Beating Ruby (6 page)

The older of the two was a short, fiftysomething man with a neat suit and a shaven skull. I squinted to better see his face through the grid. Small rectangular glasses, potato nose. I knew this guy; I had seen him with Ellingham and Kerri Lavalle at a press conference a few months prior. The other guy was a young Asian with long hair, round glasses, and a cool Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirt. His face looked sort of familiar, but I had no idea who he could be. I was pretty sure I’d never seen him inside EMT’s walls before. Some nerd cop, perhaps?

I heard a door open somewhere in the clean room. Then the sound of footsteps approaching, closer and closer, until a pair of khakis entered my field of vision. I jumped and stifled a squeak of surprise when they brushed the vent’s grille. Paralyzed by fear, I clasped a hand on my mouth to muffle the sound of my breathing. The pants shifted away, revealing brown boots partly covered by bright blue overshoes. Worn leather, no shine. I knew those pants and those boots.

The newcomer walked to the two men working on Ruby and knelt beside them. And when he did, it took everything I had not to scream. My chest constricted until I thought I’d suffocate, my ears were ringing, my heart seemed to be ramming against my ribs as if to tear through bones and muscles and escape.

Alex.

Alex was in the clean room.

Past the shock, there were a few seconds during which my brain went into overdrive trying to rationalize this. Alex worked in insurance. Maybe he didn’t specialize only in expatriate contracts, and someone had stolen something in EMT’s building. I had seen in movies that sometimes they might send an insurance expert to investigate, and maybe he had tried to tell me he was coming, but my phone hadn’t rung and he had forgotten to call back because he was busy with insurance contracts . . . and stuff.

Or maybe . . . not. He was with those Feds. For some reason he worked with them.

A cold sweat dampened my back as he spoke. “So? What gives?”

That young Turtle fan greeted him with an apologetic look. “Not much. The only thing I’m sure of is that Roth is the one who launched the program. I can place him in the clean room during the time frame, and it’s his security pass that was used to unlock the doors.”

Wait . . .

“Besides him, Chaptal was the last one to connect to the server. She disconnected at 8:34. Whether she actually helped him prepare the attack, that part I’ll leave to you.”

Wait, wait, wait.
What attack?
And what was this guy implying about me and Thom?

Alex’s expression darkened. Gone were the gentle, ever-amused brown eyes sparkling under thick and expressive eyebrows. Something tore in my chest, because it seemed I was seeing him, really seeing
him
for the first time.

“What about the attack itself? Did you find anything?” he asked Turtle-boy.

His colleague shrugged. “Nope. The app normally generates extensive backlogs in a NoSQL database that would contain every single bit of data sent and received, every method executed, when—”

Alex cut him off sharply. “In English, please.”

His tone made me shudder a little. Turtle-boy, on the other hand, appeared used to it. “All tracks got erased right after Ruby was shut down. It’s a complete disaster. All I can tell you is that Roth copied Ruby on a distant server around midnight, then the local version got launched at 2:41. From there, several terabytes of data got exchanged. Then it was shut down at 3:37, and someone wiped all logs, all remote backups, and physically destroyed all the disks where Ruby had been installed. Totally degaussed them—that requires some serious hardware,” the young guy explained, pointing at several racks that seemed to have been disassembled.

Holy shit.
What exactly were these three accusing Thom of? Stealing Ruby before destroying every single trace of the program in EMT’s mainframe?

Alex turned his piercing gaze to Ellingham’s subordinate. “Is EMG done assessing the losses?”

“Yes. Ninety-seven bank and trading accounts accessed. Six hundred—” The bald guy’s voice faltered. “Six hundred and ninety-eight million, four hundred and seventy-three thousand, five hundred and ten dollars . . . and eighty-two cents missing.”

I clenched my fists until my knuckles hurt. Ruby had been used. Unbridled. On actual bank accounts. And nearly seven hundred million bucks had been stolen. I couldn’t believe this. It wasn’t possible. Well, it
was
, but only if someone had bypassed all security systems to replace Ruby’s simulation scenarios with real targets. None of this made sense, though. Why would Thom have done such a thing? He had never shown any sign of being greedy, and the Ruby project was his
fricking
chef d’œuvre!

I focused my attention back to the three men in the clean room, where a long sigh had just escaped Alex’s lips. “And we have no idea where that money has gone?” he asked, his gaze traveling back to Turtle-boy.

“Nope. Ruby hammered the banks’ systems, and once it got in, it performed thousands of micro transfers to some obscure offshore banks, and just as many dark pool transactions. By the time the banks’ security systems started automatically blocking the accounts showing suspicious activity, the money had already been transferred so many times it was untraceable.”

Alex raked a hand in his messy brown curls. “All accounts belonged exclusively to EMG?”

There was a brief pause, during which I heard the bald man breathe in and out several times, until he seemed to find the courage to speak again. “Yes. Ruby targeted very . . . specific accounts.”

“What he means is that EM’s saving several billion dollars each year through tax evasion schemes, and all the accounts targeted were located in tax havens,” Turtle-boy supplied with a smirk.

“So they can’t go public about those losses,” Alex concluded.

Turtle-boy laughed. “That’d be in bad taste, to say the least. And then, of course . . .”

The bald man clasped a trembling hand around Alex’s arm, who seemed unaffected by his interlocutor’s tension. “Agent Morgan, I hope you understand that
no one
must know about what happened here. If the general public learns what Ruby proved capable of . . .”

Agent?
FBI then? Provided their agents were allowed not to shine their shoes. But if so, did he know about me, March, and my family? Was it why he had lied to me about his job? But why go so far, then? I felt tears brimming at the corners of my eyes at the memory of his hands holding me, his lips caressing mine as he tried to reassure me last night. I swallowed them back.

After a few seconds spent listening to EMG’s exec prophesying a financial Armageddon, Alex schooled his features back into that warm smile I knew so well. “I get it. Investor panic, wide-scale market losses, public hearings . . . the whole nine yards.”

“Yes.” The bald guy said in a gasp.

“All right. You two try to recover whatever you can. We still have employees to question. I’ll see you later.” With this Alex got up on his feet and seemed to be ready to leave.

The tension in my muscles eased a little, and that was when I noticed that something was tickling my hand.

I looked down.

A dark mass. Fur.

I promise I’m not kidding—that rat was bigger than a raccoon. I jumped back in panic and hit my head against the metal walls imprisoning me. The clanking sound seemed to echo indefinitely in the narrow tunnel, laced with my squeal of pain. I clasped my hands over my mouth in horror. The fifteen seconds that followed were something halfway between
It
and
Alien
. Blood pumped furiously in my ears, my chest hurt from the effort not to scream, and I could see Alex’s legs approaching the vent slowly . . . while that twenty-pound—no, make that thirty-pound—rodent returned to nibble on the little leather ears of my mouse ballet flats.

Behind Alex, Turtle-boy had heard the noise too. “What is it?”

All I could hear was my own shallow panting, the beating of my heart, as I watched Alex crouch down to examine the air vent. I saw his face appear inches from mine, familiar yet terrifying, the only barrier between us that small grille.

A soft expression, belied by that intense cinnamon gaze. A tilt of his head. A smile.

“It’s nothing. Just a rat,” he announced before getting up with the ghost of a sigh.

My heartbeat settled as he walked away, and I jerked my leg to kick the beast away. It ran down the tunnel with a series of protesting squeaks. I curled up and massaged my temples for a few seconds, struggling to process what had just happened. Alex couldn’t possibly have seen me. He worked with them; he’d have said something. Plus it was dark in here. He wouldn’t have been able to make out anything through the grille, right?

But he had
smiled
. That gentle, enigmatic smile I now knew to conceal a great many layers. What would I do if he knew? He had just given me a temporary reprieve, but for how long?

No need to stay to see if he’d come back and check again. With excruciating care, I turned around and started a slow crawl back toward the light of the hallway, a distant white square whose edges appeared blurred—or maybe I couldn’t see straight because all I could think of was that under my palms and knees, reality seemed to have collapsed. Thom had broken past Ruby’s security systems and reprogrammed it to steal Ellingham’s money. Alex was some kind of federal agent—or even worse, I realized, remembering what kind of countries he traveled in—and had been lying to me from the day we had met. My head was spinning. I stopped a meter or so from the air vent’s exit, suddenly scared that perhaps someone might be waiting for me out there.

My breath little more than a faint whistle, I waited, every muscle paralyzed, eyes wide. I strained my ears to pick up the slightest whisper that might indicate that someone stood in that damn hallway. Nothing came but the low hum of the air-conditioning system and the occasional buzz of fluorescent lights on the ceiling. I inched forward. A sticky sweat caked the vent’s grayish dirt on my palm. I couldn’t even find the strength to swallow. And all that tension made me want to pee. Badly.

I squirmed as silently as possible in an effort to get some sort of vantage point of view to the hallway. When I was 100 percent certain no one was waiting out there to pounce on me, I darted my nose out, breathing in fresh air and thinking of
Fantastic Mr. Fox
’s tale. You know, that part where not only do the farmers manage to get Mr. Fox out of his burrow, but they shower him with bullets, shoot his tail off, and destroy everything with bulldozers. That stuff traumatized me when I was seven.

It took me almost a minute to dare climb out of the vent, and by the time I stood alone on the taupe carpet again, the mad beat in my rib cage progressively slowed down. Best cardio of my life. Putting the vent’s grille back in place was a torturous process, since I had to deal with a bad case of clammy, trembling fingers. Dammit, those little screws kept slipping out of my hands! Once I was done, I drew out a calming breath and looked up at the security camera.

I hadn’t received any texts for a while, but Prince was probably still watching. Behind me, the freight elevator’s steel doors opened with a muted metallic sound. I folded myself back in and balled my fists as darkness engulfed me.

I can’t even begin to describe how relieved I was to see Prince’s pudgy fingers reach out for me when the elevator doors opened again. That second ride had made me nauseated; I struggled out of my shoe box with almost frantic movements.

At first I didn’t realize something was wrong. Then I registered how short Prince’s breath sounded, as if he had been the one trapped in there. He hadn’t said a word since helping me out of that car. I saw him shake his head. I blinked and looked around.

Next to us, patiently leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, stood Alex.

A jolt of electricity that I recognized as panic contracted my muscles. My legs flexed of their own volition in a familiar feeling: the need to run. I was trapped between four walls and couldn’t reach the exit door without making it past him, though. And Prince . . .
Nah
. Behind me, he remained frozen by fear. He had been caught red-handed by “Joe Jonas” and looked like he could barely stand as it was.

I couldn’t read Alex’s expression as he moved to take a few steps toward me. This shuttered, impassive face was foreign to me. He didn’t look mad, but there was no trace of compassion either.

“Miss Chaptal . . .”

I gulped.

“We need to talk.”

SIX

The Puffer Fish

“
‘I wish I could clean my heart of you, Asher! I wish I could scrub it with this sponge,’ Peyton sobbed.”

—Izzie Shepherd,
The Cardiologist’s Christmas Surprise

When I was twenty-two, I tried to go to a frat party because I was stalking this cute guy from Joy’s family law class. I padded my bra with the firm intent to seduce him, but that didn’t work because the tissues I had crammed in there fell into the punch bowl when I bent down to fill my glass. Right in front of the guy.

On an awkwardness scale of one to ten, I rated that particular event a solid eleven.

Now, on a similar scale, I’d rate it around a forty-six for me to be arrested by my boyfriend and end up sitting across from him, ready to be questioned. Alex had dragged me into a small, nearly empty office used to store stacks of undistributed copies of
EMG Magazine
. Hadrian Ellingham and Kerri Lavalle’s photoshopped faces smiled at us, while Agent Morgan’s fingers rapped against the brown melamine of the desk between us.

I didn’t say anything at first, and he remained silent as well, observing me with predatory patience. I found it difficult to collect my thoughts, sort them out, and decide what aspect of this debacle needed to be discussed first. I studied his features, the hawkish eyes and tightly sealed lips. In control. Unreadable. He was the one who eventually broke the silence, faint rustling sounds echoing in the room as he reached inside his brown leather jacket. I looked down at the wallet he had opened and laid on the table for me to see. A blue ID card bearing a round seal and eagle hologram.

It’s a possibility that my adventures with March and everything I’d learned about my mother’s past had made my skin a little thicker, or maybe it was just that I had been readying myself for this since the moment I had realized that a regular federal agent would have likely had no business in Cambodia.

I massaged my temples. “CIA, huh?”

He nodded.

A memory flashed in my mind. I was in Paris, alone with March’s ex. We were in her bedroom, resting and confiding in each other—yeah, she had been the nice ex type. A rare species, according to Joy.

“Since he started his . . . business, March has often accepted wet jobs from the CIA. It’s an easy way to stay on the US government’s good side. He gets things done for them, and in exchange they’ll overlook the rest of his activities as long as he chooses his clients wisely. Of course, they never trusted him much, so a few years ago this guy called Erwin came up with the idea to try to put one of his agents in March’s bed. That sounded like the best way to keep a close eye on him.”

Spoiler alert: that particular plan hadn’t ended well. The aforementioned agent, a woman named Charlotte Covington, got captured and burned alive during a mission in Ivory Coast. March struck a deal with Erwin to come to her rescue, but he made it there too late. There was nothing left to do. He killed Charlotte to end her suffering, and it took him three years to sleep well again in the wake of that intense trauma.

My hands gripped the edge of the desk so hard I feared my fingers might snap, and in the storm roaring inside my skull, something struggled to surface, bubbling with anger. Now I knew where to start. “You’d have—” I swallowed, forcing the word out of my throat. “You’d have
fucked
me.”

I knew we had somewhat more urgent issues to address, but this realization overwhelmed me, made me physically ill. If I had let him, he’d have used my body the same way Charlotte had used March’s. He’d have taken my virginity, that tiny chunk of myself that meant so much. All because it was his job. My skin itched; I felt violated by what had nearly happened just a dozen hours ago.

“Island, this is not the best time—”

“
Not the time?
Really? You
touched
me!” I yelled, wishing I could now scrub my skin clean until it was raw. I was so throwing those panties away. Hell, the dress was going in the bin as well.

Alex jumped out of his chair as if he had been stung, and his fists banged on the desk. “Island, your boss is dead. He let loose a goddamn cyber disaster. Seven hundred million dollars is missing from EMG’s accounts, you’re the last person who saw him alive, and I just found you in a fucking air vent, spying on a classified investigation!”

When he sat back, I remembered how to breathe. “Thank you for the recap. So you’re gonna make it all fall back on my shoulders? What really happened to Thom?” My nails scraped the melamine repeatedly, the only outlet for my anger at the moment. “I heard . . . rumors . . . that you have no actual recording of Thom jumping, that someone cut the power in the fifth floor’s west wing right before—”

His tone was direct, clinical: “Thom was dead before he touched the ground.”

I took the blow with a clenched jaw. “How?”

“The coroner found traces of TTX in his blood. It paralyzed his diaphragm. Cause of death is asphyxia. We have evidence of two men entering the building via a maintenance tunnel around two thirty. Accomplices, likely. They killed him sometime after he was done wiring the money and destroying the servers.”

TTX. Tetrodotoxin. Paralysis; loss of sensation. A painless yet horrifying death. As a kid, puffer fish had been among my favorite animals until an old encyclopedia taught me that they were—quite literally—full of that shit. I struggled to focus back on Alex. My voice sounded muted, distant to my own ears. “Will it be made public? Will you tell his wife?”

His lips curved; his gaze softened. Not really a smile—a silent apology. “You know we can’t. Death has been ruled a suicide.”

“I see. And I suppose it’s a complete coincidence that you’re the one investigating all this. I mean, you must be bored already. Greenwich Street doesn’t sound nearly as exotic as your usual destinations,” I said bitterly.

Lines appeared on Alex’s brow that I wasn’t sure I had ever noticed before. He seemed equally tired and conflicted, and when he spoke again there was an edge to his voice. “Don’t play with me. I know you’re smarter than that. The CIA is involved because US interests are threatened, and
I
am involved because
you
are threatened. My boss gave me the job because he knew I could never stand watching someone else—”

“Treat me like this? Locking me in a room for interrogation?”

“Yes,” he admitted.

I looked away. “You’re lying. All you’ve done is lie from the start, anyway.”

“As you lied to me,” Alex gritted out. “If I recall, you told me your mother had been a French diplomat. I must have missed the part where you mentioned her job as a spy.”

I wondered, as he said this, if he knew about the Cullinan affair as well, or even . . . Dries.

He
was the other surprise package my mom had left for me to discover after her death. You see, she never delivered the diamond after she stole it, and was murdered before she could reveal where she had hidden it. What the Board would learn only a decade later was that she had double-crossed them with her lover, and incidentally my biological father, a supervillain hell-bent on world domination and known as Dries. No wonder my mom had chosen the nice American banker she had shared a brief fling with to raise me, instead.

Here is where things get even trickier: she was supposed to give Dries the Cullinan, but for some reason she decided against it and vanished off the grid in Tokyo with me. Dries, however, belonged to a little club called the Lions, a secret fraternity of deadly and incredibly arrogant South African assassins who seemed to believe that the rest of us were maggots and the world was theirs for the taking. Said fraternity often took care of the Board’s dirty jobs: they got summoned to catch my mother and recover the diamond. Very convenient, as you can imagine.

Except that on the day Dries was supposed to kidnap us, one of his men went rogue and shot my mom while she was driving, without any valid explanation, save for some bullshit about a faulty aim. I should have died too, but Dries’s favorite disciple, a young assassin he brought everywhere with him, turned his back on his “brothers” to save my life.

That young man was March.

I was fifteen, he was twenty-two, and unbeknownst to us both, he had set in motion a chain of events that would change our lives forever, like they say in movies.

March left the Lions after that, and went on to fly solo, “cleaning” people on his own terms and becoming some kind of legendary criminal wildlife regulator, mostly for the Board, but sometimes also for the US government itself. I didn’t even remember him, until one fine night in October, he came knocking at my door—well, breaking in, really—for that goddamn rock . . .

I figured I’d better not ask Alex if he knew any of this, and risk getting myself in even more trouble than I was already in.

“What did you want me to tell you? I don’t even know that much about her. Don’t try to deflect this shit on me, Alex. I omitted a part of my life I felt it was too soon to tell you about; you
made up
an entire fricking life!” I snapped, getting up from my chair.

He imitated me and walked around the desk. I stepped back until my shoulders hit the room’s locked door. “Don’t come near me. If I’m getting arrested anyway, I want to be handled by someone else. I won’t say anything to you.”

God, I was trying to sound cool, but each intake of air betrayed my increasing panic. Alex’s brow lowered in a mask of barely controlled anger as he marched toward me. Without thinking, I raised my hands to shield myself as he lunged forward. His hands slammed hard on each side of my head against the door, trapping me. A faint whiff of his good-guy cologne floated in the air between us.

I stood paralyzed. This man was a stranger who looked like Alex.

“Island, I didn’t have the
right
to tell you!” he hissed. His eyes searched mine for a couple of seconds, and he drew a long breath through his nose. It dawned on me that the intensity I had mistaken for anger sounded in fact more like desperation. “No one knows about my job, not even Poppy. After we chatted and I offered to take you out, they screened you. It’s mandatory; we’re discouraged from engaging in relationships outside of the Agency.”

His gaze had softened, and in spite of myself, my own animosity started to ebb; I knew what was coming.

“The screening raised a number of red flags . . .”

I went limp against the wall, overcome by a sense of mental exhaustion. “How do I know you’re not lying? That you weren’t just trying to bed me so you could better spy on me?”

To my astonishment, this time his features relaxed, revealing the gentle expression I was accustomed to. His right hand left the door to caress my hair. I fought a shiver. “Look, I know this is gonna come out wrong, but—” He seemed to fight a smile. “Your file wasn’t big enough to warrant a seduction mission.”

I pursed my lips, unable to find the right answer to this. Should I voice some degree of irritation at his clumsy statement? At the fact that in spite of my family tree, I was nothing but an ordinary girl he had picked up on Yaycupid? Or should I just be relieved that this wasn’t the storyline of
Fatal and Sensual Ukrainian Nights
after all?

Still, I could spot a couple of loose ends in Alex’s version of events. “Why did you date me anyway, after the CIA screened me and said I was bad news?”

He shifted closer, his eyes shining with warmth, a tender certainty I didn’t dare to name. “Because you were intriguing, and I liked you. I thought that whatever you were hiding, I could deal with. The more I got to know you, the more I wanted to protect you.”

I averted my gaze. I couldn’t withstand the look in his eyes, those softly spoken words caressing me the same way his hands were. Alex was telling me exactly what I wanted—needed—to hear, and I was scared by the contradictory emotions fluttering in my chest. In that moment, I just wished I could have turned into a bubble and burst in his arms, free of all tension.

“I’m not sure I believe you,” I finally said.

At this, he bent down with slow, controlled movements—likely because he knew he had scared me and I was still shaken—and pressed a delicate kiss to my forehead. His lips moved to graze my ear, his voice down to a suave whisper. “And yet here I am. There are two agents waiting for you on the other side of that door, and I’m with you, baby.”

No,
I corrected him inwardly.

Agent Morgan
was with me.