Wes frowned at the sudden reversal. “Max changed his mind?”
“Not Max. New evidence exonerating you has come to their attention, and they are pursuing other leads,” she told him, obviously quoting whoever had been on the other end of the call.
Wes’s brain scrambled to keep up with what she was saying. “But how...that’s not... It doesn’t make any sense.”
“It doesn’t have to make sense. When the result you want comes up, you take it.”
A soft whirring drew both of their attentions down to the floor, as the Roomba made its scheduled appearance in the kitchen, just like he’d programmed it to.
“Guess you’d better put that ankle monitor back on so you can get rid of it for good, huh?”
He leveled his gaze at her, felt the jolt of connection when her eyes met his. “So that’s it?”
He wasn’t talking about his case.
Her shrug was barely discernible, even with all his attention focused on her. “That was the plan from the start, right?”
Wes didn’t have an answer for that. Right now, “the start” felt like a million years ago, and he couldn’t remember it with any clarity.
Vivienne glanced at the clock on the microwave and cleared her throat. “You’d better eat fast, so you have time to change. This judge is a stickler for punctuality.”
Wes grabbed the pan and tipped the contents into the trash, before dumping the Le Creuset in the sink with a loud clatter.
“I’m actually not that hungry either,” he mocked, before heading off to don his freshly dry-cleaned suit.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
IT HAD BEEN a week since his ankle monitor had been removed. Well, in an official capacity and not just as a Roomba attachment, anyway. A week of being haunted by memories of Vivienne, of having her in his arms again, of feeling her beneath him.
He’d tried to drive all that shit from his mind by going through every bit of the evidence AJ had used to bring him down in the first place.
He pored through his own notes and analysis of the hack on Whitfield Industries that had set the entire chain of events in motion. Compared them to AJ’s take on how the hack had derailed SecurePay, Max Whitfield’s digital crypto-currency app.
He wasn’t surprised to find they both thought it reeked of an inside job.
Then he dug into AJ’s discovery that the phone that Wes had given to Whitfield’s little sister and PR guru, Kaylee Whitfield, after she’d broken hers had been bugged. Wes hadn’t done it, obviously, but sifting through AJ’s timeline of events, he understood that if he had orchestrated the whole thing, a prebugged phone would have been the way to go.
The flaw in the plan, of course, being that there would have been no way for him to ensure Kaylee had shown up that day with a broken phone, eager to make an exchange for the one that had been doctored.
Wes filed that discrepancy away in the back of his brain and kept going.
Next up was the knock-off version of The Shield, Liam Kearney’s competing entry in the digital crypto-currency market. Instead of an app, Kearney’s company, Cybercore, had opted to create a status symbol, embedding his payment system in a wearable piece of hardware that doubled as a fashion accessory. The specs for which, inconveniently, had been leaked shortly after Cybercore had started testing Soteria’s commercial antivirus product for installation on some of their products.
AJ had found a version of the program on Kearney’s laptop with a back door installed, which would have made accessing the top-secret plans the digital equivalent of taking proverbial candy from proverbial babies.
All together, it looked bad. Really bad.
And most damning of all, every piece of infected tech had the exact same code in it, a garbage string of eight digits that marked them all as related. And every single one of them could be traced back to him and Soteria Security.
AJ’s notes suggested she’d started off thinking it was a date, but like her, he couldn’t find any significance. May 10, six years earlier yielded nothing of consequence when plugged into a search engine.
The fact that the code had infected every avenue of her investigation had led her to the working theory it must be some kind of signature. The hypothesis remained theoretical though, since it didn’t match the calling cards of any of the well-known, or less well-known, hackers that either he or AJ were familiar with.
By the end of the analysis, Wes was half-convinced he’d done it.
He pushed back from his desk and scrubbed his hands over his face. The only piece of the puzzle he could bring to the case was the knowledge that Vivienne had been blackmailed into installing that original program. And that was just one more link that pointed directly at him.
What he couldn’t figure out was who had the talent, and the motive, to have set this up. What he needed was to unleash the full force of Soteria Security on this case, but in order to do that, he needed his impossible-to-get-ahold-of partner to push his reinstatement papers through.
He grabbed his cell and connected the call.
He couldn’t say he was surprised when he got shunted to voice mail.
“Jesse, man. It’s me. Again. We need to talk. Call me back, okay? Or text me. Or answer one of the million emails I’ve sent.”
Wes disconnected and tossed his phone beside his computer. AJ hadn’t figured out the meaning of that garbage code that appeared on all the affected devices. That was the key, he knew it. If he could figure out the significance of that, it would tell him—
“Do you not own a shirt? Is that the problem?”
“Jesus!” He banged his knee on the underside of his desk as he spun around in surprise, frowning as he caught sight of his black-clad interloper. “Don’t you knock?”
AJ’s grin was smug. “Guess the reports of my stealthiness aren’t so greatly exaggerated after all, huh?”
“You shut down a wall of infrared and broke into my place in the
