AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The sense of betrayal was overwhelming. Any sliver of goodwill I’d begun to feel for Kev Rogers was gone faster than an air speeder with a coveted Apple Butter Booster.
I sent Riggs a boiling-hot glare. How the fuck am I supposed to get along with this guy when he keeps pulling shit like this?
“Wait, Hux. Let me explain,” Kev said quickly, holding out a hand toward me.
I jerked away before he could touch me. “I’m such a fucking idiot. You had to have admin privileges to load the program.” I ran a hand over my face. Why hadn’t I seen that before?
Simple. Because even after yesterday, I’d still trusted him deep down.
“I cannot believe you had the balls to make yourself an admin of my system when you know how shitty that is, Kevin. You know, more than anyone in this room.”
Kev winced and had the decency to look guilty, but I didn’t care. It hadn’t been enough for him to humiliate me in front of my team yesterday, but he’d actually withheld information so I could look even more incompetent today.
I jumped to my feet, and Champ jumped up to restrain me, like he worried I might attack the gnome-fucking betrayer on the other end of the sofa… and maybe he was right.
“My intention wasn’t… I mean, I wasn’t going to… I mean… I tried to tell you about the vulnerability yesterday, and you wouldn’t listen to me,” Kev insisted, his words tumbling over themselves in his rush to get them out. “So, yes, I accessed the system and ran that script to make a point. But when I tried to confess, you jumped to conclusions again. You were already so angry, and I… I knew if I told you everything, you’d be nuclear-fallout-level angry, which you are—”
“No shit!” I yelled. “Because I keep trusting you, and you keep fucking me over!”
“But I didn’t fuck you over! I wouldn’t! I thought if I could just take care of it myself, that would help make it up to you. I was trying to…”
I leaned toward him and said in a low, menacing voice, “Tell me you were trying to help, Kev. Tell me. I dare you.”
Kev swallowed convulsively.
“If you wanted to help me, you would have told me what was going on from the beginning. You would have let me handle it,” I said in that same tone.
Riggs leaned forward, like he, too, was ready to physically separate us. “Can someone please explain what’s going on to those of us who don’t know what the hell you’re talking about?”
Kev opened his mouth but quickly snapped it shut when he saw my face. I turned to Riggs and gave him a super-simplified version.
“There’s a vulnerability in the system, and the bad guys tried to exploit it.”
“You mean they’ve figured out that we have the info from the original Horn and they want to access it?” Champ demanded, pushing me into my seat before sitting back down.
“No.” I sat on the edge of the cushion, careful to maximize the space between me and fucking Kev the Civilian. I was itching to get back to my computer so I could see what the fuck Kev had done to my system… and ensure he never had the opportunity to do it again. “They have no reason to believe that we have the data, let alone that we’ve decrypted it. They’re probably trying to monitor our communications. To see whether we’ve given up the investigation, to figure out how much we know and who we suspect.”
“But if they got into our systems,” Elvo said, “maybe they found the Horn data too.”
“They didn’t get into our system,” I said confidently. “There are multiple layers of protection to prevent that. It’s like they’re peeking through a hole in our fence—which is not the same as crossing the yard, bypassing the alarms, and picking the locks to get inside our house. You feel me?”
Elvo nodded slowly.
“And furthermore…” Part of me wanted to glance at Kev in smug satisfaction—or maybe to see his eyes flash with appreciation and respect—but I forced myself to stay focused on Riggs. “Even if they did get through our security, they wouldn’t find what they’re looking for. I keep all of the HOG data offline. It cannot be hacked. Our OPSEC hasn’t been compromised.”
Then I did turn to Kev, only so I could explain in my sweetest voice, “OPSEC means Operational Security, Kevin. It’s a term we used in the military,” as though Kev were a particularly dim child who couldn’t make that logical leap.
His jaw tightened. “Thank you, Huxley, but I’m familiar with the term, thanks to Wikipedia and, you know, television.”
“Mmm. I bet you get most of your experience from the internet and television,” I said condescendingly.
Kev’s eyes flared, and he turned a violent puce color, which was odd—that had been a half-assed insult at best since we both knew Kev had multiple degrees in computer science and sure as fuck hadn’t gotten them by watching TV—but whatever.
