Heather Woodhaven - Protected Secrets

She accepted the coffee with a wink. “Where’s your little darling? I thought you might bring her with you.”

Aside from Nancy King’s attention for detail and unmatched work ethic, she acted as an honorary grandmother to his two-year-old daughter. It was a much-needed connection that he appreciated as a single dad. “She’s at a friend’s house this morning, which is why I’m taking advantage of your time. I feel like we’re not quite ready for the big sales pitch Monday.”

Ever since Trevor, his stepbrother, quit the company six months ago, Bruce had yet to fill the gaping hole Trevor had left as his former partner. Nancy crossed the parking lot with him. He entered the code to momentarily disarm the security system and unlocked the door.

On weekends, there was usually only one security guard on duty. At that moment, Max rounded the corner, hair freshly buzzed in a military cut he’d likely been wearing for over forty years. Aside from his uniform of an ironed white shirt and navy pants, he wore a holster with a gun and Taser. It seemed like overkill to Bruce, but he relied on the expertise of the security firm to make those decisions. “How’s it going this morning, Max?”

“Before you came, it was quiet on all fronts, just how I like it.” Max whistled as he strode past them. For good measure, Max checked the locks on the door they’d entered before he rounded the next corner.

Bruce’s phone dinged with an alert: Network Down. He groaned. There was no explanation for that, but it didn’t necessarily mean the problem was on their end. “Slight change of plans, Nancy. I’m going to need to make a quick stop in the server room to make sure everything is okay.”

She matched his stride. “Can I do anything?”

“I’ll need to talk with someone in the IT department first. I think Doug is on call today. Could you text him? He should’ve received the same alert I did.” He shoved the stairwell door open since the elevator worked at a snail’s pace.

Nancy didn’t complain. He heard her steps behind him until he reached the basement level when her phone dinged. “Doug says it’s just come back online, but he doesn’t know why the blip occurred in the first place.”

So it could’ve been a connectivity glitch. “Tell him that since I’m here I’m going to take a look and call him back in a minute.” He stepped out into the open area filled with cubicles. “Nancy, you can wait for me in my office if you want.”

In his peripheral vision, he caught sight of someone disappearing behind a cubicle wall. He froze for half a second, caught off guard. It was possible his eyes were playing tricks on him. Glad Nancy hadn’t left yet, he turned his head and said in low tones, “Send Max a text and tell him to make his rounds down here now.”

Her eyebrows rose, but she didn’t argue. Her thumbs flew over her phone’s keypad.

A blip of light flashed from the cubicle to his left. Bruce strained his neck and saw a computer monitor on with a script shooting lines of code out faster than he could read. So he wasn’t imagining things. Someone else was down here. “Hello?” he called out.

No one spoke, but his neck tingled. If someone had come in through the front doors, Max would’ve noticed. The man always double-checked doors were locked after someone entered, and the security key code would’ve alerted him to their presence. So who was here? How had they gotten in?

And what had they come here to do?

Bruce took a step toward the computer screen and tried to read the script.

“What’s going on?” Nancy stood to his right and looked down.

His stomach turned to lead. An unsanctioned update was uploading to all the bank systems that subscribed to their risk-analysis software. Bruce set down his coffee, leaned over and entered the administrator commands necessary to quit the process.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” A voice reverberated through the room.

Bruce straightened. Nancy’s face blanched and coffee ran down her wrist and dripped onto the blue carpet. A man—short in stature, wearing a black T-shirt and jeans—held a gun in his shaking hand.

Once Bruce managed to move his focus from the gun to the man’s face, he recognized Andy Williamson, one of his data analysts. Andy narrowed his eyes and steadied his aim on Bruce. “Move away from the computer.”

He did, using the opportunity to slide in front of Nancy. “Andy, what are you doing? Put the gun down.” Bruce put one hand behind him and gestured for Nancy to get down. Instead, he felt her shaking fingers grip the back of his shirt. She tugged him backward. No doubt she felt some maternal instinct toward him, but there was no time to argue about who should save whom.

“Don’t take another step,” Andy barked.

The tugging on the back of his shirt stopped. Bruce didn’t know Andy as well as he did some of the other employees, but he’d seemed friendly. Maybe there was some sort of stress in his life that had made him snap. If he was a reasonable man, there was hope he could be talked down. “Andy, I can help you. Just put—”

“You weren’t supposed to be here. If you’d just stayed away you never would’ve known.”

“Known what?” Bruce asked. “What are you trying to do?”

Andy raked his free hand down the side of his face but his weapon stayed trained on Bruce. “You need to turn around and walk away now. Don’t interfere and forget you ever saw a thing, for your own good. You don’t mess with the—”

The stairwell door at the opposite end of the floor opened. Max was coming. Bruce couldn’t let him walk into an ambush. “Gun!”

As Andy spun around, Bruce clutched Nancy’s wrist and pulled her downward into a crouch as he ran the two of them past the cubicles.

A trio of gunshots rang out.

He felt Nancy flinch at each ping of the bullets. Bruce looked over his shoulder just in time to see Max crumple to the ground.

“No!” A sob escaped Nancy’s lips.

Bruce pulled her around the corner to a darkened hallway. “Follow me.”

He ran to the nearest door and placed his hand on the biometric scanner. Two beeps sounded, followed by a click. He wrenched open the door as Andy rounded the hallway corner.

Bruce gave Nancy a gentle push so she’d step inside the server room first. Then he met Andy’s anguished but determined gaze as Andy raised the handgun. Bruce ducked behind the fireproof door and the bullets hit the steel in front of him. He pulled on the handle of the hydraulic door so it would close before Andy reached them. “Come on, come on, come on.” The lock clicked, but he had a hard time letting go of the handle.

“Won’t he be able to get in, too?”

“No.”

“But we’re trapped.” Nancy’s voice shook. She didn’t wait for him to answer and held the phone to her ear. “Gunman shooting at us.” She rattled the address to what had to be police dispatch and stepped into the small space between the servers and the wall before sinking down to the ground.

Bruce forced his fingers to relax and let go of the handle. He took one step back and watched the door. He stood inside the most secure room in the building, designed to withstand most hackers and thieves, but he didn’t remember “bulletproof” as being one of the selling points. The steel seemed to be holding up for now.

At least Andy, as an analyst, didn’t have credentials to enter the server room. Bruce pulled out a keyboard from one of the racks and typed in the commands to shut down the outgoing update in midstream . He then turned off the network completely so Andy couldn’t try again.

Their company provided risk-analysis software to 30 percent of the banks in the country. If Andy had been able to sneak malware in with an update, it was impossible to guess just how much damage he could’ve done both to the banks and to his company’s reputation.