The only positive to come from my situation is I don’t have to deal with relationship drama anymore.
“Agreed. We can’t trust anyone we don’t know with this,” I say.
Abby lifts her head from her cell and stands. “He’s here now. I’ll let him in.”
Drew turns around, walking to stand behind the couch. Shandra looks up at him, and there’s no disguising the hurt in her eyes. I drop down on the seat beside her, squeezing her hand. “Are you okay?”
Her chest heaves. “Not really,” she murmurs, turning her head into me. “Am I that obvious?”
“Maybe heartbreak recognizes heartbreak in others,” I say in a moment of stark honesty.
“I’m sorry.” She leans into my side, looking up at me. “At least Sydney is nice and she seems to understand.”
I shrug. “She has her own reasons for doing this.”
“Sorry I’m late.” Xavier bursts into the room looking like he crawled out of bed mere seconds ago. His messy hair falls over his brow and into his eyes. His T-shirt is wrinkled, and he’s wearing jean shorts with Nike slides, in a look that’s unusual for him. “I overslept.”
Ignoring the nausea swimming in my gut, I plant my usual façade on. “I don’t know how long we have before Mom and Sydney return. Let’s get started.”
Everyone takes seats, and Xavier and I spend time updating them on what we’ve been doing to date. No one interrupts. Everyone gives us their undivided attention.
“You’ve gone through all the personnel files and no one stood out?” Abby asks when I finish explaining how I’ve been focusing on staff members, especially those who work in IT roles, delving into backgrounds and looking for anything that doesn’t stack up or any potential links to the elite.
“I had a short list of suspect employees, but all of them checked out.”
“How do we know it’s someone in the New York office?” Shandra asks. “It could be someone from another Techxet office.”
“It’s possible,” I admit as Anderson doles out coffees. “But we have thousands of technical staff in hundreds of offices globally. It would take forever to go through every staff file.”
“We could do it if we split them up between us,” Charlie suggests.
“My gut tells me this person is in New York,” Xavier says, blowing on the steam rising from his mug.
“So does mine,” I agree. “Whoever is doing this is very smart, and there’s an air of—”
“Arrogance about it,” Xavier finishes for me.
“Thank you.” I purse my lips and narrow my eyes at him. “I’m capable of finishing my own sentences.”
“In what way?” Abby asks, jumping in before things escalate.
“Someone who has the balls to come into one of the world’s best technical firms and essentially hold them to ransom is arrogant as fuck. They’ve got to be to pull off something like this with so much audacity.”
“Hunt is right,” Xavier says. “I cannot understand how we can’t find any trace. If this was a normal company with standard systems, I could fathom it. But not us. Not Techxet. We have systems in place to protect against this, so how the fuck can someone leave no trace? Every time I think I’m finding a footprint, it leads nowhere. It’s driving me insane trying to work out how this person or persons did this.”
“And they haven’t stolen any more cash since the last time?” Drew asks, leaning forward on his elbows.
“Nope. Our finance guy has eyes on all the bank accounts twenty-four-seven. They’re continuously moving funds around and opening new accounts in far-flung places in an attempt to make it harder for anyone who may be inside our systems watching.”
“That’s got to be it.” Anderson slings his arm around Abby’s shoulders. “There must be someone inside watching what’s going on.”
I throw up my hands in frustration. “We have looked at every single employee at headquarters. We have had additional cameras installed. We have eyes on everyone.”
“This doesn’t make sense.” Charlie frowns.
“No shit, Sherlock. What have we been telling you for the past hour?” Xavier levels a look at Charlie.
“I’d like to look at the bank statements six months before and after the occasions where the funds were stolen. I am guessing these guys did a trial run first,” Charlie says.
“Our finance people have trawled through all the statements and found nothing,” I confirm.
“Maybe you still have a mole on the finance side,” Charlie adds. “Didn’t you say it was your finance and IT guys working together the first time?”
I nod. “I can get you the statements. It can’t hurt to have fresh objective eyes look at it.” Charlie holds a senior position at his family’s banking and investment firm, and he’s worked there, in some capacity, for years. He knows his stuff, and I know he’s keen to prove to all of us he’s completely on our side, having fucked up spectacularly our senior year of high school.
“What about talking to that guy in prison?” Anderson says. “Did you ask your father about it?”
“Yes, and he said the same thing again. To leave it. He won’t cooperate, and he knows nothing.”
“I’m calling bullshit on that,” Drew says.
“So am I, but it’s not like I can just walk up to the correctional facility and demand to see a prisoner,” I say.
Drew flashes me a dark look. “Leave that one up to me. Message me his full name, and I’ll get you in to see him.”
“Both of us,” Xavier says, looking me squarely in the face. “You need backup.”
“I can go with Hunt,” Anderson offers, and I appreciate what he’s trying to do.
“We’re professionals.” Xavier lifts his shoulders, pinning Kai with a smug look. “I know that’s difficult for you to understand, caveman, but we can work together and keep things strictly business.”
“Like you’re doing with Jamison?” I blurt, unable to help myself.
Xavier stares at me like he wants to rip my head off my shoulders. “You’re going there? Really?”
I clear my throat, annoyed at my lapse in control, choosing to ignore his question. “So, we are agreed on those things. We need to talk about the elite. Who do you think is doing this?”
“It’s got to be Hamilton,” Drew says. “He has it in for us, and we knew he’d come for us sometime.”
“But this was set in motion before anything had happened with us or before Hamilton was president,” I remind them.
“What if it was whoever was helping Atticus?” Anderson pipes up, and an eerie hush descends over the room. “We never discovered who it was.”
“Wasn’t it your dad?” Abby softly asks Charlie.
Charlie sits up straighter, wetting his lips. “There was someone else. Someone who brokered the connection between Atticus, Wes, and my dad. I don’t know who it was. Dad would never tell me.”
“Could that be the link?” Anderson asks.
“Would Wes know?” Abby asks, and Anderson shakes his head.