“Pretty fuckin’ spot-on.” He sounds lethally mad.
“Right. Then, after you checked to confirm there were no network breaches and made the system tighter than a virgin’s asshole, you told Miranda she was probably dealing with an amateur and not to worry about it. And then he raped her network. And then the price doubled.”
Connor’s murderous expression tells me I’m right again.
“How long ago was that?”
“Four days.”
“How are you stalling him?”
“She’s saying she has to put together the money, she isn’t that liquid.”
“Has he given her another deadline?”
“Not yet.”
“Has any of the data he stole been leaked?”
“No.”
Good. So we still have some time. I pause, reflecting. “What did he get?”
“Emails. Everyone’s, right down to the interns’. Executive salary information. Copies of unreleased films. Copies of scripts on future projects. And the source code for Miranda’s proprietary algorithm software, InSight. We think that was the main target.”
I snort.
Frowning, Connor looks at me. “What?”
“He’s not interested in her software. If anything, he probably looked at it and had a good laugh.”
“Why would he take it, then?”
I shrug. “To piss her off. To make it even more personal. She didn’t do as he asked, so she got her hand slapped. Big-time. So what happened next? Did you bring in the feds?”
“Yes—”
“And did you confirm that the people who arrived at the studio with FBI badges were, in fact, FBI agents?”
“Yes.”
He looks uncomfortable with my question. I suspect I’m echoing some of his worst fears about who he’s dealing with. “How?”
“I’ve got contacts inside the agency.”
“Let’s hope those contacts are who they say they are.”
He growls, “I’ve known them for over twenty years, Tabby!”
“Oh, please. You’re not that na?ve.”
Connor’s face flushes. He turns to me with a glint of steel in his dark eyes. “I was in the corps with those men. I’d trust them with my life. They are who they say they are.”
After a quick mental calculation, I switch gears because my curiosity is getting the better of me. “Exactly how old are you?”
He turns his glower back to the road. “Older than you.”
“By how many years, precisely?”
“More than ten. Now back to the subject.”
Obviously he’s not going to divulge his precise age, but “more than ten” puts him at least at thirty-seven or thirty-eight, depending on the month he was born. I look closely at the skin around his eyes, his jaw, the backs of his hands. It’s all unwrinkled and tight, just as perfect as it looked in the pool. I wonder if he uses special cream, or if he’s just genetically blessed, because to have skin that gorgeous at his advanced age— “Jesus Christ, princess, cut a guy a break, will you?” he snaps, bristling under my microscopic inspection.
Perversely pleased I’ve been upgraded from “sweet cheeks” to “princess,” I smile. In a teasing tone, I say, “Look at you, Mr. Senior Badass Hot Guy, still gettin’ out there with the young whippersnappers to fight cybercrime! Impressive! But I’ll understand if you need to be in bed by seven tonight. Gotta rest those creaky old bones. We don’t want you breaking a hip.”
Slowly, Connor turns and looks at me, only now the aggravation is gone, replaced by a sly gotcha! smugness.
He drawls, “Hot?”
Oh shit.
I attempt an attitude of nonchalance. “It’s good manners to be polite to your elders.” When his look of smugness only deepens, I hastily add, “Actually, I think your hearing aid is malfunctioning. I didn’t say ‘hot,’ I said…um…something else.”
Nonchalance = epic fail.
“Oh, I must have misheard!” says Connor, all wide-eyed, blinking innocence. “This pesky hearing aid is always malfunctioning on me. Let’s see, what rhymes with ‘hot’? ‘Trot’? No, that doesn’t work. ‘Cot’? Hmm. ‘Badass Cot Guy.’ Unlikely. What could it be, what could it be?”
He pretends to think hard, while I slide lower in the seat, trying to make myself invisible.
He keeps guessing all the way into Albuquerque, gleefully torturing me with words that rhyme with “hot” while I keep trying to steer the conversation back to Miranda, until finally I give up and sit with my arms crossed over my chest and my eyes closed he as proceeds to shove a giant fistful of crow down my throat, and all I can do is swallow.
Bastard.
Eight
Connor
So getting my dick on board with my “strictly professional” plan with Tabby is a spectacular failure, evidenced by the way it reacted when I saw her at the pool in her running outfit, and in the car on the way to Albuquerque when her voice was breathless with stifled laughter and she looked at me as if she actually liked me.