Trying not to panic, she went into the bedroom and retrieved his phone from the nightstand, already prying off the cover as she walked back into the room. She reached into her purse for the phone he’d given her and sat down beside him as they worked, each of them silently absorbed in their tasks.
When both batteries were lying on the coffee table, she said, “What about the SIM cards?” In a regular cell phone, the SIM card contained the identity of the mobile subscriber, but Ian bought prepaid cards and when the minutes were up, he replaced them.
“I already wiped the phones, and I’ll swap out the cards tomorrow.” As he typed, he muttered a string of curse words, which did nothing to soothe her nerves or slow the galloping of her heart.
Kate went back into the bedroom and retrieved Ian’s glasses from the nightstand. After cleaning the lenses, she sat down on the couch and handed them to him.
“There’s that quickness I like so much,” he said, putting them on with one hand and taking the other off the keyboard just long enough to give hers a brief squeeze. “Don’t worry. I’ve got this. Go back to bed.”
Kate didn’t want to go back to bed. She was wide-awake and wanted to ask a stream of frantic questions about what had triggered the alarm and what it meant for him and for them. But Ian had entered a hyperfocused zone and he kept his eyes on the screen, pounding the keys and typing faster than she’d ever seen anyone type before.
Not wanting to impede whatever it was he was doing, she let him be and went back to bed.
But sleep would not come, and Kate stared at the clock, watching the minutes tick by as different scenarios played out in her head. An alarm had to be a bad thing, and an alarm that woke you in the middle of the night seemed even worse. And asking her to pull the batteries from their phones. Kate knew what that meant and half expected him to rush into the bedroom and start gathering up his things.
He’d said he’d tell her if he ever had to leave, but the promise did nothing to lessen the impact of how she’d feel if he actually did.
At 3:48, she got out of bed. Silently she stood in the doorway and watched him. He was still typing, but at a much slower speed. Then he took off his glasses, laid them on the coffee table, and rubbed his eyes. When he looked up and spotted her, he smiled, held out his hand, and beckoned her. She went to him, and he pulled her down onto his lap.
“Why aren’t you sleeping?” He scanned her face, and his smile faded as he registered the worry etched in her expression.
“Will you have to leave? I’ll understand if you do, but I don’t want you to.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“No?” she asked, relieved.
“No.” His voice was soft, soothing.
“Then what was that all about?”
“I’ve been monitoring the traffic moving over a network. I wrote an alarm into the code to alert me to any intrusion attempts, but I didn’t really expect to get a hit. It’s kind of like entering a building you thought was abandoned and walking around a corner and encountering someone.”
Though she knew it didn’t work that way, Kate couldn’t help but picture Ian coming face-to-face with the intruder in a dark cyber hallway. “Then what happened?”
“Then I reconfigured the firewall to stop the attack and prevent him from hacking me.”
“Did he try?”
“Yes, repeatedly. He was good, I’ll give him that. But I was better.”
The best, she thought.
“Does he know where you are?” Kate twisted the sash of her robe, and Ian reached for her hands, stilling them.
“I use a proxy server to conceal my IP address. We all do.”
“Then why did you have me pull the batteries on our phones?”
“It’s protocol anytime someone attempts to breach my firewall.”
“I thought disposable phones couldn’t be traced back to us.”
“When it comes to hacking, nothing is impossible. There’s always a vulnerability, a weakness, somewhere. But removing the batteries stops the flow of information.”
“So everything’s okay?”
He wrapped his arms around her tighter. “Everything’s fine.”
She exhaled, feeling some of the bottled-up tension leaving her body.