Julie James: About That Night

He still wanted to throttle Jordan for that one.

Kyle checked his watch and picked up the pace for the last half mile of his run. According to the terms of his home detention, he was allowed ninety minutes per day for “personal errands,” as long as he stayed within a ten-mile radius of his home. Technically, he was supposed to use those ninety minutes for food shopping and laundry, but he’d figured out how to game the system: he ordered his groceries online and had them delivered to his front door, and he utilized the dry cleaner located in the lobby of the high-rise building in which he lived. That gave him ninety minutes a day outside his penthouse, ninety minutes when life seemed almost normal.

On this evening, he made it back to his building with eight minutes to spare. He may have been gaming the system, but he wasn’t about to test it. God forbid he got delayed with a leg cramp and an alarm was triggered from his ankle monitor. All he needed was a SWAT team storming the beach and slapping him in handcuffs just because he hadn’t stretched properly.

The rush of warm air that hit Kyle as he entered the building felt stifling. Or perhaps it was just the knowledge that his return through those doors meant he would be trapped in his apartment for the next twenty-two hours and thirty-two minutes.

Only three more days to go , he reminded himself .

In little more than seventy-two hours—he’d started thinking in terms of hours ever since his prison days—he would officially be a free man. Assuming, that is, that the U.S. Attorney’s Office upheld their end of the bargain, which was a big assumption. It was safe to say that he and the U.S. Attorney’s Office were not on the best of terms these days, despite whatever deals they’d made with his sister regarding his early release from Metropolitan Correctional Center, the federal prison where he’d served four months of an eighteen months’ sentence. They had, after all, called him a “terrorist” both in open court and directly to the media, and in Kyle’s book, that got people a one-way ticket onto his shit list. Because a “terrorist,” as any moron with a dictionary knew, was a person who engaged in violence, terror, and intimidation to achieve a result.

He, on the other hand, had just engaged in stupidity.

Miles the doorman checked his watch as Kyle passed by the front lobby desk.

“Can’t even give yourself a break on a Saturday night?”

“No rest for the wicked,” Kyle said with an easy grin.

He caught an elevator and pushed the button for the thirty-fourth floor, the penthouse. Just before the doors shut, a man in his late twenties wearing jeans and a ski pullover scrambled in. He blinked in recognition when he saw Kyle but said nothing as he pushed the button to the twenty-third floor.

They rode the elevator in silence, but Kyle knew it wouldn’t last. Eventually, the other guy would say something. Some people cussed him out, others high-fived him, but they always said something.

When the elevator arrived at the twenty-third floor, the guy glanced over before stepping out. “For what it’s worth, I thought the whole thing was pretty funny.”

One of the high-fivers . “Too bad you weren’t on the grand jury,” Kyle said.

He rode the elevator to the top floor, space he shared with two other penthouse apartments. He let himself into his apartment, peeled off the sweaty nylon jacket he wore, and tossed it over the back of one of the bar stools in front of his kitchen counter. Per his instructions, his place had been designed with an open floor plan, with all of the living space except the bedrooms flowing together for an airy feel that complemented the floor-to-ceiling windows that ran along two walls. He had a spectacular view of the lake, although on most days everything outside looked gray and dull. Par for the course for Chicago in March.

“If you ever have to work a deal for me to serve home detention again,” he’d joked to his sister, Jordan, when she and their father had been visiting the week before, “make sure the Feds include a provision that says I get to spend the cold months on a beach in Malibu.”

Their father, apparently unamused, had walked out of the room to take a phone call.

“Too soon,” Jordan had said, shaking her head.

“You have no problem making prison jokes,” Kyle pointed out defensively. In fact, his sister had developed quite an annoying knack for them lately.

Jordan had waved around a Mrs. Fields cookie she’d pilfered from a tin in his pantry. “Yeah, but I’ve known since we were three that you’re a moron. Strangely, it took Dad this long to figure it out.” She’d smiled sweetly as she took another bite.

“Thanks. Hey, genius—that cookie’s five months old.” Kyle had chuckled as his sister scrambled for a paper towel.

Later, on her way out the door, Jordan had revisited the issue, more seriously this time. “Don’t worry about Dad. He’ll get there eventually.”

Kyle hoped Jordan was right. For the most part, their father had handled Kyle’s very public arrest and conviction as well as could be expected. Like Jordan, Grey had been at all of Kyle’s court appearances and had visited him in prison every week. Still, things were a little awkward with his dad these days, and there was no doubt that a man-to-man conversation was in order.

Eventually.

Pushing that issue temporarily aside, Kyle stripped out of his running clothes and took a quick shower. He checked his watch and saw that he had a good half hour before his visitors arrived, so he settled in at the desk in his office to read the evening news on his thirty-inch flat-screen monitor.

After perusing the national news, he skimmed the Tech section of the Wall Street Journal . He exhaled in annoyance when he saw that his upcoming court appearance was the second story on the page.

At least he hadn’t been one of the headlines, although he had no doubt that his picture would once again be plastered all over the papers come Tuesday, when the judge ruled on the government’s motion. It was ridiculous, really, that one screwup—yes, he’d screwed up, he fully admitted that—had gotten this much attention. People broke the law every day. Okay, several federal laws in his case, but still.

Kyle ignored the Wall Street Journal story, not needing to go over the lurid details. He knew full well what he’d done—hell, half the free world knew what he’d done. In legal terms, he’d been convicted of multiple counts of electronic transmission of malicious codes to cause damage to protected computers. In tech terms—language he preferred over all that lawyer-speak—five months ago he’d orchestrated a distributed denial of service attack against a global communications network through the use of a “botnet,” a network of computers infected via malware without their owners’ knowledge or consent.

Or, in the common vernacular, he’d hacked into Twitter and crashed the site for two days in what was undoubtedly the most boneheaded move of his life.

And the whole thing had started over a woman.

He’d met Daniela, a Victoria’s Secret model who lived in New York, at a friend’s art show in SoHo, and they’d hit it off instantly. She was beautiful, she had a genuine appreciation for art and photography and could talk passionately about the subject for hours, and she didn’t take herself too seriously. They’d spent the entire weekend together in New York, a whirlwind of sex, restaurants, bars, and fun—which was all that Kyle had been looking for at the time.

They had begun casually dating long distance after that, with Kyle flying out to New York a few times over the next several months to see Daniela, and the tabloids had begun to gossip about their relationship. The supermodel and the billionaire heir.