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“How are you finding it?” He directed the question to his sister.
“Okay,” Lara replied, “although it’s a bit of a dull project, we’re redoing a Human Resources database.”
Jamie shrugged. “It could be worse.”
“What is it you do?” Draco asked, curious.
“I’m the liaison link with the traders, the guys who go down to the stock exchange to buy and sell and generally keep an eye on the financial markets. The man at base, as it were. Any information they send through that looks potentially interesting for our clients comes via me and I flag it up with dad.”
Draco nodded, but recalled the screens on Senior’s wall. Was it a made up job, much like their own? Jamie was a middle man, although he supposed he was learning the ropes too. From what Lara had said, Jamie was only a couple of years older than her. He was just about to ask how many guys worked in the stock exchange, when someone else came in. Janice had obviously sent the message to both brothers.
Lara grinned. “This is my other brother, Charles. Charlie, Steve.”
Draco scrutinized the older guy as they shook hands. Both of them seemed laid back compared to most of the people working in the building. The privilege of being born into it, he figured. Charles was the party-guy, Draco recalled Lara saying. He had floppy hair and a beard and looked a
s if he’d dressed in the dark.
Why hadn’t these two dipsticks figured out the security breach already? It struck Draco as mighty suspicious.
“Charles works in Marketing,” Lara explained.
“Oh, right. What does that involve?”
“I manage a client list and market investments to them. The marketing team follows the current trends, looks for gaps in the market. I pitch clients the interesting shares.”
Draco figured it was a high-powered job, responsible. “Do you make the decisions on which stock to push?”
“Jesus, no.” Charlie laughed. “I don’t think I’d last long if I had to do that. Too much stress.”
He went into a bit more detail about what he did, while he grabbed himself a coffee. From the sound of it, he spent most of his time schmoozing with clients over the phone and going out on all-expenses-paid lunches and dinners.
Nice work if you could get it, Draco decided.
The older brother was definitely the most laid back of the family, although neither of them had the hungry, eager look he saw in the other financial people in the building. Draco figured if your dad owns the company and you’re not stressed or making big decisions, it could get a bit comfy. Was that why they hadn’t revealed the source of the financial leak yet, or was there a deeper, more personal reason for that?
Draco couldn’t help wondering if Compton Senior had given them the chance to expose the source as a warning. If C.S. could figure it out, he wouldn’t need anybody else. If one of his two sons was creaming off profits as a sideline, perhaps Lara’s father had set the task as a warning exercise. It was certainly possible. He’d given them a couple of weeks to find out before bringing in a professional investigator. That was weird in itself. Or maybe the investigator had done his work, and C.S. had already addressed it. Draco had his suspicions about what was going on here, but he needed a little bit longer to pin down proof.
He watched Lara chattering with her brothers and noticed the easy laid-back relationship they all had, despite being separated in their teens. It made him think about his own kin. If anyone watched him with his two sisters, Sky and Rowan, would it be the same? He got on with his sisters—even if they had fallen out of touch this last couple of years since he’d left Wales—and with his stepbrothers even better.
It was good to see Lara interacting with them easily, because she seemed tense around her dad. The longer Draco spent with her, the more he realized it was about impressing her dad, not beating her brothers to the prize.
When they returned to the desks, they discovered a single printed sheet of paper had arrived. It listed the requirements of the system and access codes to the old database. “Special delivery from Janice?”
“I assume so,” Lara said, picking up her tablet and unwrapping it.
Draco spent some time looking at the old database, while he also eyed the company infrastructure and subsystems with interest. A quick scan of the categories listed there made him to want to dive in, to cruise through their carefully built software and mentally list all the various kinds of havoc he could unleash on them. It was going to take some degree of restraint to keep that under wraps until later on in this so-called placement. “How long does this placement last?”
“Four weeks. But we’ve got two weeks, tops to do what we have to.” She lowered her voice. “End of the month, the pros are coming in.”
Why in hell weren’t the pros here now? What viable company wouldn’t be able to handle a breach internally? He wanted to ask her outright, and eventually have to point it out to her, but right now those questions would undermine what she saw as her mission—her chance to prove herself to her dad. He would enable her to do that, even though it wasn’t as clear cut a “project” as she assumed. The timing had to be right, that’s all.
He returned his attention to the Human Resources record system. “This database is an impeccable model of software design.”
“Really?”
“No. I was being sarcastic.”
“Oh. Seriously though, do you think there’s time to do everything we need to do, safely?”
