1
Ben Whalen had known for the past two weeks that something was eating at his girlfriend, Cassy Levin, and he was almost certain it had to do with her work on the cybersecurity floor at Burnham Pike, the nation’s premier investment bank. But he had mostly left her alone about it, figuring that sooner or later she would tell him.
As a former Navy SEAL lieutenant he had learned by combat experience how to face any problem head-on. Not that he appeared very aggressive. At five-ten and a lean 170 pounds, his blond hair and open blue eyes made him look more like the appealing boy next door than a highly trained killer.
“My hero,” Cassy had called him from the first moment they’d met at Toni’s, a bar on Long Island.
She was thirty, petite, with a pretty face and a nice figure, and he was turning thirty-two next week, and sometimes, like this Thursday morning, looking at her lying in bed beside him in their third-floor loft in the Village, he could only marvel at his good luck. They’d lived together for nearly a year now, and on the fifteenth, his birthday, he was going to ask her to marry him. And it scared the hell out of him that she might say no.
She’d been moody lately, which wasn’t like her. She was usually feisty and spirited, but something was bothering her. Yet every time he’d brought it up, she’d just smiled and looked away for a moment. “It’s work, but I can’t talk about it right now. Okay, sweetheart?”
“When?” he’d pressed two days ago as they were having lunch at the Old Town Bar on Eighteenth Street.
She’d started to object, the corners of her mouth turned down, but he’d kept going.
“Is it like Murphy Tweed?”
“Don’t push it, Ben, please.”
“Is there an intrusion?”
“Could be,” she’d said, and she’d abruptly tossed down her napkin. “I’m late.” She’d gotten up, pecked him on the cheek, and left.
At her previous job over at Murphy Tweed, a small investments firm, she had worked as a cybersecurity analyst and designer. On her first day of work she’d prepared a detailed report for the brass informing them that their data system was woefully out of date and prime picking for hackers. She’d recommended a complete overhaul of the system, which at her best estimate would take as much as a half million dollars to put in place.
She was voted down, and less than a month later, the company’s system had been hacked and mined for the user names and passwords of nearly one thousand customers. The stolen money had been channeled to overseas private banks where no one could find it.
In less than ninety days the company had gone belly up, the execs had been bailed out with golden parachutes, and Cassy had been blamed for the entire mess. She’d found herself out on the street with no job, no money, and no real prospects.
Until Francis Masters, a research chief at Burnham Pike, had recognized her talent and almost literally plucked her off the street.
“I would like you to do for us what you tried to do over at Murphy Tweed,” he’d told her in his office. “You have the chops, Wharton and Harvard. I went to MIT myself. And believe it or not, MIT’s old VP Tom Foley gave you the best recommendation of all: ‘Hire her and listen to her.’”
“Malware,” she’d told Ben, later that night at home. “Someone put a program into our system that can steal passwords and user names, like at Murphy Tweed, and create all kinds of other mischief.”
“I know how to blow up stuff, and shoot bad guys, and seek and find.”
“Macho man.”
He’d shrugged. “I didn’t have Wharton or Harvard, but I did have the SEALs, including hell week,” he said. “But you know how to stop it.”
She’d tilted her head to one side—a move that meant she was agreeing with him and thinking at the same time—a move that had turned him on from the get-go. “I think I do, and now it’s up to me to convince Francis so he can convince his boss, the chief technology officer.”
“O’Connell?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, they hired you to improve their cybersecurity operation, so you’d think they’d listen to you.”
“We’ll see.”
For the last week or so he’d watched the worry lines grow at the corners of her eyes and mouth, and heard her laugh, which had always been light and musical—one of her many fabulous attributes—go south.
“Screw it,” he’d said at their apartment yesterday after work. “Your systems are in place, let’s take a month off. Paris, get a little efficiency on the Left Bank, walk the Quai, spend the afternoons at sidewalk cafés, maybe take in a museum or two here and there. Versailles, Mont Saint-Michel, maybe a canal barge in Burgundy.”
“Not now,” she’d said.
“Later?” he’d asked.
“Promise.”
He was going to propose in Paris. All he had to do was get her there.
2
Cassy came awake slowly, as she did most mornings. He watched her with pleasure as she stretched, arching her back, tasting her lips as if she were testing the air, just like a cat did, smiling, almost purring. Her shoulder-length dark hair was tousled, the sheet down, exposing one small breast.
Her eyes opened and she looked up at him, propped up on one elbow, watching her. “What?” she asked, smiling.
“I can’t stop looking at you.”
“I’m a wreck at this hour.”
“My wreck,” he said, and he reached for her.
She pushed back the covers and scrambled out of bed, stepping back. “Not this morning.”
“We have time,” Ben said, and he shoved back his covers and started to get up.
“Benjamin, no,” she screeched, backing up.
They both slept in the nude, and in his eyes every square inch of her body was perfect. And again, as he did just about every hour of every day, he said a Hail Mary to his luck. He was a kid from the wrong end of a steel plant/iron-ore-mining town, and she was a New England privileged blue blood.
“Just a shower together. One reason why not.”
“I’ll give you two. You’re taking the shuttle down to the Navy Yard in D.C. first thing, and in the meantime the roof might cave in on me this morning, so I have to be on the floor ASAP.”
“Come on, Cassy. It’s me you’re talking to. What’s going on?”
“Something. I’m not sure. But big.”
Her narrow shoulders slumped, and for just a moment Ben thought that she was going to cry.
He got out of bed, and before she could turn away, he took her in his arms. She was shivering, and he held her without saying a word for a long time until she calmed down. When they parted, she looked up at him.
“I’m afraid.”
“Don’t be. I’m here.”
“Just be here for me, Ben. Please. Promise me that no matter what happens in the next twenty-four hours or so, be here.”
“Promise,” he said, and he was more concerned than he’d ever been in a combat situation, where the SEALs’ number-one Murphy’s law was: Incoming rounds have the right of way.
3
Clyde Dammerman, the number-two man at Burnham Pike, was the last of the four to arrive at Kittredge, the hundred-year-old private club on Fifth Avenue. He was a tall man with a bald head, a beak of a nose, and dark, angry eyes that suited his personality. This morning, an hour and a half before the opening bell on the NYSE, they were the only four in the oak-paneled dining room on the third floor.
Reid Treadwell looked up. He was BP’s chief executive officer, a trim, dapper man in his fifties with gray hair. The joke was that he was so natty he even went to bed at night dressed in a three-piece suit, the tie correctly knotted. Handsome and debonair, he radiated a charisma that landed Burnham Pike a lot of high-fee deals—and aided his almost insatiable quest for women. Always calm and composed in public, he never raised his voice even when he was irritated, like now. “You’re late,” he said, his tone icy but even.
Copyright © 2020 by David Hagberg and Lawrence Light
