AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The fact that Cole may or may not have started with a noble purpose was irrelevant. Somewhere along the way, he’d fallen into the trap of greed and ambition. And it was up to her to prove it. She couldn’t ignore that there was now a third goal.
Goal number three. Find the mole inside Zia.
As much as it pained her to admit, it really sounded like Zia was doing good things. And if this gene therapy was as promising as Kensington thought, then she didn’t want to have a part in its failure or sabotage. Just because Kensington as CEO might be corrupt didn’t mean that the entire mission of Zia Pharmaceuticals was a lost cause.
And maybe she’d just leave herself a little extra access into their system so she could make sure Zia couldn’t monopolize and cash in on the treatment once it was established. But first, she had to help him make sure it was fully developed and approved.
She was ironically bothonKensington’s team and firmly opposing him. If Cole was part of the Syndicate, then she had to watch her back. Because one wrong move would paint a huge target on it. She had the feeling that Cole would do anything to protect his “friendship” with Flint.
Well, she wasn’t going to let her guard down. She’d help Kensington with his project. But at the same time, she was going to prove exactly what kind of person he was. In her last information sweep, she found that he owned a house in Key West. His next-door neighbor just happened to be Shane Derulo. The CEO of QuinTech Missiles had built his fortune on war and fearmongering for government contracts, and—if her intel was correct—paying off key people in the budget and purchasing arena.
His ties to Tripp Harrington, along with his connections to Senator Collins and Morris couldn’t just be coincidental. But it was all circumstantial. This mysterious legal trust could be the key. There were also his mysterious ties to Jared.
Unless she could find something concrete, Flint was never going to listen to her.
But she was inside Zia now. And that meant she had access she’d never be able to get any other way. She just had to figure out how to take advantage of it.
The next day, she parked in the garage next to Zia and walked through the tunnel connecting the buildings. Her mission today was to get some uninterrupted access to the server room. As long as her computer came. She smirked. It would be far easier if she could sneak her own laptop in, but she knew that wasn’t going to happen. Instead, she’d be working right under the nose of the ITS department, using equipment they’d paid for.
“Good morning, Ben.”
Her cubicle neighbor looked up and jerked his head up in acknowledgement with a grunt. The oversized headphones appeared to be an ever-present fixture.
Okay then. Not a morning person. Or maybe just not a people person. “Do you have anything I can do before my computer arrives?”
Ben didn’t respond, already looking down at his own system. She waved her hand in front of his face and then pointed to her ears when he looked. He pulled the headphones down. “What?”
“Hi. Hello. Nice to see you again, Joey. You too, Ben.” She held the conversation with herself, saying his lines as well as hers. “I was wondering if you have any work I can do while I wait for my computer.”
He rolled his eyes. “No.”
She smiled tightly. “Great. I’m going to go get familiar with the server room, then. Do you want to show me around?”
Ben looked down. “You’ll figure it out. Apparently, you’ve got quite the resume,” he sneered.
Joey raised her eyebrows. So Ben was threatened by her? She wasn’t sure if that was a good thing, but it sounded like it was going to make him leave her to her own devices to sink or swim.
She smiled tightly. “Okay, then. Great chat.”
Ben pulled his headphones back on, and Joey sat back down at her empty desk. Her gaze fell on Ben’s jacket, hanging on the hook between their cubes. She kept her eyes on him as she stood, palmed his access badge, and walked toward the server room. Her heart raced, and she waited for alarms to sound and the hulking security guards to appear out of nowhere and escort her out.
Instead, there was nothing. She glanced at Patrick’s office, but it was empty. She glanced around the open room, but no one paid her any attention. She swiped the card at the door and entered the server room, shutting the door quietly behind her, shutting out the chatter of voices in the large office space. Technically, her employee badge had full access. But she didn’t want to raise any questions from the folks who monitored the security logs. Even with permission, the Raven Tech system would flag her access and require a confirmation approval from the onsite team. Easier to borrow Ben’s badge for now.
The dark room, filled with racks and familiar green lights, returned Joey’s pulse to normal. She shivered slightly at the cool air. She saw two terminal monitors, one on each rack and went over to one. The login screen came up when she tapped the keyboard. She frowned at it, then grabbed a flashdrive from her pocket. Her own creation, the program on the device should bypass the login screen.
She held her breath while the program ran and exhaled when it worked. She started poking around, familiarizing herself with the organization system. There were so many unfamiliar names and acronyms, it was going to take her days to know what she was looking at, let alone find the vulnerabilities. She found the email server, and her fingers itched to dive into Kensington’s inbox.
The door to the server room opened, and she jumped.
“Joey?”
In the doorway, she saw a familiar face. “Oh, hey, Patrick.”
“What are you doing in here?” Was it just her imagination or did he sound suspicious?
She quickly logged out. “Just trying to get the lay of the land. No computer yet… Ben said it was okay to come in here,” she said cheerfully as she slid her USB from the terminal into her palm.
Patrick watched her for what felt like minutes. She forced herself not to say anything. She wasn’t guilty. Her heart pounded in her chest. Surely, he could hear it, even over the hum of the cooling fans in the room.
