Zane sat down beside her. “Who are we talking about?”
Jewell dropped her tablet to the couch. “Vista.”
“Okay, let’s assume I don’t know what you’re talking about. Start at the beginning.” He had no earthly clue what she was talking about, but the name Vista rang every warning bell he owned.
Jewell sighed heavily. “When Tempest was debriefing the Fate in Russia, she said that One had the hard drive. We are surmising the drive I had was the original, but if there was a clone or a ghost of that hard drive kept for security…”
“You do that. You ghost all of your hard drives.” He’d seen her do it.
“Right, so if they fail, I have the programs already loaded on another drive and partitioned exactly how I want it to be. But ghosting the drives is insurance against failure, so you can recreate your systems with little problem. If that is what they have, we have no worries. But if he cloned the hard drive, the Fate or whoever has access to it would have access to the information we found on Vista’s drive.”
“But we—and by we, I mean you—have mitigated all the damage knowledge of that information could cause.” Zane reached over and rubbed her back. She leaned into his touch and then literally fell into his side.
“But what if I haven’t?” She sighed again and looked up at him. “I found something.”
“What?”
She scooted closer to him and tucked under his arm. When she was feeling insecure, she’d cuddle close and talk quietly. “I found a duplicate code on his hard drive.”
“And what does that usually mean?”
“It doesn’t. I mean, you have code that runs the programs and orders the information in the programs. Having an exact duplicate set of code for one hard drive is useless and redundant.” She sighed again. “Vista was methodical and intentional. This wouldn’t have just happened unintentionally.”
Zane pulled her into his lap and held her close, his chin resting on the top of her head. “So, you need to investigate.”
“Yeah.” She groaned. “Only I have no idea where to start.”
“Well, is the code exactly the same?”
“Mostly, except for some extraneous letters and numbers.”
“Do you have those?” Zane reached for her tablet and handed it to her.
“Yes, but you see a handful of letters and numbers.” She called up the screen.
“A puzzle? A message perhaps?” He stared at the jumble.
“That’s what I think. Only I can’t find any rhyme or reason for it. Taken out of context from the code it is nonsense; in the code, it just looks like stray keystrokes.”
“But Vista wouldn’t make that kind of mistake.”
“No, he wouldn’t. What am I going to do?” She looked up at him with her big green eyes.
“You are going to let your beautiful brain work on it while we get to Aruba. I know you’ll figure it out. We need to finish packing and then get to bed. We leave for the airport at five in the morning.”
“The secure comms pallet should arrive in Aruba with the security detail today.” She grabbed his neck when he moved to stand up with her in his lap. Her shriek of happiness and then outright laugh were the reason he did it. She loved it when he did the ‘He-Man’ thing. Her words, not his.
“Once we have that set up at Gabriel’s location, you and I are going to do nothing but lay in the sand and drink fruity alcoholic drinks.” Zane laughed and planted his feet as Jewell literally climbed his body and wrapped herself around him for a piggyback ride down the hall. She grabbed his earlobe in her teeth, tugging it for a split second before she released it and laughed. “You do realize you just said we could drink bad stuff.”
“Hey, fruit is not bad stuff.” He’d make sure the drinks had more fresh fruit in them than liquor. He hitched her up a bit and started walking down the hall to their bedroom. He glanced at the clock. He had nothing else left to pack other than Jewell’s computer and tablet, and that wouldn’t take long. Jewell, on the other hand, had yet to put a stitch of clothing into the suitcase.
“What do you want to take?” He dropped her legs once they hit the bedroom.
She opened a drawer and swiped an armful of underwear and dumped it into her half. “Swimsuits, shorts, tops, and maybe a pair of pants.”
“Sundresses? The family might have a dinner or something.” He’d bought her several over the summer, but they’d found a home in the back of the closet. His woman had a style. Yoga pants and t-shirts at home and jeans and nicer tops at work.
He turned in time to watch her dump all the shorts and t-shirts from her bottom drawer. She put her hands on her hips and stared at the suitcase. “Flip-flops and hair ties.” She spun and went into the bathroom, obviously going for the hair ties. He went to her closet and pulled several pairs of sandals and her favorite leather flip-flops out. The jumbled mess on her side of the suitcase was so like his wife. Things like what to wear were just not important. He’d righted most of the clothes by the time she came back, sans hair ties.
She stopped in the middle of the room and stared at him. He straightened and waited for her to formulate what she wanted to say. Actually, she was probably having the entire conversation in her head without consulting him. She turned and left the room again. He chuckled and continued to fold her t-shirts. Jewell stepped back into the room and asked, “When are we going to have children?”
Okay… Looking for hair ties led her to a conversation about children. He needed to understand how that happened. He dropped the shirt he was folding. “Jewell, do you want children?”
She stared at him, and then her brow furrowed. “I think so.”
He shoved the suitcase to the side and sat down on the bed. He patted the mattress beside him and waited for her to come sit down beside him. “Okay, walk me through it, please.”
She huffed and pointed to the bathroom. “I went to get hair ties and saw I had one of Tori’s from this weekend.” She stared up at him as if that answered everything.
“Right, so, did Tori say something about having children?”
“Yeah.”
Bingo. God, he was getting downright good at following her logic. “What did she say?”
“She asked when everyone was going to have kids. I told her I didn’t understand the way they are programmed, but everyone said that they just wing it and hope for the best. Even Joy wants to have a baby.”
Zane blinked and snapped his mouth shut. Moriah wanted kids. Holy fucking hell. Stop the presses. That was a headline that would stun the Shadow world. He’d try to process that bit of information later. “Oh, okay. Well, first, I’d love to have children. I thought you were against it. We’ve had this conversation, remember?”
“Yeah, and you said it was up to me and that you wouldn’t pressure me.” Jewell nodded. “You’re not pressuring me.”
Zane blew out a lungful of air. “Okay. You realize you’d have to put in shorter hours if we started a family.”
Jewell jumped up from the bed and started pacing. “Yeah, I get that. That’s okay. You have the right people in the right places in the section. I mean, we wouldn’t be able to leave for two weeks for an unscheduled vacation if you didn’t, right?”