The manager sniffed. “Yeah, well, that’s what we told the guy from Dover, but he said since Dover was taking care of the payment what Dover said was what we had to do.”
Heather laced her fingers together, her anxiety evident. “Do you know who this guy was?”
“He said he was one of the executives,” the manager replied. “We never asked for a name because we’d done business with Dover before, so we figured this was on the up and up. Anyway, the guy asked us to take some photos and email them to him.”
“What was the email address?” Simon asked.
Miranda shook her head. “We already asked for any contact details and the email was one of the ones that vanishes after a period of time. It looked like a legit address from the company, but upon closer inspection it was cleared to see it’s fraudulent. Sadly, it wasn’t a permanent email address.”
“You’re kidding.” Simon shook his head.
“We lost it, yeah, but we were able to track the IP address.”
“Let me guess, the IP address was located in Dover headquarters,” Simon muttered.
“Exactly. That’s how we know that the story about the executive is probably the truth,” Miranda said.
“So, what about the hack?” Simon asked. “Something like that took a lot of skill.”
The manager crossed his arms. “We didn’t hack into anything. My guys don’t have that kind of know-how. The senior executive told us to call him the minute we took your servers off the grid while we were doing the electrical upgrade.”
“That’s when he hacked into the system. They took advantage of the servers being down for a certain period of time, which would have made the security vulnerable,” Simon said as sudden realization hit. His stomach knotted up as the scope of the betrayal dawned on him. There was no way Heather could have pulled off something like that. It was the kind of thing very few people on earth had the skills to do, and most of those skilled people had worked at Dover for years.
“With the security system down, that meant that if someone had the capability and the skills they could get a hold of your ideas in a matter of minutes,” Miranda said.
Simon cursed under his breath, his fists clenching. This was worse than Xander’s insider trading. Someone had deliberately torn down his security system to steal his ideas one by one. Ideas he had worked on for years. Some for well over a decade. The algorithms and codes he had been tinkering with since he was a child were the most important to him. Not because they’d necessarily yield a lot of money like his later ideas, but because they reminded him of where he had started. Besides, he often shared many of his ideas with the world for free. He had never kept things to himself if he thought they could make the world better. All the hacker needed to do was wait a few more months or years and his ideas would have been released to the public. The hacker’s level of selfishness and greed astounded him.
“Why didn’t come forward with this information sooner?” Heather’s voice held a subtle accusation in it. Her hazel eyes zeroed in on the manager, her unwavering gaze making him squirm in his seat.
“We had to protect ourselves,” the manager replied. “If we didn’t do our own internal investigation to get all the facts, Dover might have sued us. We couldn’t survive a lawsuit from a corporation like Dover.”
“But you’re talking now,” Heather countered, clearly unwilling to let this line of inquiry go. To Simon, it was clear that she was still upset about the position the electricians had put her in. If they had come forward sooner, she wouldn’t have had to go through doubts and suspicions. She wouldn’t have had to deal with gossiping coworkers and an ex-husband hell-bent on using her private life against her to take her child away forever.
The guilt was almost impossible to bear. Simon had put her through hell with his accusations. When he had refused to listen to her when she had defended herself, he had been no better than her ex-husband. Heather needed people she could rely on, and even though she had forgiven him it didn’t change the fact that he had let her down.
“We’re talking because the cops were starting to give us a hard time,” the manager said. “If we have to choose between dealing with Dover and dealing with the cops, we’d rather deal with Dover.”