Hide & Seek

Jennie nodded, not entirely sure she completely understood, but pleased for Sarah anyway. Jennie loved her work, too, but that was because it was all she had. Marriage and family were out of the question for her. If she had what Sarah had, she might quit and contentedly stay home, baking cookies and taking walks in the park…enjoying her children and making a home for her family.

She sighed, and pushed that fantasy aside. Right now, she should be concentrating on bringing Sarah up to speed on current cases.

Sarah, whose sharp observation skills missed little, caught her ogling Nathan again.

“That poor guy has been after you nonstop for months. When are you going to give him a break?”

Jennie grinned, knowing her answer was going to set Sarah back a few feet.

“Friday night.”

Yup, she thought with satisfaction, as Sarah leaned in, her hand grasping Jennie’s forearm.

“Are you kidding me? You two are finally going out on a date?”

“It’s just dinner.”

Jennie couldn’t help smiling, though she remained conflicted about going out with Nathan. On one hand, she had a very good list of reasons why this shouldn’t happen. However there were two very influential items that undermined all those good reasons: one, she liked him; two, she was lonely.

Jennie was used to attracting a certain amount of male attention. Sometimes she even enjoyed it. She had the normal urges that healthy women had, and she liked to work them off with a good-looking guy from time to time. And Nathan certainly fit that bill. But maybe she’d made a big mistake accepting his invitation to dinner.

She might be fooling herself that she could keep this under control. She enjoyed having a nice no-strings-attached relationship with a man occasionally. But she’d just celebrated her thirty-third birthday—alone. The years were slipping by, and what did she have to show for them except her work? Her work was challenging, and it helped her deal with her past and feel as if she was making a difference in the world. All the same it didn’t keep her warm at night, that’s for sure.

She considered another good reason to cancel the date—the problems a romantic entanglement could create in the office. She’d already had an affair with one of her colleagues, though that had been over for years. E. J. Beaumont was now a happily married man. Jennie was good friends with his wife, Charlotte, and was godmother to their second child, Annie. A relationship with Nathan would be hard to keep under wraps in such a small unit, and Jennie didn’t want to start being known as the office goodtime girl. In a police station, where women were so outnumbered, it was important to keep your professional image intact.

Nonetheless, Nathan was just too good to resist; and in truth, his pursuit of her, the flowers—and the seductive glances those amazing gray-green eyes cast in her direction when she was least expecting them—had finally crumbled the fortress she’d built around herself. There were several ways to access a system, Sarah always said. You could take a subtle and stealthy approach; you could wage an all-out attack, or you could convince the system or the people who ran it to give you what you wanted.

The last option, social engineering was Nathan’s specialty.

With dual degrees in psychology and criminal science, he could have had his choice of any number of good jobs within regular law enforcement. He’d done his doctoral thesis on how computer hackers exploited the human element of technology, using human habit, weakness and error to get what they wanted. Hackers took advantage of one human trait in particular: the tendency to trust others. People were inherently trusting; they wrote down their computer passwords because they never really thought anyone would look through their desk or their e-mails. They left the systems open thinking no one would take advantage. They gave the waiter their credit card at lunch thinking the young man or woman would never steal the number when they were out of sight.

Nathan had provided a simple example at a recent seminar. A hacker comes to a reception desk, knowing the name of several people in your office, their office numbers and even things like the fact that someone just had a baby. He or she says they’ve come to deliver a baby gift, and asks to come by, just to drop off the present. Chances are, you agree. People want to help; they want to trust.

And that simple fact put hackers one step closer to getting what they needed. Once they were in, they could take it to the next step and find their way into company computers, networks. It happened every day.

Jennie wondered if this was what Nathan was doing to her—wearing down her resistance, charming her with his flirting, getting by her barriers because he’d somehow convinced her to let him in. He’d never pressured too much, but he’d never really stayed out of sight for long, either. Of course, she thought of him when she woke up and saw the latest flower arrangement on the dresser. He engaged her in conversation that had no romantic slant whatsoever, but his eyes sent a whole different message. He pursued her and yet waited for her to decide to come to him.

The difference was, she knew it, and she knew herself well enough to be sure she wouldn’t give him anything more than she wanted to. She was a mature, experienced woman, after all. Right? But that’s what scared her, a little. She’d been alone for a long time, and that loneliness made her vulnerable. Was she only seeing what she wanted to see, or worse, what he wanted her to see?

She shook her head to clear the cobwebs of her thoughts. Hacker talk. Most things in this office came down to hacking, even love. They had to be careful, or they’d be paranoid about everything, and she already had too much of that in her life. She glanced at the poster over Sarah’s desk: F.U.D. Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. It was a hacker mantra, but it also was a real part of Jennie’s life. Maybe she’d let too much FUD in over the years.

“So where are you going?”

“Huh?” She’d been caught zoning out again, and felt the color creep up into her cheeks.

“Dinner. Where are you going?”

“I don’t know. I told him to keep it casual.”

“My first date with Logan wasn’t a date, either. It was casual, too.”

Jennie rolled her eyes and laughed. “Stop distracting me, please? Let’s get back to work.”

Sarah’s brow creased in consternation. “Yeah, right. I don’t think I’m the distraction. But, yeah, okay, back to work, if you can take your eyes off of your Irish loverboy.”

Although Jennie enjoyed the banter, she felt the familiar tug of sadness that never quite went away. She wished, especially in moments when she felt close to someone, as she did with Sarah, that she could tell them the truth about herself.

Sarah had no way of knowing that Jennie’s entire life was a lie—her name wasn’t even Jennie Snow. Didn’t anyone ever notice how strange it was that an obviously full-blooded Italian women had such a WASPy name? But few people ever questioned it.

For those who had noticed over the years, she’d repeated the story she’d been given by the Witness Relocation Program—she’d been adopted. She was an only child, both parents dead. That much usually stopped people from inquiring further out of respect for privacy.

Jennie didn’t think about it much, but there’d been a time in her life when all she wanted was to meet a nice guy, have a solid job and have a bunch of beautiful babies. Though she’d gone to college and wanted to have a career, she’d always imagined she would eventually have a full family life.

Until she’d discovered the travesty that was her own family—at sixteen she’d wandered into the small, fenced backyard of their city home to check on some abandoned kittens she’d brought home, only to find several of her male relatives beating some poor man half to death because he’d owed them money, and he wouldn’t—couldn’t—pay. So they’d seen to it that he’d paid in broken bones and bruises—a message he could take with him for the next time he borrowed more than he was good for.

Her rosy view of life, the idyllic vision of her supposedly close Catholic family, had been shattered. She had never revealed what she’d witnessed, but she’d started noticing all the little things she never had before that night. Her dad, her uncles, her cousins…all belonged to the mob. Everything she’d grown up believing in was a sham.

She’d spent several painful years trying to live with her secret, allowing her parents to assume she remained clueless about the family’s ties to the mob, even as she’d watched her two brothers be slowly subsumed into “the life.” All she’d wanted to do was get out, get away and forget it all, starting her own life over somewhere else. And she had.

During finals of her junior year in college, she’d gotten word that both her father and her youngest brother, Gino—a gentle, sweet soul who hadn’t really belonged in that life—had been killed in a gangland slaying orchestrated by her Uncle Bruno, her father’s own brother. Jennie had vowed to do what she could. She’d gone to the FBI, and she’d offered them every bit of information she could in hopes Bruno would be punished for his crimes. In the end, all he’d ended up serving was seven years, and then he’d been paroled for “good” behavior. What a joke.

Jennie had entered the Relocation Program, where she’d changed her appearance, her life and her name. While they’d wanted to shuffle her off to the Midwest, she’d insisted on staying on the Eastern Seaboard, working for the government as a computer cartographer—a Graphic Information Systems specialist—who mapped organized crime activity. She believed wholeheartedly that her uncle would never look for her right under his nose. For some reason, all the guys thought everyone in Witness Protection headed to the heartland.

Here, she could also keep better tabs on them. She could devote her life to helping the authorities stop their activities for good. And that’s what her life was about—and at least she had a life, though it wasn’t perfect. But whose was? She saw people every day who had worse lives than she did, so she wasn’t about to complain.

Her thoughts wandered back to Nathan. How could she ever marry, or have children, knowing that it would all be a lie? How could she ever endanger their lives with her secrets?

Temporary affairs and light engagements—a man in her bed, but not in her life—was all she could look forward to. It had to be enough.

Sarah had no idea, and Jennie knew it made it difficult for her female friends to understand why she cut herself off from love and family. She let them think what they wanted. EJ and Ian were the only other people who knew, or who would ever know. They kept her secret safe. Sometimes it was a relief having someone who knew the truth, someone who could understand, even though she never discussed it.

She’d been living this kind of life for over a decade. Lately, she’d been yearning for more in a relationship. Between sex-only flings and marriage, there were all kinds of degrees of intimacy. She hoped she might find something in the middle with Nathan.

NATHAN STRODE OVER to his desk, sliding the laptop bag from his shoulder and onto the chair, then perused his appointment book and the stack of new files on his desk screaming for his attention. He’d let Jennie presume he hadn’t noticed her watching—but every covert brush of her gaze had touched him through the windows that separated them. Still, he couldn’t look her in the eye—not yet.

He turned his attention to a seminar he was giving later that week on protecting personal security information—it was astounding how many corporate breaches came down to someone being careless with a password. It was difficult, because part of his work was teaching people to be suspicious, to be conscious of how people might be manipulating them. For the HotWires, he functioned as a kind of “profiler” for techno-crimes.

On top of that, he had no fewer than two critical meetings today. The morning had completely gotten out of control, the new assignment that had just landed on his shoulders throwing him for a loop. After the unexpected meeting that had waylaid him on his way into the building, he hadn’t even known if he could show up at the office and act normally. But Internal Affairs insisted that he needed to keep a regular schedule, not arouse any suspicion. Nathan had to put the skills he studied in others—in criminals—into practice, and lie to everyone around him. It didn’t come naturally.

He was still processing what they’d told him, and he didn’t want Jennie to figure out that anything was wrong. She’d catch on, though, if he didn’t go say something. He never just walked by her, as he did this morning. He was acting out of character already, and he had to get a grip.

He went over to her, hoping he looked casual—normal—but the way his skin prickled and his body hardened just seeing how the soft waves of her dark brown hair rested on her slim shoulders told him he was in trouble. He valued his sense of cool—hard-won in a family filled with quick Irish tempers, but he felt anything but cool right now. One of his grandmother’s favorite sayings came to mind: If you dig a grave for others, you may fall in it yourself.

“Thanks a bunch, Nanna,” Nathan muttered under his breath.

He saw Sarah get up, grabbing a sheaf of papers from her desk before she walked over to him, glancing back at Jennie to see if she was looking. As she came closer, she swatted him hard with the rolled-up papers.

“What the heck are you doing, Junior Mint?”