“Don’t look at me like that,” Michaels said.
“As I was just saying . . .” Kriegel said.
“Thank you, Thomas,” Michaels said. “We’ll take it from here. And I appreciate your use of discretion in this instance. I don’t forget that kind of loyalty.”
Miller exited the room. Once the door latched shut, Kriegel stood up and started pacing.
“This is exactly the thing I was afraid of,” he said.
“You’re jumping to conclusions, David. This is a complete fabrication. Whoever this woman is only wants her fifteen minutes of fame and is likely being preyed upon by William Braxton’s nasty operatives.”
Braxton was more than just a political rival as he squared off with Michaels twice in U.S. senate races. Michaels had never lost, but the margin wasn’t a comfortable one in either election. And after Michaels won the White House, Braxton triumphed in the special election to refill the seat—and in the process, he became his party’s answer to Michaels with a strong opposing voice. The fact that they were fraternity brothers in college made the rivalry personal to Michaels. Braxton took their competition to another level when he became the opposing party’s nominee for president.
“You really think Braxton is behind this?” Kriegel asked.
“Your assumption is that I’m guilty, which is disappointing.”
“I didn’t mean to imply anything, I just—”
“Just go deal with it, okay?” Michaels said. “This doesn’t have to be an October surprise, and your job is to make sure it doesn’t turn into that.”
“I’ll do whatever I can.”
Michaels walked toward the door and opened it, gesturing toward the exit as he looked at Kriegel.
“I appreciate you handling this as quietly as possible.”
“Of course,” Kriegel said as he exited the room.
Michaels left his office and headed straight to his assistant.
“What’s the rest of my day look like?” he asked her.
She smiled. “You’ve got a briefing with your campaign manager in five minutes. Oh, and I also have a note for you.”
She handed Michaels an envelope. He opened it as he returned to his office. Inside, he found a handwritten note scrawled across a piece of ruled paper.
Everything is in place to make the deal happen, and all we need is your green light.
Michaels folded up the message and tucked it in the inside pocket of his coat. He smiled as he eased into the chair behind his desk.
Have I got an October surprise for you, Will Braxton.
CHAPTER 6
Brighton, England
ALEX RUBBED HER CALVES as they started to burn. She’d been perched on the toilet in a locked stall for nearly three hours. After she was convinced the office would be virtually empty, she eased onto the floor and dug into her purse for her wig, sunglasses, and gloves. She donned the disguise and ventured back into the hallway. Her assumption proved true as the floor was empty.
She approached the server room, using Wellman’s duplicated access card to gain entrance. As Goldman Financial’s cyber security chief, Wellman was in charge of making sure none of the company’s information was compromised through hacks. But she doubted he would ever anticipate an onsite hacking job, especially by someone he was fond of.
Wasting no time, Alex went to work. She hammered away on the keyboard in search of the truth about Michaels and Oliver Ackerman. Masking her location through a series of redirects, she eventually used a backdoor portal to hack into the NSA’s database. She broke through several firewalls and uncovered a treasure trove of information regarding Ackerman. She used a small digital camera to take picture after picture of documents about the private security head from Oman.
While Alex felt comfortable navigating around on the NSA’s server, she didn’t want to press her luck and overstay her welcome. Her best guess was that she had no more than two minutes to shut down her session and get out of there before someone at the NSA figured out where she was as well as what she was doing. In an effort to further cover her tracks, she searched for unrelated issues, some of which appeared to dig deep into Michaels. At a cursory glance, she wanted anyone looking at her breadcrumbs to be convinced that she was digging for dirt on Michaels and that Ackerman just happened to be an entry point into the search.
She glanced at her watch—less than a minute.
Alex typed furiously, rooting around in one final folder. Her mouth fell agape as she read the details of the documents in front of her. Her hunch had been right.
She took a few final pictures before terminating her access. Before logging out, she deleted all of the security footage from earlier in the day that could’ve linked her with any piece of clothing she wore.
Placing her camera back in her purse, she slung it over her shoulder and slipped into the hallway. As she moved down the corridor, the only thing she heard was the low hum of the fluorescent bulbs. But as she neared the elevator, she heard something else—a squeaky wheel.
Alex rushed over to the wall and stood flush against it. She peeked around the corner to assess the situation. About twenty meters away, an elderly man with his head down wheeled a yellow bucket down the hall using the mop’s handle to steer. Though unaware of Alex’s presence, he guided his pail in her direction.
Think, Alex. Think.
She’d managed to glide through Goldman Financial after hours as if she was a virtual ghost, but she was about to be exposed by the one thing she hadn’t considered—a janitor. She spun on her heels and eased back down the hall, trying door after door. They were all locked.
Come on, come on.
With each handle she jiggled, the results remained the same. The doors didn’t budge. Alex felt her pulse quicken with each squeak emitted by the old man’s bucket. The sound echoed off the empty walls.
Alex concluded that she would have to wait out the old man and pray that the security
