinated by the topic, but more so by the woman, who exuded an intriguing combination of startling candor and secrecy.

Sloan shrugged, offering her automatic explanation—all of it true, just not the whole story. “The Internet is the new frontier, and we are woefully unprepared to confront it. It is fast becoming the foundation of communication, commerce, even culture. And it’s wide open, lawless. There are no rules, no methods of enforcing any if there were, and few means to detect or deter crime. I saw the possibilities, and I had the experience.”

“And you got that experience where?” Michael probed.

“Cal Tech, then later...” she hesitated, aware that she was revealing things that she rarely discussed, “uh...industry.”

Warning bells started clanging loudly in Sloan’s head—Michael Lassiter was easy to talk to, and even easier on the eyes.
Oh man. Not good, not good at all.
She shut up and concentrated on the monitor.

*

Sloan stretched and looked at her watch, surprised to find that she and Michael had been sitting wordlessly fifteen feet from each other for over an hour, each silently working. She looked over at her companion, unaware of both the pensive smile that Michael quickly hid and the fact that the CEO had been watching her for the better part of the last quarter hour.

“Done for the night?” Michael inquired.

Sloan nodded.

“So, you’re a cyber-cop?” Michael asked, still curious and genuinely interested.

“Hardly.” Sloan laughed harshly, thinking of how she had once been called that by condescending colleagues, another lifetime ago. “‘Incident response expert’ is the latest jargon. Mostly, I guess, I’m just a technogeek, without the glasses and pocket protector.”

Whatever you call yourself, you’re far from that
. It had been a long time since Michael had lost herself in conversation with someone when it hadn’t been focused on sales or development or some other aspect of her work. Perhaps as long ago as those early years with Nicholas, when they had stayed up half the night fantasizing about a world that was now coming to be.
Had it been this easy, then?

“Somehow I can’t see you in the nerd role.” Michael laughed.

Sloan laughed with her. “You should have seen me when I was twelve.”

“So this was what you always wanted to do?”

Sloan’s immediate impulse was to change the subject. Her past was not something she discussed with anyone, even her friends, and she didn’t have many of those. She looked into Michael’s eyes, preparing for evasive maneuvers, and discovered something she hadn’t seen in a long time—simple interest, unaccompanied by innuendo or pretense. Often when women inquired about her personal life, it was a prelude to seduction. Not that attempts at seduction were unwelcome, by any means, but she
had
learned to subtly direct conversations away from revelations that could put her at a disadvantage.

From this woman, however, the questions seemed merely friendly, and Sloan dropped her guard. There was no need to protect herself from Michael Lassiter, because nothing was going to happen between them. There was no danger here.

“I was into computers before most of my peers, when I was still a kid really. It just came easily to me. Pretty soon I was hacking into places I probably shouldn’t have been, but it got me turned on to the possibilities very early. One thing led to another.”