Chapter 19 #3
“A lot. My Uncle Christian came to get us out of the safe room. We made sure the kids didn’t see the bodies of my mom’s security team. Every one of them was dead. It was a slaughter.”
“Oh, my …” Maggie shook her head. “I never heard any of that on the news.”
“It wasn’t on the news. Guardian made sure of it.
That incident messed up my cousin Talon.
He wouldn’t let anyone close to him, except for family and, eventually, his team.
It took years for him to trust anyone. So, joining Guardian and working to help the people who couldn’t help themselves was a natural transition for all of us. ”
“What happened to your mom and aunt?”
Reece made a face. “That’s their story to tell.
Suffice to say, both were traumatized by the event, and both dealt with it in different ways, but they made it through.
Changed, sure, but they’re two of the strongest women I know.
Actually, all the women in my family are overachievers in that department. ”
“And your dad?”
“He walks with a cane now. Sometimes his back isn’t kind to him, as he says.
He lost his streak of not using any drugs because they had to operate, and the pain was real, so he took the meds they prescribed until he could function, but I watched him struggle to walk again.
To be the man he needed to be for us and to beat the addiction again.
Like I said, strength isn’t missing in our family. ”
“I’m so sorry that happened to you. How did you cope with it?”
Reece smiled. “With my parents? I walked through it with them and came out stronger on the other side. I used to be timid and nonconfrontational.”
She frowned and looked at him. “You?”
“Yep.”
“No, I can’t see that.” She laughed.
“Believe it.”
He leaned forward and kissed her. It was sweet but altogether too short for her liking. When she opened her eyes, he was smiling at her. “I do believe you. Because you told me it was so, because I believe you. I believe in you.”
He smiled down at her. “And I believe in you.”
She turned to face him more directly. “I meant that, you know. I trust you, Reece.”
He pushed her hair. “And I trust you.” He kissed her again, this time longer, and it carried heat that could fan into a fire.
“Wow,” she said as she leaned against him.
He dipped down to kiss her neck before sighing “We should probably slow it down a bit. Not sure what’s going to happen or when.”
She nodded and swallowed hard. “Probably.” That was the last thing she wanted to hear, but she knew it was true.
Reece cleared his throat and adjusted in the chair a bit. She glanced at his crotch and then back up to him, wagging her eyebrows. He laughed and pointed at the tablet. “So, why don’t you show me what you found. That tablet is safe, I’m assuming?”
“Well, since DM Dude said it was, I’m going to say yes. I’ll figure out how he shielded it from Darkwater’s systems, though.” She leaned way back and grabbed the tablet from the floor, tapped the game off, and went into a folder.
“How much do you know about programming?”
“Nothing. Pretend you’re talking to a rock.”
She closed one eye and looked at him. “Why do I think you’re selling yourself short?”
He crossed his heart with a finger. “If it shoots, flies, or can be hunted, I’m your man. If it has anything to do with the digital sphere, don’t come to me.”
“Okay, so pretend this program is a stream of water. The water is the information we’re gathering, legally.
” She looked at him. “Or we thought it was legal. Kestrel decided that programmers and analysts didn’t need to worry about authorizations, that legal should do that.
So, anytime we have a green box here at the bottom of the computer screen, it means we have the authority to do what we need to do for the client’s request that we’re working on. ”
“Keeps you in the dark and assuming you’re working within the legal parameters that were ethically established.”
“It did.” She nodded.
“I noticed time glitches when I was running a data retrieval for a client. I didn’t think too much of it until it happened again. Once is a fluke, twice is …”
“A problem,” Reece finished for her.
“Exactly. So, I started to look. It took about a week because I’m really busy here.
Don’t get me wrong, I love—or rather loved—doing what I was doing, but when I found it, I got a really bad feeling.
I knew it was added after the program was written and installed because it was my program.
I’m not sure why I didn’t report it immediately, but I didn’t. ”
“That probably saved your life.”
She sucked her bottom lip in between her teeth and nodded.
“Yeah.” Then she shook her head as if to clear it.
“Anyway, these gates are hidden architectures that allowed data to flow in ways it shouldn't.
Access points that bypassed oversight. As I said, someone built this deliberately into my program," she said.
"It's not a vulnerability. It's a feature. "
"For what purpose?" Reece asked, although he already knew.
"Intelligence gathering," Maggie said. "Corporate espionage.
Maybe worse. These gates could access information from anything we legally connect to.
Financial systems, government databases, private communications.
Anything connected to the internet that we access for what we thought was legitimate business. "
Reece sighed, "And Darkwater sells that access."
Maggie looked at him and nodded. "No doubt, and to the highest bidder, I would assume."