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“She’s not capable of intentionally hurting people she cares about. Which says she could only do this because she doesn’t really give a shit about me at all.”
And that was killing Zy. “I don’t believe that. I’ve watched her. I’ve seen the way she looks at you, and I think she loves you.” At least as much as she would let herself. The attachment was there…but Trees suspected that Tessa loved money more. “Any chance she doesn’t understand the ramifications of what she was doing?”
“No.”
“Maybe she—”
“Whatever you’re going to say, no. Don’t try to make this better. You can’t. So let’s just get this shit done. The bosses want a timeline of the mole’s activities, so…I guess we’ll start at the beginning. Go through the backups. See what you can find in the electronic records on the EM servers.”
“How long do you have?”
Zy glanced at his phone. “Another five hours, give or take ten minutes.”
Trees scoffed. “The bosses don’t want the fucking world or anything.”
“They never do…”
“I’ve got a spare computer in the office. Would you grab it? I’ll start capturing the data sets and pulling them down. Once I’ve got them, I’ll show you what we’re looking for, then you can search the records, too. This will go twice as fast if we both look.”
“Sure. On it.” Zy disappeared down the hall.
After a few minutes and a minor run-in with Laila, they settled back at the kitchen table.
“You ready to do this?” Trees tried to focus on the task at hand.
“As I’ll ever be.”
“I’ve got the data sets ready. We need to account for all the breaches in EM Security’s information, times when the enemy seemed to know shit they shouldn’t have, and see if we can trace it back to any communication from Tessa, identify who it was going to, and how she might have passed the information.”
Zy nodded. “So what am I looking for?”
“Anything. Emails, website hits, log-ins to online locations that seem fishy. If I have to drill down to the keystroke level, I will. But let’s see what we can establish without that since months of that info would take more than five hours to comb through.”
“Sure.”
“You take January through March. She was on maternity leave most of that time, so the majority of the emails and communications you’ll be sifting through will belong to Aspen.” Trees almost winced when he said the temp’s name.
“Oh, god help us all. I’d forgotten about her.”
“I’d like to…” Trees rolled his eyes. “I’ll take April through August and see what kind of patterns emerge. Oh, and be sure to look at any cookies, plug-ins, or other programs she might have downloaded. I compiled a list of EM-approved software.” He slid the paper on the table between them. “Anything else is something she would have downloaded without telling the bosses and worth looking at. If you have questions about what you find, holler. I’ll figure it out.”
“Thanks.”
Obviously, he wasn’t grateful at all. How could he be, actively working to gather evidence against the woman he loved?
Trees reached across the table to slap his shoulder in support. “You’re welcome.”
Then they both dived in. Trees worked faster since Zy’s specialty wasn’t tech but demolitions. Trees didn’t pretend to be anything but functional when it came to blowing shit up.
“What is toy voyaging?” Zy asked suddenly. “Any idea?”
“No. What the hell?”
Zy looked it up, then just started shaking his head. “Who sends their toys with strangers so they can be photographed around the world? And why is that a thing?”
“Is it? Really?”
“It is for Aspen,” Zy went on to explain. “Apparently, she got a kick out of that.”
“Because that’s not weird or anything,” Trees quipped.
“Not at all. So here’s a piece of software either she or Tessa downloaded on January thirty-first, exactly one year ago. The location suggests it was installed onto Tessa’s machine. Was she in the office that day?”
Since Zy hadn’t begun working for EM Security yet, he had no way of knowing, so Trees stepped in. “Let me bump that against a calendar I maintained. I told the colonel I wasn’t a fan of letting the temp use Tessa’s machine because we didn’t know her, but we didn’t have a spare at the time. So I kept track of who had control of it when.” Trees flipped over to another document on his computer and scanned it with a frown. “That was one of Tessa’s last days in the office before her maternity leave. She was supposed to have worked with Aspen the following Monday through Wednesday, as I recall. But she went into labor on Tuesday morning and didn’t come back until the end of March.”
“So Tessa probably downloaded this?”
“Most likely. What is it?”
Zy scowled as he scanned the code again. “Looks like some sort of spyware maybe.”
“Let me see.” Trees craned his head to study the screen—and he didn’t like what he saw. “Fuck. This is some hand-coded shit that collects every keystroke, but it also enables stealth remote access from anywhere in the world.”
