Chapter 1
“I’m in,” Claire Johnson whispered to herself, her fingers flying skillfully over the keyboard as she typed in the various code she would need. The low murmur of voices from the other patrons faded away, her complete concentration focused on the screen in front of her. The only pause was when she sipped her raspberry flavored cappuccino when the delicious scent of the coffee momentarily broke through her focus. She had to move fast, get the information and get out, hopefully without being detected, but more importantly, without getting caught. This project, this mission, was too important to fail.
“Ha!” she laughed as the files filled up the screen and she absently tucked a platinum curl behind her ear. With a click and a tap, she downloaded the files onto her flash drive, unknowing and uncaring that several men stopped to admire her Marylyn Monroe-like appearance. While the data was downloading, she scanned the gourmet coffee bistro, blinking chocolate brown eyes made larger with the mascara and dramatic eye liner she’d worn this morning in an effort to create a bit of excitement to her day. She glanced to the right and left of her temporarily rented computer, wondering if anyone else might know what she was doing.
She’d chosen a computer closer to the window where no one else was working so she had a bit of privacy, but she of all people knew that privacy was illusory.
Hopefully, she was still flying under the radar but nothing was absolute. That’s one of the reasons she was doing this at a public facility with multiple terminals instead of at her house on her own computer. Hacking into company databases to search for information wasn’t a good idea if one wanted to stay out of jail. Normally, she wouldn’t have dared to do anything so drastic, but Gary had been missing for three weeks now and she was the only person who had the capability to figure out where he might have disappeared to, besides the police, who hadn’t taken her seriously during her last visit.
It was also why she only accessed one database at a time, making sure no one was able to tag her and find out where she was.
After another forty five seconds, she had the information downloaded and she carefully logged off of the computer. As casually as possible, she slid the chair back and pocketed her flash drive, now filled with the information she hoped would lead her to finding her friend. Picking up her coffee and opening magazine to the latest fashion article, she strolled through the coffee shop looking as if she were trying to understand the national debt. If anyone were to look closely, they’d notice that she wasn’t actually reading the article on the various shoes coming onto the fashion world this fall but Claire hoped no one was looking that carefully. Normally people in these sorts of establishments were absorbed in their own worlds, wanting privacy themselves.
Twenty minutes later, she badged herself through the gate at her work office, smiled to George, the security guard, and stepped into the elevator along with about twenty other workers returning from their lunch breaks.
With a sigh, she set her café coffee on the side of her desk and pulled up the latest computer code she’d been assigned to work on. Within twenty minutes, she’d fixed the code and sent it off to the programmer who was having problems, then pulled up the next code. Claire did this for four hours, one set of code after another, she worked on fixing other people’s errors. Some were simple fixes that the programmers should have figured out on their own, others were slightly more complicated, but nothing took her more than a few minutes to fix. She’d been promoted to this position six months ago after being a programmer for a couple of years. Her current company thought her position was a huge advancement, had lauded her as one of the best and brightest, an up and coming star in the corporate information technology world. Unfortunately, Claire hated the job, even though the promotion came with a window office, which was nice, but the space was still cramped, beige and boring.
She didn’t really think of her work as a career, since she knew she didn’t want to do this for the rest of her life. It was just a job, one that paid the bills. Unfortunately, her heart wasn’t really into it. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, but fixing other people’s problems definitely wasn’t it and so far, she hadn’t been able to work on any programming that was challenging and exciting. She knew how to write code quickly and efficiently, better than the average programmer by far. That didn’t mean she had to like it though. She wanted something daring and exciting, something that was cutting edge and over the top. Something that would make a difference in the world.
As soon as she walked into her apartment that night, the phone started ringing. Dumping her laptop and purse onto a red plush chair, she picked up the phone while checking caller ID at the same time. “Hi Darcy. No, I haven’t found him yet, but I downloaded a bunch of data during lunch.” While her friend spoke, she walked to her personal computer, unplugged the internet connection and moved the mouse to take the system out of hibernation mode. She didn’t want to analyze any data while connected. She wanted total privacy while reviewing this information, since she wasn’t supposed to have it in the first place.
“Give me thirty minutes and I’ll call you back. Call Emma and let her know what’s going on, okay?” Claire hung up and plugged in her flash drive. Her fingers manipulated the information and she sifted through the data.
Darcy and Emma were her best friends, had been friends since college and had stayed in touch ever since. They got together about once a week now, catching up on each other’s lives.
Well, she and Darcy got together. Emma was in some foreign country, married now to a gorgeous sheik and helping him run his empire. She’d just had a little girl a couple of months ago but Emma still took time away from her royal obligations to call or chat online with both her and Darcy. Their conversations were wonderful and it didn’t matter that they weren’t physically together anymore. Besides, Emma was madly in love with her new husband, which made her not being a physical part of their trio much easier to endure.
Claire was starting to worry a bit about Darcy though. Her friend was absolutely gorgeous with soft brown hair and the sexiest hazel eyes known to womanhood. Darcy was also estranged from her mob boss father and brother, her mother having passed away when she was younger. Darcy’s father was constantly trying to get his daughter to settle down to a good mafia marriage. Darcy on the other hand, wanted nothing to do with that world, abhorring the criminal element and what they did to society. Instead, she used her celebrity status to raise money for her one and only passion; animals.