Chapter 15 #2
“Jennifer Aniston’s voice? Yep.” He is completely deadpan when he delivers this, sliding his hands into his pants pockets.
“You don’t even want to know what I had to do to get her permission to clone her voice…
” He turns away, throwing the following words over his broad shoulder. “I couldn’t walk right for weeks.”
My jaw swings. “Wait, you’re kidding, right?” I rush to catch up with him, surveying his face in disbelief as he pauses at a more conventional looking desk, albeit in slick black glass. It boasts so many screens that even my extensive home office setup is put to shame.
“About which part? Getting her permission? Or that I couldn’t walk right for a week?”
I lean back on my heels, wondering if this man is actually crazy bananas and I just haven’t noticed. “Both?”
“I got her permission, and I couldn’t walk right.” He gives me a lopsided smirk that is borderline schoolboy.
“Your nine a.m. call is ready for you, Mr. Walker,” the synthetic voice announces.
“Thanks, patch him through.” He lowers himself into the sleek black jaguar of a chair behind his desk, and props his elbows on the arms, hands loosely linked in front of his torso. “Lucian?”
I scoot around the desk enough to see the image of a mountain of a man on one of the screens behind the desk.
With close cropped hair that could almost qualify as a buzz cut and more tattoos than I can count, he looks like the type who might pick school children up by their ankles and shake them for loose lunch money.
“Walker,” the large man rumbles and nods in greeting. “Still getting your ass kicked by that hacker?”
Sparkling whiskey-colored eyes slide briefly to mine before he answers, “You could say that, but I think I can handle her.”
My cheeks frustratingly flame at the suggestive lilt in his timbre.
Does this guy have an off switch for the playboy bachelor flirtation, or does he walk around this way all the time?
It’s ridiculous, but I’ll admit, sometimes it’s hard to ignore the slither of awareness that slides down my spine.
The way he fills any room, no matter the size.
The way his chest strains at the buttons on his shirt when he reaches up to rub a hand over the back of his neck.
Instead of examining any of that too closely, I roll my eyes.
“Her?” Lucian asks, picking up on the nuance. “You found the hacker?”
“I’ll update you later. For now, what do you have for me on this photo, Lucien?” Chase places one ankle on his knee and seems to slip into a different mode entirely, one where his face is serious and all of his attention piqued.
“It’s definitely AI generated,” Lucien responds. “We managed to get into the main frameworks to check back end, and we were lucky to find the one they used.”
My ears prick, because if I’m not mistaken, that very much sounds like this Lucian guy just admitted hacking into private corporate databases.
Well, well, well, how the turns have tabled.
I fix Chase with a haughty expression, akin to what I might imagine a mother affords a son who just admitted to stealing candy—which he ignores entirely.
“Did you find anything else in the data?” Chase leans forward, a static energy charging the space around him. The faint blue glow of the monitors exaggerates the shadows that sit beneath his sculpted cheekbones and jaw.
“I’m afraid not. They covered their tracks well.”
Leather groans quietly as Chase leans back in his chair, visibly disappointed but also giving the air of someone who has already categorized the news and moved three steps ahead. He glances my way, and I somehow silently know his ask and nod.
“Send me the information, Lucien. I’d like to have someone check my end too, just in case.” He lifts his linked hands to his face, steepling his index fingers right in front of his full lips and staring into the distance as thought swallows him whole.
“Right away,” Lucien’s gruff voice readily agrees. “Call me later?”
“Yes,” Chase replies quietly, his focus narrowed. The large man on the screen seems to realize this, and with one last nod he ends the video call and the blank video chat background hangs in his place.
“What are you thinking?” I walk the rest of the way around his desk and perch on the corner closest to him, sparks of adrenaline igniting in my veins.
“I’m thinking…” He brushes his steepled fingers back and forth across his stubbled mouth a couple times as he pauses to gather his thoughts. “That it takes two staff members with the right clearance to override a shipping route in any of my systems.”
“Okay, so whoever it is snuck someone else in with an artificial ID?” I clasp my hands neatly in my lap and wait.
He cants his head to the side a fraction, and a lock of dark hair falls over one side of his forehead. “What if there is no second person at all? All you need is a second ID tag that’s in the system, and you can override any shipment you want.”
“So this person might be doing this alone?” My stomach sags, because whilst it’s great that we have more information on how this could have happened, this particular news means we’re searching for a needle in a haystack.
Actually, scratch that. With the size of Dev Ops Inc, it’s like searching for a singular specific grain of sand on a beach.
He nods, the pallor of his skin tone seeming slightly waxy all of a sudden.
“Have you got somewhere you can set me up?” I glance around the room, searching for another desktop interface.
“I have a meeting across the city in an hour, you can work here.” He stands, smoothing the front of his suit and offering me his chair.
I take it, resisting a shiver when I feel the warmth from his body bleed through my clothes. It even smells like him, and I take a surreptitious lungful of that woodsy smoke before it fades.
“Send me the data from the platform when it arrives, and I’ll have another poke around to make sure.” I wiggle the mouse to wake up the screens that have gone dead.
“Good, thank you.” He does the top button of his shirt back up and steeples his spine as he fixes his tie around it.
The desktop blinks to life on every screen in front of me, and it suddenly hits me how fascinating it would be to have unfettered access to Chase Walker’s systems. Even when you hack in, there are areas too firewalled to even bother trying.
“Don’t get too excited,” he drawls as if he heard my thoughts, giving each of his jacket sleeves a swift tug. “Jen? Make sure she doesn’t access anything she shouldn’t.”
“Of course, Mr. Walker.”
Walker turns to head for the door and I mimic him behind his back and then stick my tongue out too, for good measure.
“I saw that,” he growls, and my spine snaps straight.
Despite the spark that crackles over my skin, I snark as he steps back into the elevator, “You were meant to!”