Dallas moved like a predator.
Even as she’d walked away from my front door, it was like watching something lithe and deadly assessing the shadows for threats or prey.
Dallas was dangerous.
The generosity from someone so unfriendly had surprised me, and I backed up the footage to watch a couple more times, oddly compelled. But since being compelled by dangerous women wasn’t the way I operated, I shook thoughts of the grumpy bodyguard out of my head and tried to focus on my next steps. Securing my house was a big one since someone was after my work, but was it enough?
Darius and Anna startled me when they returned downstairs. I was buried in a piece of machine learning code, and I’d forgotten they were still in my house. From the frown on Darius’s face, whatever he had to tell me wasn’t good.
“Your security company is McCallum?” he asked.
“That sounds like the name I get a bill from every month.”
“We have some … concerns about them,” he said, like every word had been carefully chosen not to offend.
“Why?” I looked from Darius to Anna, and I was surprised to see that his somber mood had infected her. She seemed like the last person who would ever be serious.
“McCallum’s been on our radar for the last year, since they undercut Cipher on a job and then failed to deliver,” Darius said quietly.
“Failed to deliver.” Anna snorted. “I broke into one of their jobs too easily,” she added. “Security’s what they failed to deliver.”
I shrugged, looking back and forth between them. “Okay, well, they’re your competition, so whatever. No one has succeeded in breaking in here yet—”
“I found six possible points of entry just on the second floor,” Anna interrupted.
“Six …” I frowned.
“My real concern,” Darius said, before I could finish figuring out what that meant for me, “has to do with the ownership of McCallum.”
I closed my mouth and waited while he marshalled all his careful words.
“We have found evidence of a connection to a man named Alex Karpov through both the start-up money McCallum used and the tech they’re selling under their own label.”
“Who is Alex Karpov?” I asked.
“Doctor Evil.” Anna snorted again, and I smiled. Her snort-laughs were contagious.
Darius was apparently the long-answer guy, and less prone to snorting. “He was one of the partners in a company that folded under federal investigation for illegal data mining and conspiracy to commit murder. He escaped to Russia and has been lying low since then. The connection to McCallum was discovered a few months ago through a Russian shell company.”
Coincidences, even random ones, made me twitchy. “Karpov is Russian?”
“Yeah, ethnically anyway. High school and college here in the States, but his family came from the western part of Russia near Lake Peipus in the nineties.” Darius looked searchingly at me. “Dallas mentioned that your attacker spoke Russian.”
I scoffed, “Russia’s huge. A connection between my guy and yours would be epically coincidental.”
“Epic coincidences are kind of our specialty,” said Anna, with a little smile at Darius. It was the kind of shared look that made me almost miss having a girlfriend, which meant it was definitely time to find a hookup to cure myself of that thought. I did not do girlfriends. They invariably expected to spend the night, and I definitely didn’t do sleepovers. I’d spent too many years never really sure where I’d wake up or who would be there when I did. Now, the only way I got any sleep at all was making sure it was in my house and that I was alone. No surprises.
I’d missed whatever sidebar thing Anna and Darius had said to each other, and tuned back into the conversation in time to hear Darius say, “Even if Alex Karpov isn’t a direct threat to you personally, the fact exists that there are significant vulnerabilities in your current security system, and as I mentioned before, I strongly recommend a complete overhaul.”
I stood up with that it’s your cue to leave energy that let me keep wearing the charming smile without looking like a dick, and stuck my hand out to shake Darius’s. “Right. Cool. You’ve given me a lot to think about, and I’ll definitely get back to you.”
He met my eyes with a sure you will look, and then Anna grabbed my hand with a solid handshake. “Listen, I have a date on a boat with some girls, or I’d give you a proper lecture, because despite the fact that you’re a friend of Sterling Gray, you seem like a nice, only mildly shady guy.”
I couldn’t help the bark of laughter, but I realized Anna was actually serious. “That should go on my letterhead. Oliver Curran, Nice Guy, Mildly Shady,” I said. “Sterling know what you think of him?”
She hadn’t let go of my hand and her gaze was intent. “My sister’s dating the guy, so there are no illusions. My point is that you’re vulnerable here. Be smart about this, Oliver, and protect yourself. Get a dog if you won’t upgrade your security, but, dude, I could break in here in under a minute.”
I couldn’t let that opening go by, and I flashed her one of my best smiles. “If only all the thieves were as cool as you, I’d welcome the break-in.”
She shrugged. “I’m an original.” She turned and held her hand out to Darius. “Shall we?” she asked him with a huge grin, like they’d just shared the best secret and now they were leaving to indulge in each other. Apparently this woman was immune to me too.
Flirting was a game I usually won. I had natural skills, and I’d also worked at it, so catching people’s interest was easy. Anna seemed impervious to my charms—she only had eyes for Darius, and for that matter, he only had eyes for her. It was vaguely unsettling to realize that everyone I’d encountered at Cipher Security had flirtation immunity.
I followed them to the door and threw the deadbolt behind them, but not before I heard Anna say something about closing barn doors after all the horses had already escaped.
6
Dallas
“The Wild still lingered in him, and the wolf in him merely slept.”
Jack London, White Fang
* * *
“Normal people don’t take boats out on Lake Michigan in winter weather,” I said with an eyebrow raised at the hand-crocheted, green Baby Yoda hat Anna wore over her long, crazy blonde curls.
“Normal is boring,” Shane said with a shrug as she tossed the mooring line into the 1950s wooden party cruiser that Anna expertly maneuvered out of its slip and into the waterway.
“Fair point.”
“Dallas,” Anna said from her place at the wheel, “pull up the bumpers and watch for sea lions until we’re out of the harbor?”
“Sea lions don’t live in fresh water,” Shane said as she coiled the lines on the deck. She was wearing a heavy, knit turtleneck sweater and a black watchman’s cap, and somehow managed to look elegant despite the cold red nose.
“A sea lion broke out of the Lincoln Park Zoo in the late 1800s,” Anna declared. “It could have had babies. Also, there’s a whole species of freshwater seals that lives in Lake Baikal in Russia … hey, speaking of Russia, I met your pretty client Oliver this morning,” she added, nodding at me.