The algorithm’s potential was crystal clear.
He took the guy’s money—it was perfectly good money—and began planning the operation. But he’d already decided to keep the acquisition in-house. The algorithm was far too valuable to hand over to the fucking client.
Besides, if the guy complained, there was always Shepard.
Maybe even if the guy didn’t complain. Maybe even include the attorney, and the personal rep with dirt under her nails.
This was going to be big.
Chip didn’t like witnesses.
As for Shepard, Chip would take care of him personally.
Profit sharing was for suckers.
? ? ?
HE PUT HIS SUPERGEEKS on the project full-time for two months, and they got nowhere. The Cassidy woman made none of the usual mistakes. She actually used the fingerprint reader on her phone and her brand-new personal laptop, the one she took home with her. Her password wasn’t PASSWORD or her birthday or her daughter’s name backward or anything else that simple.
As it turned out, she wasn’t just any professor. She was in fact a big-shot Stanford computer science star. She had real discipline and major skills and random long-string passwords. It was infuriating. Chip was actually impressed that the client had gotten her working notes, because Chip’s supergeeks couldn’t even get that far.
So he went old-school. He planted infected USB drives in the parking lot, on the hallway floor outside her lab, in the backpacks and messenger bags of her staff, even in Cassidy’s own purse, all in the hopes that someone would plug a drive into a lab computer. He got a few takers for his virus and a lot of naked pictures of Stanford coeds, but no access to Cassidy’s systems.
He’d already hired a dip to lift her personal access card, planning to make a duplicate and put it back into her purse, but before the dip did the deed, Cassidy went and added fucking retinal scanners to her lab doors, so unless he was going to pop her eyeballs out of their sockets, he wasn’t getting in that way. He sent a team to assess the physical security of the place, but she had multiple layers over Stanford’s already decent measures, and short of a sledgehammer and a very large crowbar, or quite possibly the jaws of life, the place was tight as a fucking drum.
He was starting to consider the eyeball option.
But first he thought he’d try the direct route, hiring Nicolet on Chip’s own nickel for the negotiations, to further insulate himself from both client and professor and thus ensure his own anonymity. Chip had known Nicolet for a half-dozen years, and the man had no problem with wheels-within-wheels, his personal ethics firmly firewalled from his business practice.
Chip’s last two offers were far more than he could afford to pay, but by then it was more about her reaction, seeing who he was dealing with.
Hazel Cassidy was a tough nut.
When she stopped answering Nicolet’s emails, Chip decided there was only one way through. Cut the Gordian knot.
Or more to the point, kill the professor.
Then his operators could walk in with government credentials and a cutting torch and clean out her office. Which is exactly what happened.
They’d taken boxes of paper files and stray hard drives. They’d taken an odd-looking aluminum crate the size of a dorm fridge, loaded with computer components and cooling fans. They couldn’t take the lab’s servers, a long row of liquid-cooled Crays too big for a pair of operators to physically remove in the middle of the night, and the credentials Chip provided wouldn’t stand up to loading a box truck in the light of day. So they’d uploaded Chip’s virus via flash drive and gotten the hell out of there.
The supergeeks were very impressed with the aluminum crate, which they called a mini-supercomputer, something Cassidy had apparently designed and built herself. But it was an empty jar, completely wiped.
The virus got them remote admin access to the servers, which were packed to the gills, but not with anything useful.
They still couldn’t find Chip’s algorithm.
The next obvious step was the daughter, but somehow Smitty’s team had screwed up taking her off the street. Chip never did get a good explanation out of them, and now they were dead in the fucking mountains. The mystery man, whoever he was, had taken out Chip’s top tactical team, and the daughter was in the wind. Chip was certain she had the algorithm.
Soon enough, however, he’d have her. And the goddamn mystery man.
That’s why he was heading back to his office.
If traffic weren’t so fucking bad, he’d get there before the ball dropped. Watch the whole thing from the dashboard cameras. Bert had a helmet-cam, too.
Chip really wanted that code. More than he’d wanted anything in his entire life.
He deserved it. He’d worked so fucking hard to get here. Stepped over a lot of bodies.