Chapter 24
COLE
Kate comes into my office, dressed in clothes I’ve never seen before, cream-colored linen pants and a tailored silk top.
She crosses to stand behind my office chair and folds her arms around my neck, bending down to kiss my ear.
She smells like oranges, and I let myself relax in her unexpected embrace before I ask, “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“I missed you.”
My laugh is a single, short bark of amusement. “I’ve been here all morning.” I swivel my chair around to frame her between my knees. My fingers tighten on her hips as I ask, “Where have you been?”
“Granny needed some lotion, so I walked to the drugstore.”
I frown. “Nilsson can take care of things like that.”
“Can Nilsson get me some fresh air, too? You should take a walk. It’s gorgeous outside.”
I tug on one of her stray curls. “Too many work projects piling up. You’ll have to take walks for both of us.”
“Or I can help you with work.”
She says it easily, as if we haven’t been through this before. Multiple times, I’ve refused to let her work for Lone Wolf clients—even though she’s an expert coder, even though she’s bored.
She thinks I won’t let her do the work because I have some misguided sense of machismo. I’m the man. I provide. I won’t let my wife work.
But it’s more than that. If I let Kate behind the walls of Lone Wolf, she’ll see exactly how close I’ve come to being overwhelmed by my clients’ toxic demands.
There’s my full roster of customers, along with her father and Tarasov, everything piling up in the shadows of my blackmailer’s looming threat.
Kate must always think I’m strong. She must believe I’m in control.
So a month ago, I lied, saying her code didn’t meet my standards. That was the worst mistake I’ve made in my adult life. She left me. I could have lost her forever.
Since she returned, I’ve learned to admit that the bond between us is more powerful than anything I’ve ever felt before. Every minute I’m with Kate, I want to devour her. I never want to let her go. I love her.
She’s waiting now, breath and heart suspended for me to respond. She needs me. And I need her. More than I’ve ever needed anyone in my lonely, suspicious life.
So maybe it’s time to change. Time to throw all my logic and careful thought out the window. “You can help,” I finally say.
It’s impossible to ignore her shy, delighted smile as I pull her onto my lap. Turning my chair to face the wall of monitors, I pull up the program I’ve spent the better part of the past week developing.
“This,” I say. “Is a Money Box.”
Her eyes gleam as she studies the lines of code. When she swallows, her throat bobs. I narrowly resist the urge to tongue the pulse point below her ear.
Instead, I explain Uncle Viktor’s con, printing money on blank paper until his salted bills ran out. “I’m doing the same thing.”
“Not printing money…” she says. She reaches out to my keyboard, scrolling to look further into the code.
“No,” I say. “I’m opening doors. Decrypting any document in the world.”
Her breath catches. I’m showing her the Holy Grail.
She works her way through the code, fingers flying as her eyes scan what I’ve written. Most of it, she takes in with a single glance. Three separate times, she scrolls back, returning to the top of a screen, nodding as she untangles threads.
I watch her discover the end of the legitimate code. My fingers tighten on the arms of my chair as she dives deep into the con. She reads to the very end. Stares at the monitor. Scrolls up to the diversion point and works her way through again, much more slowly the second time.
“You’re using artificial intelligence,” she finally says.
I nod.
“The AI mimics the documents you’re breaking.”
“Exactly.”
“In real time. It creates its own backstory, embedding the fake story at the same time it moves forward with the decoding.”
“You’ve got it.”
“What do you call it?” she asks.
“Viktor.” The name fits, of course, because of the old-time con artist who was my inspiration. But it means more than that. It means I can be victorious. I can defeat Tarasov.
“Does it work?”
I reach around her, framing her body with my arms. Pulling up the simplest test case—an encrypted bank statement—I put Viktor to work. The decoded document scrolls across the screen in real time.
“Sweet Jesus,” she says.
I walk her through half a dozen other examples, increasing the complexity. The first two are good demonstrations of my actual decryption skills. The other four, though, are purely Viktor’s fabrication.
She pulls the keyboard onto her lap and starts typing. I recognize the back end of Barry Lynch’s system for the Canton Crew. A few taps on the screen, and she’s in. That was my legitimate work, building a system the Lynch clan can access when necessary.
She pushes her way into her father’s financial accounts without drawing on Viktor’s expertise. She’s relying on real access to the Baltimore banks she’s known about half her life.
Staring at the screen, she chews on her lower lip. Then, she tilts her head to cast me a sly smile before her fingers race over the keyboard.
It takes me a moment to recognize the site. It’s Banque Wagner Privée. Kate’s Red Cap Raiders did their best to break into the Swiss bank a few months ago, but I foiled every one of their attempts.
Kate throws Viktor at the firewall. Letters and numbers scroll across the screen for a moment, bits of data shifting into a pattern that can be read by human eyes. Banque Wagner appears to open, displaying complete access. Kate’s gasp of surprise makes me smile.
“Wait,” she murmurs, typing a series of quick commands. She pauses, studying the monitor, then types more. She scrolls down. Switches to a different screen. Types still more queries.
“None of this is real?” she finally asks. “The AI is generating all of it?”
“Every bit.”
“So that transaction I just entered, the transfer of funds into my personal account?”
“The registers appear to be updated at Banque Wagner and at your home bank.”
“And when I disconnect?”
“Banque Wagner’s actual files remain untouched.”
“And at my home bank?”
“Those changes haven’t been made either. But you’ll see them on your end for one calendar year.”
“What happens when I try to transfer my supposed new funds to another account?”
“Viktor builds another simulation, and that one displays for a calendar year.”
Her attention immediately sweeps back to the monitors. “Show me.”
I pull up the internal clock on my machine, the one that marks year, month, day, hour, minute, all the way down to thousands of a second.
I change the date, moving us forward a year.
In the time it takes for me to blink, Viktor generates a report of every transaction it’s completed, a perfect record of the crime Kate just committed. Or, rather, attempted to commit.
A question pulses on the screen: Transmit to authorities? Checkboxes wait for me to select local, national, and international forces.
“A year…” Kate breathes. “An entire feckin’ year…”
“And then the trap springs shut.”
“The resources this thing requires… The cost must be obscene.”
“Then it’s a good thing I’m obscenely rich. I can’t imagine a better use of my money.” Now that I’ve read her into the scheme, it’s important I tell her the truth. “When I first wrote this, I intended to give it to your father.”
“Da?” She snorts. “He wouldn’t begin to understand this!”
I’ve been wary of her Irish pride, her loyalty to her clan, but she’s clear-eyed enough when it comes to her father’s limitations.
“I figured I could load it on his system and let him play at conquering the world. Keep him from calling me with some new demand every hour on the hour. I could delete his activity log at the end of a year.”
Her short laugh is surprisingly sympathetic. “You say at first. What are you planning now?”
“I’m giving it to Tarasov.”
She shudders, a tremor I might have missed if she weren’t still sitting on my lap. “Giving it to him,” she says, as if she’s dipping a toe into the Arctic Sea.
“This coming Thursday. He expects more access to your father’s files.”
I feel her muscles go tight, but she doesn’t launch a new round in that ongoing fight. Instead, she says, “You think a hacker like Tarasov will load live code onto his computer? He’ll install Viktor just because you ask him to?”
“I’m working on that,” I answer candidly. That’s always been the biggest challenge of this scheme.
She studies the lines of code laid bare on the auxiliary monitors, and I think she appreciates my honesty. Her fingers hover over the keyboard. Her face is gorgeous when she’s scheming.
“What do you need me to do?” she finally asks.
“Break it.”
“What?” I’ve caught her by surprise.
“I’ve tested every scenario I can think of, and I’ve trained Viktor to respond to every threat. Now it’s your turn. Transfer Viktor to your computer network and use your sysadmin status to try and break it. Think like Tarasov.”
She trembles again. “You’re telling me to get inside that gobshite’s mind?”
I settle a calming hand on her hip. “When it comes to bratva business, yes.”
She swallows hard. “And once I’m done?”
“Then we get Tarasov to bite.”