all of your illegal activities, you will tell me who you sold the information to and what data you sold, and then, depending on how cooperative you have been, I will decide whether to turn you over to the authorities or not.”
Wyndi swallowed painfully, feeling as if she might just throw up. She’d been caught! And not by the police or whatever authority regulates cyber-spying, but by a man whom she had trusted. She’d slept with this man, made love to him and drew him into her body. She’d begged him, pleaded with him to take her and he’d built up her need so high that she’d been his to command.
“You bastard!” she gasped, sitting down only because her legs wouldn’t hold her any longer. “What you did…the things…” she stopped, feeling sick just thinking about the things they’d done together. Shaking her head, she looked down at her fingers, a painful, humiliated feeling washing over her whole body. “You used me.”
Tamar couldn’t believe the anger that burst out of him. He could honestly say that he’d never been so furious in all his life. “I used you? That’s rich, my dear, since you have been sneaking into my companies and my government, stealing information. How much money did you make selling proprietary information to my competitors?” he demanded. “How many state secrets did you discover and sell to Surisia’s enemies? Are we vulnerable in some way?”
Her mouth fell open as he spoke, stunned by his words and his accusations. “What are you talking about?” she asked, trying to make sense of this whole scene.
“Your program, the one that you developed,” he spat out, pushing her laptop closer to her. “It was designed to break into company files and search for information.”
He wasn’t asking, she understood. He was accusing. “You think I created that code so I could steal information and sell it? Sell it to whom?” she asked, still not sure what he was talking about.
“Don’t lie to me!” he snapped. “And don’t you dare try to play dumb! The person who created this code is brilliant!”
She crossed her arms over her chest belligerently, pushing her chin out because she was so scared and trying to hide it behind a façade of defiance. “I’m not stupid. Nor am I even trying to convince you that I am.”
“Are you telling me you didn’t create this code?” he demanded, leaning forward, his eyes burning with his anger.
“I created it,” she confirmed.
His temper rose several notches. He felt like he was slowly burning up with the fury caused by her betrayal of his trust and the mounting evidence of how stupid she’d made him look. But with her admission, a small part of something inside of him unclenched. “Glad to know there’s a small part of you that can be honest,” he replied. “So next you’re going to create two lists. The first one will include all the information you obtained from your program and the next list will provide me with every single person you sold the information to. I want contact information, names, companies, titles if you know them and if you don’t, guess based on your conversations. I also want every single piece of e-mail or digital communication you’ve had with your contacts.” With that, he shoved a note pad towards her, slapping his pen down on top of it.
Wyndi glared at the man who had held her so tenderly only hours ago. What had happened? Why was he doing this? And then she looked at her laptop. It was laying there, so innocuously and yet it was obviously the bone of contention between the two of them.
A smarter woman might tell him what he wanted to know. But he’d basically kidnapped her, accused her of a horrible crime and was now debating her future without hearing any of the evidence. Unfortunately, she had a horrible stubborn streak inside of her, one that wouldn’t allow her to give him what he was asking for simply because he was being a horrible human being.
If he’d found the evidence back at her apartment and asked her about it, she might have given him at least part of the story. She couldn’t ever tell him all of it. She had to protect her brother until she knew what had happened to him. Royston had been more stubborn and defiant than she had ever been and Wyndi was afraid he might have gone down the wrong path. The possibility that he had died