“Normally I don’t like people who threaten me every time they see me, but for whatever reason, you’re the exception, Ryan T. McLean. He’s lucky to have you as a friend.”
“I’d die for him,” Ryan says bluntly, with zero self-consciousness. “He’s saved my life more than once. Even if he hadn’t, he also happens to be the best man I’ve ever known.”
I look away, my eyes prickly. “He basically said the same thing about you.” When my throat loosens enough for me to talk again, I murmur, “It must be something.”
“What?”
I quickly swat at my eyes. “To have someone who’d die for you. How many people can say that?”
There’s a long silence. I feel Ryan inspecting my face, but don’t look over at him because I’m afraid what my expression might reveal. Finally, he leans in and says softly, “You can, you hardheaded woman.”
My heart in my throat, I glance up at him. He looks both disappointed and angry, a combination that makes gazing into his baby-blue eyes almost unbearable.
“That’s not…you’re being—”
“Shut up,” he sighs, and gives me another shake. He drops his arm from around my shoulders and stretches his head back. Under his breath, he mutters, “Fuckin’ women.”
At the same time the valet guy pulls the car around the corner and to a stop at the curb, Connor walks through the doors of the lobby and joins us. He nods at Ryan. He doesn’t look at me.
It’s all I can do not to reach for his hand, because what Ryan said keeps echoing over and over inside my mind, a record stuck on repeat.
You can.
I don’t know whether that makes things better, or so much worse.
When we get back to the COM center at the studio, I make a beeline for my computer. O’Doul’s agents are taking a meal break, milling around a table someone has set up with platters of food. They fall into silence when we walk in. Everyone turns to look at us except Rodriguez, who sneers in my direction and turns away.
O’Doul quickly ends the phone call he was on. “Gentlemen.” He nods at Ryan and Connor, and then looks at me. “Miss West.”
I cut right to the chase. “I’ve got something.” I sit down at my computer, enter the password, and hold my breath as I open the traceback program’s compilation report.
Within seconds, I’ve got sixteen FBI agents and two ex-Special Ops badasses breathing down the back of my neck. Everyone watches in tense silence as numbers begin to stream across my screen.
“What’re we lookin’ at?” asks Ryan from behind me.
“Data points,” answers Special Agent Chan. He’s to the right of me, bent over my desk, staring in fascination at the display. “But this report is totally random—how can you tell what you’re looking at?”
“I can’t. Not yet, anyway. This is raw data from S?ren’s system. It has to be converted.”
I sense the general disappointment from behind me. O’Doul asks, “I assume you have another program for that?”
“You assume correctly.” With a few keystrokes, I’ve pulled up the remote access tool that allows me to log in to my home system. I upload the compilation report and hit Send.
“What now?” asks Chan.
I sit back in my chair and release a breath. “Now we wait.”
“How long?”
I shrug. “Depending upon how much data we were able to extract, anywhere from a few hours to—”
I break off mid-sentence and jerk upright in my chair, gaping at the screen.
Instantly, Connor is behind me, his presence calming though I’m in complete shock. He says, “What?”
I point at the monitor. In the upper right-hand corner, the program displays a series of bar graphs, indicating how much time is left on various conversions.
Two of ten bars have already turned from red to green. Then, in rapid succession, all the remaining bars turn green.
O’Doul grunts, impressed. “Pretty fast converter you’ve got there.”
“It never works this quickly,” I say slowly, feeling a cold niggle of worry at the base of my spine. I open the file utility and look at the size. “According to this, there was a few terabytes of data to sort through—”
“Let’s take a look and see what you’ve got!” interrupts Chan eagerly, crowding close.
Everyone is silent as I open the first report. I read through a few lines, stunned, and then read on all the way to the end to be sure I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing.
Finally, I’m convinced. I sag back against the chair and breathe, “Holy. Shit.”
Though he keeps his voice even, I can feel O’Doul’s aggravation. “Please don’t make us keep asking ‘What?’ Miss West.”
I shake my head. “This is… I can’t believe this.”
In unison, O’Doul, Chan, Ryan, and several other agents bark, “What!”
I’m still staring in awe at the monitor, blinking because I can’t believe my own eyes. “It’s S?ren’s malware program. The entire thing. All the code he used to cripple Miranda’s system. It’s all just…here.”