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My phone rang, and I pulled away.
Gabe watched me, his eyes slightly hooded, as I shakily picked up the phone.
“Lauren. It’s Leo.” He sounded tense.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. I’d spoken to him earlier in the day and he’d said everything was fine.
“It’s Clive. I just found something. I need you to come look at this.”
My heart pounded. “I’ll be right there.”
Gabe watched me, a worry creasing his brow. “What’s the matter?”
“Leo found something in Warren Technology’s system.” I swallowed over the lump in my throat. “I need to go look.”
“Can I come?”
I nodded, relieved he was there. “Of course.”
We headed directly to Leo’s office.
“I need you to look at these, to confirm if it’s what I think it is,” he said when we arrived.
He pulled up the documents on his screen, and I read through them quickly. File after file, attached to an email to Clive from an anonymous contact, showed studies that had been recently conducted on a patch that contained technology extremely similar to Paragon’s. I held my breath as I scrolled through the reports. They showed similar results to the tests we’d run in the spring, before I’d discovered the component I’d been missing.
“Can you trace who this email’s from?” I asked.
“I?
?m on it. So far, I’ve only traced it to a proxy server in Russia.”
I sighed, looking back at the screen. The tests reflected the outdated information Clive Warren had stolen. I’d set up our computer system to guard against the possibility of being hacked, and herein lied the benefit—the technology they’d stolen was not the technology that worked.
Still, Clive was an accomplished scientist. It was only a matter of time before he, or whoever he was working with, figured out the flaws and worked out the technology.
I just had to make sure Paragon’s patch made it to market before that happened.
“What do you see?” Gabe asked.
I sighed. “Exactly what I was worried about. Someone is running tests on a patch similar to ours, and they sent the results to Clive. It’s probably his foreign buyer, the one he said wouldn’t be ‘hampered’ by government compliance.” I closed the documents and turned to Leo. “Thank you. I need you to continue to monitor this. Alert me to anything new.”
Gabe and I went back into the hallway, and I stood there for a minute, catching my breath. My nerves were shot, and my body was humming with adrenaline.
Gabe watched me carefully. “You’re coming with me,” he said.
“Not tonight. I can’t.” I shook my head. “I have to stay. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I need to be here if Leo finds anything else—”
Gabe took me by the elbow, either interrupting me or totally shutting me down—I wasn’t sure which. “Leo has your phone number. He’ll get hold of you. You need to take a break, Lauren, and eat something. You’ll feel better in the morning if you take care of yourself. It sounds like it’s going to be another long week.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but he continued to ignore me, guiding me to my office and collecting my things. Thank goodness my assistant, Stephanie, had gone home for the night. I could only imagine the look on her face if she saw Gabe hustling me around like this.
I usually didn’t get hustled around. But Gabe outweighed me by about eighty pounds, and he didn’t appear to be taking no for an answer.
Of course, I hadn’t said no to him.
“Gabe.” My voice was pleading. “I need to be here right now. If Leo finds something else tonight, I need to know immediately.”
He shrugged, undeterred. “If something happens, I’ll bring you back. I promise. Now, call security and your driver. They know my address, unless it’s been so long that they’ve forgotten.” His tone was casual, but I knew that underneath it, he was one of the most stubborn men I’d ever met. Apparently, I was going home with him, either voluntarily or over his shoulder. I could live with that.
