Not Bad for an Amateur (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) (5 page)

By one o’clock in the afternoon, she was finished and called Mr. Merrill. Fortunately for him the problem could be fixed easily. Unfortunately for his employee, a Missy Henderson was being used to enter Merrill’s systems while she flirted with a man named Roland Jepson at another research facility, Fensile Corporation.

Lily’s system was pulling all of the files from Fensile at the moment so Merrill could find his intellectual property. If Mr. Merrill followed her advice, Fensile Corporation would be more worried about retrieving their information than espionage. She would charge Merrill’s a lot of money for her service, but she would ensure that they would regain their property and be able to retain it until another company found another back door into their research.

As she glanced at the files loading, she noticed the file called Wolf. While her system pulled all of Fensile’s files, she could not isolate the Wolf file. Lily could do nothing yet. The waiting was driving her crazy. Merrill’s was not the only corporation that Fensile was pulling information from. There were even some encrypted files that she was certain were government related. Her servers would keep the files safe until she decided what to do with them. This was proving to be bigger than just corporate espionage. What she would do with the information remained to be seen after she sorted out the files and various sources.

Lily called her mother. After the usual “hi, how are you doing” conversation, Lily asked to talk to her stepfather, Jackson. He was a retired FBI bigwig, and while Lily was cautious of him, he was the only person she could think of to talk to about the information she possessed. He had never done anything to hurt Lily or even yelled at her as a noisy, smart-mouthed teenager. Yet she could never remember him being a warm, loving man either. Her mother adored the tall, handsome man.

When he came on the phone, Lily had a hard time forming the questions she needed to ask him. What she was doing was illegal if you followed the letter of the law. There was no doubt in her mind that Jackson was a follower of the law. “Hi, Jackson, this is Lilly.”
Smooth, real smooth there, dummy. He knows
who you are
. “I have a problem and I, er, look, this is hard to explain. Can you come over sometime really soon so I can show you something that I, uh, stumbled across?”

Jackson didn’t even question what it was. He must have caught the urgency in her voice and told her that he would be over in a half of an hour. Lily was relieved. If Jackson had any ideas on how to handle this, then she would be happier than she deserved to be right now. When Mr. Merrill returned her call, she told him to tell his employees not to go online today, instead if at all possible to work in house. If they needed to use a computer it would have to be offline. She promised to call tomorrow morning after assuring the man that she had found the breach.

She was not going to do a damn thing or hand over any information until she had the talk with Jackson. It looked as if Fensile Corporation gathered information concerning anomalies. The Wolf file confirmed her worst fears. She had purposefully been infected with the lupine virus. Three others had also been used as guinea pigs. Unfortunately for Fensile only one of those infected people had been identified. The blood had been mixed up with the hospitals normal supply, and it was impossible to trace the others. Some of the hospitals supplies had been sent to the local VA hospital for their needs. That must be why there was so many files that were government property.

Jackson came alone. She offered him a beverage, and he opted for a whiskey neat. It was a good thing she had a bottle of his favorite whiskey that she had purchased early for his Christmas present. She led him into her office, and he looked around. She was proud of her setup and abilities but wondered what he would think of her once she revealed her most recent job.

She had him sit in the comfortable office chair that she usually used and then just started talking. “I do computer forensics for companies that are concerned that their employees are engaging in espionage or that seem to have information leaks.” Jackson nodded, his face solemn. “I was doing a routine track for a corporation that was leaking intellectual property like a spaghetti sieve and tracked the information to another company.” He was still looking at her and waiting for the real reason for his visit, she could tell.

“Jackson, I couldn’t think of anyone else to call, and I hope you won’t think too badly of me for this, but the company that is stealing information is also stealing information from a half dozen other companies.” She took a deep breath. This could be his breaking point. The American public was his priority. The man was straight as a stick when it came to the law, and she was about to confess to several instances of breaking those laws he held so dearly.

“I recovered the files from that company’s computers and deciphered most of the encrypted files. Then I realized I had several confidential files belonging to the government. The company is called Fensile Corporation and it is based in Ohio. I don’t know what to do with the information.” Now she could see the interest in his eyes.

Lily watched him change from almost bored into nostril-flaring investigator. He demanded to see the files, and she isolated them for Jackson to read for himself while she took a tour of her apartment and made a pot of coffee.

She checked on his progress and was not surprised to see his fingers flying over one of the keyboards. His cell phone was at his ear, and he was talking to someone who was too dumb to realize who he was talking to. Jackson was not a chatter. Until now Lily couldn’t understand the attraction that her mother felt for the quiet man. When he finally got cranky with the fool on the other end of the conversation, she smiled behind the door. “I said put Demetrious Miller on the line. No, do not put me on hold. Boy, if I have to take a plane to Washington to talk with him, your ass will be in the mail room. What is your name? Okay, Dillon, you have one minute before I call another number and good luck to you.” Jackson did not bother to wait the minute. He hung up the phone. Then he cranked his neck sideways to crack it and then to the other side to do the same thing. He took a deep breath and hit one button on the phone and waited.

“Good afternoon, sir, this is Jackson…Yes, I am sure you remember me. I did not expect you to have my number still on your phone. Yes, sir, it is good to hear your voice, too.” Jackson listened and shared a laugh with the person on the other end of the phone. “Well, sir, I have stumbled over some information that is important to our national security. No, sir, actually the information was innocently gathered, and the woman that found it called me. Yes, sir, she is very trustworthy. She is actually my daughter. She is a computer-geek type and is doing some forensics for another company when she fell into the rabbit hole of information.”

“The problem is that since I have retired Demetrious has changed his staff again, and the pit bull he has guarding his office and phone calls refuses to put him on the line. Since I am in Northern Illinois, and this looks important, I wanted to get the information to the proper authorities ASAP. Yes, sir. I would stake my life on the girl. Yes, sir, thank you, sir. Good to hear your voice, too.”

Lily was choked up. Jackson had never told her that he felt that way about her. Jackson’s phone began to ring, but he didn’t answer it. Lily wiped her eyes and ran to the kitchen to get mugs of coffee for them then walked slowly with the hot cups back to her office.

He looked up and smiled at her when she sat the mug next to his left hand. Then he went back to reading the monitor. When his phone rang again, he glanced at the caller ID and then turned to her. “I know you heard me, and it occurs to me that I have never told you that I am proud of you. I never had kids of my own, you know that, but I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect child than you were and are, Lily.” He cleared his throat and looked away for a few seconds. Lily didn’t need to know the entire story of his love for her mother, so he told her the story that her mother had asked him to recite. “When I met your mother the first time, you had not been born yet. Tina was eight months pregnant with you, and I was part of the detail that had to tell her that her husband had been killed in a helicopter crash.

“You have no idea how it felt for me to finally meet the woman I had waited for and she was freshly widowed with a baby on the way. Then I was transferred to the West Coast to deal with a few problems, and the next time I saw Tina you were three years old and the sweetest little girl on this earth. As you know, we didn’t marry for a long time, and then I finally talked her into marrying me the Christmas before you turned five.”

His phone sounded off again, and he picked it up this time and answered it. “Ah, Demetrious, nice of you to call.” He listened for a few minutes, grinning and lying back in the chair. He winked at Lily. “What did you expect me to do, my friend? Your secretary or whatever the dumbass is refused to put me through, of course I told him who I am.” Jackson set the phone down and put it on speaker. “Wait a minute, before you chew my ass, then, you can do what you need to do and I will hop a plane to Washington.”

Once Jackson took control of the conversation, the other man listened and told him to sit tight, he was personally going to see this one through. By midnight there were five FBI agents at Lily’s door. Since they were her computers and livelihood and since Jackson was there to make sure everything went smoothly, she was invited to the party in her office. She refused flatly to allow them to take her servers and computers. She had client information stored, and her system was still working on three of those clients’ systems. The computer geek that was with the agents whistled and complimented her on the way she had her system set up. He worked with her to isolate and copy the government files and Fensile’s Corporation’s files.
 

Lily watched the computer geek, Dunlop, like a hawk. She knew he tried to put a back door into her system, and she let him. He would be real happy when he got back to his office and tried to access her computers. She wouldn’t send him a virus to a government computer, but he would not be allowed to access her system either.

He stiffened when he noticed the names of a few of her clients and looked at her with a new respect. Merrill wouldn’t hire some hacker to represent them. Neither would at least two other companies that he knew by name and reputation.

It was well into the early morning hours by the time the FBI left her and Jackson alone. Lily changed a few passwords and then reset her security settings. She locked down her servers so it would take a supercomputer days to finally break her firewall.

Jackson demanded that Lily come home with him to put her mother’s mind at ease. Lily still had to fix the back door that Dunlop thought he had put in her system so he could access the information on a few of her clients that some people in the government would love to get their hands on.

Lily showed Jackson what would happen when Dunlop tried to access her hard drive through his not-so-hard-to-find access code. Jackson leaned against the wall laughing hard when he saw a large ass painted with a pair of bright-red lips gaping open surrounding a brown asshole that was strangling a cartoon character’s neck with a large head and popping eyeballs screaming with the high-pitch scream of a woman. He watched it replay and laughed harder, with tears falling from his eyes. They laughed almost all the way to her parents’ home. When Tina noted the merriment in her husband’s and daughter’s eyes and asked what they were up to, Jackson Nelson, the upright, uptight man, fell into a fit of giggles. Tina was enchanted seeing the loves in her life finally acting like loving families do and began laughing with them, not having an idea about what they were laughing at.

* * * *

Jim and Joel were depressed. It had been six long months since the female, Lily, had left without a backward look or even a damn phone call. Joel had almost worn out his DVD player watching and rewatching the video of the at-times scantily clad woman. Her compact little body in those tight shorts and spaghetti-strapped tank top sent his imagination into overdrive. The bratwurst was replaced with Joel’s hard cock in his fantasies and her breasts featured prominently in his dreams. There wasn’t a spot on her body that he hadn’t fantasized about licking and kissing and fucking.

Jim had his own copy of the video and his own fantasies, no matter if they did fall along the same lines as his twin’s. “I sent her flowers. I even sent her those chocolate-covered things that women love so damn much. I have called her twice and left my number. Short of going to her home and kidnapping her, I can’t think of any other way to get her back here where she belongs.”

“There has to be a way to get her out of my mind. I wake up with her scent and go to sleep jacking off to her scent. It’s fucking annoying. How is it okay for her to stay away if she is our true mate? Shouldn’t she be in the same shape as we are? I even tossed that pillow into the closet and still she lingers in my mind.”

Joel knew what his twin was saying. The sheet that Jim had given him with her scent was washed and left in the linen closet, yet he found himself daydreaming about her all of the time. If there was a cure for this ailment, he had never heard of it.

He and Joel started walking the block away to get lunch at Doris’s Diner. Doris was having a slow day and was sitting at the counter with a cup of coffee, reading the local paper. Not much happened in this part of the country, but the weekly paper tried to fill as much space as possible with interesting tidbits of information. When Doris saw them enter, she smiled widely and walked over to get their orders when they sat in the window booth.