Come and Find Me A Novel of Suspense - By Hallie Ephron Page 0,80
in and tapped the Bluetooth silent.
“Oh, yeah.” Daniel fiddled at the computer for a few moments. “Liberate Nadia.”
“Makes a good bumper sticker,” Diana said.
Daniel scanned through the messages that had popped into his queue. “Here it is. Jake with the meeting coordinates,” he said. “He copied you.”
“Uh-oh. What’s this?” She bent down and pretended to pick up the Bluetooth from the floor. “This yours? I almost stepped on it.” She slid the little audio receiver onto the table.
Daniel barely glanced at it. “There. Reboot your system and you should be all set.”
Diana settled at her computer and restarted it. She turned on the audio and slid the volume control louder. When she got back into OtherWorld as Nadia, messages streamed into her queue. She found the one supposedly from Jake, clicked it open, and pasted the coordinates for the Vault meeting into her transporter.
“Engage?” She looked over at Daniel.
Daniel laughed and pulled his chair up behind her, gave the screen a two-fingered salute. “Make it so.”
Diana clicked go and the silo dissolved around her avatar. A moment later Nadia was hovering over a barren OtherWorld island. A box appeared and Diana typed in the pass code. A whirring sounded, then a click, like a safe opening. Clever touch.
Pixel by pixel, a meeting room rezzed around Nadia. The walls were the uneven dirt of an underground cave, but the table that Jake’s avatar was seated at along with four other avatars, all in business suits, was a regulation conference table. There were two empty chairs. Diana sat Nadia in one of them.
In the real world of the silo, Daniel stooped behind her and draped an arm over her shoulders. “Here we go.”
“All for one—” she whispered, looking up at him.
“One for all.” He looked at her expectantly.
She smiled. “And every man for himself.” She kissed him softly on the lips. Game on.
Then she pulled over the table microphone and spoke into it. “Nadia Varata.”
One of the male avatars stood. She hovered the cursor over him, checking that this image was supposed to represent Andrew Moore, Vault’s head of IT. “We’re looking forward to working with you,” Moore said.
He introduced the others and Diana wrote down the names and titles. Daniel returned to his own computer as she began delivering her presentation. She moved through it as quickly as she dared, lest Daniel zone out or fall asleep again before they got to the good part.
She had an odd sense of déjà vu. Nadia and the virtual Jake were working together just as they had for the last eight months, the pair of them a team making these new clients comfortable, lulling them into what would turn out to be a much more intimate relationship than they’d bargained for. Only this time, the clients wouldn’t be the ones unpleasantly surprised.
She concluded her presentation with, “Bottom line: you need to know if your lost data is being traded or sold, and lock down your systems and procedures to prevent this kind of thing from recurring. We’d like to start right away.”
“The sooner the better,” Moore said. “This couldn’t have come at a worse time. We’re at a critical point in our sales cycle. If this gets out, the results will be disastrous. We want to get out in front of this and manage any fallout. But we need to know exactly what we’re looking at.”
“Excellent. Then we’re on the same page,” Diana said. “We’d like to come at this two ways. Detection and prevention. As soon as we get a copy of the data that was taken, we’ll start tracking globally to see if it’s out there. I understand you’re concerned about security access codes as well and vulnerability in general. We can start penetration testing your network right away too. As soon as we finish with this meeting, if you like.
“One of the foremost experts in the world will be working with us on this.” She glanced over to see if Daniel was listening. “It’s possible that, within a few hours even, we’ll have some answers for you. Then we’ll be able to advise your staff on any changes that are needed.”
“That’s all well and good, but I’m concerned that—” Moore began, but he was interrupted. The audio feed sounded as if conversation was going on at the other end. “I’m sorry. Just a minute.”
Although the avatars on the screen remained seated, Diana could hear muffled voices, then nothing, as if Moore had put his side on mute.