Reckless (Benson Security 1)

“I need to sit down for this,” Callum muttered as he perched on the edge of the armchair behind him.

“It was totally cool. The ring worked perfectly. As soon as Rudi shook my hand, it activated and he was injected with the drug. If you think about it, it was poetic. A ring to knock him out and get the ring with the records.”

“I just realised,” Elle said. “You had the ring to rule them all.”

They fist bumped.

“Holy crap.” Joe ran a hand over his head. “It’s like hearing about a train wreck after the fact.”

?

?You dosed the guy with date rape drugs?” Callum said.

“I need a drink.” Dimitri headed for the kitchen where Ryan pulled out a bottle of whisky.

Megan scrunched up her nose. “I didn’t sexually abuse him or anything, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“No. I wasn’t thinking that.” Callum took the glass of whisky Dimitri handed him and emptied it in one swallow. “What did you do to him?”

“I secured him to his chair. And then I used the micro USB connection lead that was hidden in my shoe heel to connect to his laptop.” She grinned widely. “Julia’s friend, the prop guy at the BBC, modified my shoes for me. He did such a great job, the modifications didn’t even turn up when they ran my shoes through their scanner.”

The men just stared at her. Megan didn’t know what to make of that. In the end, she decided they were awed by the brilliance of the plan. She elbowed Elle, signalling it was her turn again.

“While Rudi was a slobbering mess,” Elle said, “Megan downloaded the information on his ring to an old MP3 player I’d modified. She then wiped the data from the ring and uploaded a virus to it that should travel through Rudi’s cloud account to his data storage unit in Switzerland.”

“Holy shit,” Ryan said. “You can do that?”

Elle stuck her nose in the air. “Of course.” She sighed. “Fine. I may have asked Harry to work on the programme. I may have told him it was a hypothetical situation. I may have made it into a challenge so he’d write the code by the time we needed it.”

Callum held his glass out to Dimitri who took it and went for a refill.

Elle cleared her throat. “It’s not that I couldn’t have written the code myself. It’s just that Harry is a freaking genius and did it way faster.”

“He doesn’t know you used his code to break into a secure facility, does he?” Callum asked.

“To be clear,” Elle said. “It’s not the whole facility, just the storage area Rudi uses. It will wipe out everything there, but it won’t spread.”

Callum took the refilled glass from Dimitri and nodded his thanks. He downed it in one go again. “Do you four realise how many international laws you broke doing that shit?”

“Yes, but we didn’t do it.” Elle was trying to look innocent. She nearly pulled it off. “Harry did it. Hypothetically speaking.”

Megan had to clench her fists to stop from giving the woman a high five. But Callum’s eyes were on her. He stared at her long enough to make her squirm.

“That isn’t all you did, is it, Megan?”

She wasn’t going to deny it. The reason she went in there was warn Rudi off Claire. She’d done her job. Nothing more. “No. That isn’t all I did.” From the looks on the faces around the room she wasn’t sure she wanted to tell him the rest.

“Spit it out,” Callum ordered as Dimitri’s eyes burned laser holes through her skull.

“I simply carried out the rest of the plan. I warned him off Claire.” She crossed her fingers and hoped that was enough information.

“How?” Dimitri asked.

Megan took a deep breath. “I wrote the warning across his chest in permanent marker.” She paused, wondering if they’d let her leave it at that. She was guessing from the death glares that they wouldn’t. She took a deep breath and confessed the rest. “Then I used a modified version of a docking band on his penis.”

The men froze at the word penis.

“A docking band?” Ryan sounded more than a little hesitant.