“Whoever set this up has been taking information from the Brighton Enterprises database and is sending it to another database.”
“What kind of information?”
“Emails, sales data, personnel information,” I listed.
“Holy shit.”
I nodded. “Yes, holy shit.”
“Can you stop it?” I felt his gaze on me and turned my head, our faces inches apart. My mind drifted back to his office and the feel of his kiss. He was like a magnetic force, and I felt myself getting sucked in.
“Allie? Can you stop it?” he repeated.
I jolted back to focus on the screen. “I’ll try, but, I’ve never seen this before. Is there anyone else you can call to help?”
I hated admitting that it might be above my head, but this danger was too real to let something like my ego stop me from asking for help.
“Everyone’s gone home. I’ll call and see who can get back here.”
I nodded.
“But Allison, please, do what you can,” he said.
“I will.”
He left the office, already on his phone before he rounded the corner out of my line of sight.
While he was gone, I continued working, tryi
ng to figure out what—and more importantly—who was taking the information.
“Anything?” Cooper asked, striding back into the office twenty minutes later.
“It looks like whoever is taking information is gathering the most data from Plush. So, that must be what they’re after.”
Cooper pulled a chair around the desk and sat next to me, staring at the computer screens, but I could tell he was completely out of his league as his eyes frantically watched the activity on my two screens.
“Do you need anything?” he asked.
“Is anyone else coming?” I prayed the answer was yes. Even with the help of my forum friends, this was way more complex than anything I’d ever done before. The ironic thing was that I’d just been planning to do the same thing to the competition. Granted, I wouldn’t have been stealing, simply observing. Which raised a very important question…why were they stealing the information? Wouldn’t it be easier to simply copy the data? Whoever was behind this was not just looking for the data, they wanted to destroy it.
Cooper nodded. “Yeah, Chad Franklin will be here soon. He’s not one of my guys, but he comes recommended for stuff like…this,” he said, gesturing at the screens.
“Good.”
“Don’t we have backups for this kind of thing?” he asked.
“Yes, but if this virus takes out the whole system, there is a chance it will destroy the backup, and whoever this is locked the backup so I can’t get information out or shut it down. I already tried.”
“Fuck. This is just what I need,” Cooper growled.
My heart twisted at his anguish. I wished I could say something to comfort him, but at the moment, it seemed as though I had no hope to offer to him.
I remembered back to what Parker had said at the restaurant. I hadn’t paid much attention at the time, but as it came back to me, it fit like a puzzle piece. He’d said that Brighton Enterprises was a little too fragile. I wondered now what he’d meant.
“It will be okay, remember?” I said, repeating his words from hours before, up in his office.
If he recognized my attempt to comfort him, he didn’t let it show.