“Ah. That still goes back to my other point that you have no way of knowing if people are really leaving their laptops at home or not.”
The waitress returned with their drinks and to take their orders.
“That’s one of the things you’ll hopefully be able to tell me,” Ormond said. “If they are somehow behind this, or if someone else is.”
“I still don’t think I’m the right person for this assignment,” she said once they were alone again. “I don’t know if Rob told you or not, but I am not the most tech-savvy person out there. We have other investigators who would be better suited for this.”
“You’re wrong,” Ormond said. “I’m well aware of your skills, and I think you’re the perfect person for this assignment.”
She glanced at Rob.
He grinned. “See? I don’t hate you, Manny.”
She frowned at him, but returned her attention to Ormond. “And why is that?”
“I want an outsider to look at this and maybe see something I’m missing. Also, quite frankly, Temple and Gilyard are both single. So are you.”
“Wait a minute,” she said, trying to keep her anger from exploding. “You do realize undercover doesn’t mean getting personal with them, right?”
“I didn’t mean that,” Ormond quickly backpedalled. “I just meant that they might be more receptive to you. I’ve been trying to get them to hire an administrative assistant for a while, as well as another programmer. I’d been leaving it up to them, but now I’m using my prerogative as their boss to put someone in there for them. That part won’t be unexpected.”
“I’m babysitting.”
“No, I’m hoping you’ll figure out what’s going on before someone is finally successful at accessing Artemis.”
“And what if I find out it’s one or both of your pet brains behind it? Maybe making it look like your fired guy is behind it?”
He looked sad. “As I said, I’ve already thought of that, too. A convoluted situation where they’re trying to make it look like him or an outside party. My gut tells me it’s not. They’re good guys. But I’m also a realist. I’m hoping if it is them that they won’t feel threatened by your lack of computer skills, and will open up to you and maybe slip up if that’s the case.”
“And you’re handling this assignment armed,” Rob said.
She glanced at Ormond before looking back to her boss. It wasn’t uncommon to go armed on assignment. Normal, in fact. But not usually while undercover in a corporate business environment like this, excluding protection assignments. “All right.”
“That was one of my stipulations,” Rob said. “If it does turn out there’s a third party behind all this, and they get violent, I need you able to protect them and yourself.”
Their pierogies arrived. “Aww, you do love me, boss.”
“Yeah. Besides, you’re too hard to replace.”
* * * *
After lunch they returned to the office. Even though Manny had paperwork from other cases to handle, she stewed about the new assignment all day. There was no getting out of it. Not unless she wanted to quit, which she didn’t.
And how can someone be so friggin’ stupid they put washer fluid in the brake reservoir?
Really? These were the example of some of the brightest in the tech sector today?
We’re all doomed.
Then again, if the bad guys were just as stupid, maybe it would end up a draw.
She made it home after threading her way through rush hour traffic. While it still felt oppressively hot outside, she needed a run. Not like yesterday, to escape the demons plaguing her mind and her heart, as well as her memories, but to burn off her aggravation.
The scanner box still sat on the counter, mocking her.
Dammit, I forgot to talk to Tom.
Why was everyone so determined to dump technology on her all of a sudden?
It’s like a universal conspiracy.
She didn’t understand why technology didn’t like her. It wasn’t for lack of trying on her part. Even as a kid, she could never program the digital watches she inevitably received for Christmas and her birthday from relatives. She couldn’t program the VCR, or, later, manage to master the DVR box. And the clock in her vehicles usually resembled nothing close to the actual time.
Even her cell phone tended to give her fits, and it was the most basic one she could get her hands on. She didn’t even use texting, because to get a phone that she could actually use for talking meant a bare-bones, aggravating system of having to punch a button multiple times to make the right letter appear for text.
No, if someone wanted her, they could call her. If she couldn’t talk, they could leave a message.
Yes, she could operate her email and the Internet browser. Mostly because her father had moved the icons onto her desktop for her, where she couldn’t miss them. She could operate the digital camera she used as part of her job on some investigations, but only because she had to take a class to use it and read through several how-to books.
Now she was stuck with an iPad she didn’t want and didn’t feel she needed, all because Rob wanted the staff to “stay in touch.”
She didn’t need to stay in touch with the Internet or email every second of the day to do her job.
Frankly, she resented getting dragged into an assignment she felt ill-prepared to tackle.
Protect a client? Sure.
Investigate an employee? Absolutely.
Deal with tech-related stuff?
She’d rather have her fingernails pulled out, slowly and painfully, one-by-one.
* * * *
Just when Korbin thought maybe the day might end on a better note than it started, their boss, Charles Ormond, stopped by their office.
“I just wanted to let you know that, starting tomorrow, you’ll have a new administrative assistant.”
“I didn’t know we had an old administrative assistant,” Rhys shot back.
At least, in this way, the two men were of the same mind. Stay out of their way and let them do their job with as few distractions and as little meddling as possible. Especially when buried in a project as important as Artemis, when they were trying to meet a tight deadline.
“Now,” Ormond said, “you both know I’ve been harping on you for a while. I went ahead and took action for you. Amanda Croyle will start tomorrow. You’ll like her. Military veteran. I’ve brought her in as part of our job training program.”
“And what are her qualifications?” Korbin was almost afraid to ask. “Please tell me we don’t have to train her.”
“She’s not a programmer. Her job is to answer phones and handle the routine tasks you don’t need to be doing. Once she learns how we do things around here, I think you’ll find her a real timesaver.”
“You didn’t answer the question,” Rhys pointed out.
Ormond was already up and heading toward the door. “She’ll do fine. You’ll love her.”
They watched his disappearing back. Rhys turned to him. “I do believe we just got handed our marching orders.”
“Yeah,” Korbin said. “I think you’re right.”
“Well, we have two options. Either we roll over and accept this…” He looked at Korbin.
He smiled. “Or we make her life miserable and she quits the first day.” They bumped fists. “We do think alike, don’t we?”
They picked up Rhys’ car on the way home. Korbin was too pissed off about having a new member on their team, someone assigned to them sight unseen with no input from them, to give Rhys more of a hard time about the washer fluid.
As they sat at the counter and finished off the remains of a pizza, Rhys turned to him. “You don’t mind me living here, do you?”
He shrugged. “No. Why?”
“I realize I must be a burden at times. It was one of the things Kathy said when she kicked me out. That I was too much work.”
“No, buddy. You’re fine. She was just a bitch. It’s kind of nice having you around a
gain. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed this after college.” He let out a snort. “Not like you’re cutting into my love life.”
What love life? He didn’t have one. He had work and that was it. He didn’t have time to go out looking for the next woman to shoot his heart down.
He’d had enough of that kind of disappointment for a while.
“Promise you’ll say something if you do start to feel like that,” Rhys said. “Like I’m a burden. I value our friendship far too much to lose it over that.”
“Dude, you pay me rent, you help keep the place picked up, and it means you don’t have to get permission to come over and play Halo whenever we’re in the mood to get together. All night DnD games. Firefly marathons without someone bitching at us that are we really watching those again?”
Rhys laughed. “She really was a shrew, wasn’t she?”
“It’s kind of like being back in college again, only this time we have the money to do the things we were too broke to do back then.” He grinned. “Do we take bets on how many days the newbie lasts with us before we end up running her off? I bet we can get her out of our hair by lunch if we try hard.”
“I’ll admit I don’t want someone getting in our way, but I do plan on being nice to her.”
“Oh, I’ll be nice to her,” Korbin said. “But she’s the one coming into our world. What we do is a lot more important than a secretary.”
“Administrative assistant.”
“Whatever. Ormond’s kind of pissed me off the way he handled this. Serves him right if she can’t hack it with us.”
“He said she’s a veteran. Maybe we should give her a chance.”
“That’s up to her,” Korbin said. “I’m just gonna do my job.”
Chapter Four
Wednesday morning, Manny knew the day wouldn’t go well when she realized the AC in her aging Jeep Cherokee had gone on the fritz.
Dammit.
With no other option, she rolled the windows down and choked her way through rush hour traffic fumes and the muggy Florida morning.
Fortunately, like many tech companies, Ormond Technologies had a relatively casual dress code. Jeans tended to be the rule, not the exception. When the front gate guard asked her name but didn’t bother to check her ID or take her tag number, she made a mental note to talk to Ormond about beefing that up ASAP. She found it hard to believe their LP division would be so lax considering the kinds of projects they were working on, Artemis included.
Employees had barcode stickers on the passenger side windows of their cars that triggered a separate gate and allowed them entrance. Not a fool-proof method in her mind, because it would be too easy for someone determined enough and with the right equipment that could duplicate the barcode to simply follow an employee home and copy the barcode.
Need permanent RF scan tags for employee vehicles was also added to her mental checklist.
The receptionist at the front desk didn’t ask for a photo ID before handing Manny a generic visitor’s pass, without so much as the date written on it, and pointing her toward Ormond’s office.
She added more notes to her mental list. Need plastic ID RF cards to track visitors. Need better ID tracking system, including sign-in and presenting photo ID to get through inner doors. Do they have a vendor tracking system?
She’d spotted another three security issues before she found Ormond’s office and walked in, where his administrative assistant sat at a desk in the outer office.
“Amanda Croyle,” she said to the woman.
“Go on in. He’s expecting you.”
Again, no badge check.
Maybe I’m too paranoid. She walked into Ormond’s office. He stood and rounded the desk to greet her, closing the door behind her. “I haven’t told her what all this is about,” he explained.
She took a seat in one of the chairs in front of his desk. “Do you want to start with telling me what I’m going to be doing, or with me listing the security issues I’ve found so far that I really think you need to address immediately?”
He frowned. “Like what?”
She ticked them off on her fingers as she listed them. He sat back, a stunned look on his face. “I honestly didn’t realize those were issues.”
“Your LP department should have.”
“We worry so much about server and infrastructure security, I really didn’t give much thought to external security. None of our previous projects needed such a high level of external security. I’ll be talking with them immediately.”
“Want me to do a thorough security audit of the place?” She mentally crossed her fingers. She could bring Tom in from the office to help her tackle the techier parts of it.
“No, because I don’t want Temple and Gilyard knowing you’re working for Rob. Not yet, anyway.” He rifled through a stack of folders on his desk until he found the one he wanted. “Like I told you, they’re high-strung enough as it is. I need them focused on their project.”
Great. Just what she wanted to hear. “Then what am I going to be doing?”
“I’ve told Temple and Gilyard that you’ll be training as their new administrative assistant. Which is good, because it means they’ll be as lost as you are.”
“Come again?”
He smiled. “They haven’t had one. So it’s not like you have shoes to fill. There are some routine things that they do that, yes, they should have an assistant handling for them to keep their focus on their current project.”
“Artemis?”
“Yes. Before that came along, they were doing a variety of things, including helping our data center manager when issues came up. Right now, their exclusive job is getting Artemis ready. We have a scheduled beta test coming up that we have to make if we’re going to demonstrate it for the Department of Homeland Security. They’re racing to finish it and iron out the last bugs.”
“Well, where do I start?”
He stood. “I’ll take you over and introduce you after we get you put through HR and get you an official ID badge and barcode sticker for your car. You’ll have complete clearance, the same level as Rhys and Korbin do, so they won’t feel like they need to keep anything a secret around you.”
She stood to follow him. “Helpful.”
He turned. “I’m really hoping you’re going to tell me they have nothing to do with what’s going on.”
“Me, too.”
She followed him down the halls to human resources. Within twenty minutes, she was “officially” an employee of Ormond Technologies.
He walked her over to the building housing Temple and Gilyard’s offices. “They’re nice guys. Quirky, but I don’t know many guys like them who aren’t at least a little quirky.”
“How quirky?”
He stopped and looked at her. “Have you ever watched The Big Bang Theory?”
“Yeah?”
He nodded. “They’re not Sheldon, thank god.” He continued walking.
“That’s a relief,” she quietly snarked.
* * * *
Rhys was working at his desk when Ormond entered their lab. “Guys, I’d like you to meet Amanda Croyle, your new executive assistant.”
He looked up and shoved his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose. Next to Ormond stood a woman with gorgeous green eyes and auburn hair long enough she wore it in a braid down past her shoulders. And she wore jeans and a tank top with a long-sleeved shirt open over the top and the sleeves rolled to her elbows.
She held up a hand in greeting. “Hi. Call me Manny.”
Korbin’s head popped up from behind the divider in front of his desk and he stared at her.
Rhys found his voice first. “Um, hello.” Finally, his brain engaged his legs and he stood to walk over to her. “I’m Rhys Gilyard. Nice to meet you.” He extended his hand and shook with her.
Korbin was a little slower on the draw. With a dour look, he stood to join them, but kept his hands firmly planted on his hips. “Korbin Temple.”
“Now look,
” Ormond said. “I know you two aren’t exactly happy about me shoving an administrative assistant down your throats, but you’re going to have one, like it or not. I’ve already warned Manny about that, and she understands the situation. I also know she’s more than capable of handling you two.”
“We don’t need a babysitter,” Korbin said, glaring at Ormond.
“She’s not your babysitter,” Ormond replied, apparently ignoring Korbin’s tone. “She is, however, here to stay. So get used to it. For now, just let her use Aster’s old desk. When we finally add another programmer we’ll reconfigure things.”
Whatever objections Rhys held before meeting her slipped away. He knew whatever feelings he might develop for her would never be reciprocated, and he was okay with that.
Just to have someone like her to work side-by-side with after a few years of Korbin’s frequently dour face would be wonderful.
“She has full clearance,” Ormond continued. “So you don’t have to worry about what she can and can’t see.”
“What, exactly, is she supposed to do?” Korbin asked.
Rhys hoped he successfully suppressed his annoyed groan over Korbin’s recalcitrance to accept her. Yes, when Ormond had first made the announcement he felt beyond irritated.
Upon meeting her, however…
I’m an idiot. He didn’t care. Working next to her, as shallow as he knew it sounded even in his own brain, would make work fun.
* * * *
Korbin didn’t care how pretty she was, or how the sight of her made his normally quiet cock stir, he still resented Ormond forcing her on them.
We’ll see if she really can handle us.
He’d prepared a few surprises for her, without letting Rhys in on it. Nothing that would jeopardize his job, but she might decide the tech sector wasn’t for her.