Wicked and True (Wicked & Devoted 4)

“What is toy voyaging? Any idea?”

“No. What the hell?”

Zy looked it up, then gave a dumbfounded shake of his head. “Who sends their toys with strangers so they can be photographed around the world? And why is that a thing?”

“Is it? Really?” Trees looked as confused as Zy felt.

“It is for Aspen. She gave someone this ugly straw hat with flowers to drag all over Europe. The person sent back a bunch of pictures of statues wearing this hat. She seemed really excited. Just before that, she’d been to some resort in Mexico and taken pictures of these weird nesting dolls from Russia and photographed them on the beach, in the jungle, and beside the hot tub.” Zy shook his head. “Apparently, they all got a kick out of that.”

“Because that’s not weird or anything,” Trees quipped.

“Not at all.”

“I hate to judge, but I’m glad we don’t work with her anymore.”

“Same. So here’s a piece of software either she or Tessa downloaded on January thirty-first, exactly one year ago. The location suggests it was installed onto Tessa’s machine. Was she in the office that day?” Zy had no way of knowing since he hadn’t begun working for EM Security yet.

“Let me bump that against a calendar I maintained. I told the colonel I wasn’t a fan of letting the temp use Tessa’s machine because we didn’t know her well, but we didn’t have a spare at the time. So I kept track of who had control of it when.” Trees flipped over to another document on his computer, then frowned. “That was one of Tessa’s last days in the office before her maternity leave. She was supposed to have worked with Aspen the following Monday through Wednesday, as I recall. But she went into labor on Tuesday morning and didn’t come back until the end of March.”

“So Tessa probably downloaded this?”

“Most likely. What is it?”

“Looks like some sort of spyware maybe.”

“Let me see.”

Zy shoved the computer toward Trees, who craned over to study the screen, his face growing more concerned. “Fuck. This is some hand-coded shit that collects every keystroke, but it also enables stealth remote access from anywhere in the world.”

Was he serious? “So whoever installed this could tap into Tessa’s computer at will and could see every time she or Aspen hit a key? And they could access our servers without anyone being the wiser?”

“Yep. I begged Aspen to let me scan that computer a couple of times. Every time she said it crashed or she finger-flubbed whatever she’d been typing and ended up somewhere in the computer she shouldn’t be, like at a command prompt.”

Zy sat up. “Tessa couldn’t have had anything to do with this. She’s not a computer whiz, and she definitely doesn’t know anything about writing code, especially something that involved.”

“You think Aspen does?”

Probably not. “Is it possible neither of them did this?”

“Possible? Anything is. Improbable? Yeah. Keep digging. See if you can find any traces of contact in March, around the time we went to Mexico and damn near got ambushed.”

“Getting there. After that software is installed, there isn’t much in the way of sent emails except to the bosses. It’s like…Aspen didn’t do that much.”

“No, it’s not ‘like’ that. She actually didn’t do much. But no fishy communications around the time of our mission?”

“Not that I see.”

Trees sighed. “Then again, with remote access and keystroke recording, all anyone had to do was log in to our server themselves and they could mine almost anything.”

“Do you think that spyware/remote-access garbage is still on Tessa’s computer?” Maybe she had been passing on information without even knowing it.

“No. As soon as Aspen cleared the building, I restored Tessa’s computer back to the factory settings, then carefully rebuilt her profile. I didn’t trust Aspen not to have unwittingly screwed everything up.”

“So the rogue software is gone? And we have no way of knowing who might have been accessing our systems and where the information was going?”

Trees winced. “When you put it that way, I should have looked to see what was on the computer before I wiped it, but I had no idea…”

“You couldn’t have.” But that didn’t help prove that Tessa wasn’t their mole…if they could prove that at all. “You finding anything else?”

“Let me finish. Then…we’ll talk.”

Given Trees’s scowl, that was a yes.

His friend worked in silence, seemingly a lot faster now that he knew what to look for. Zy stood and ambled to the coffeepot, flipping it on. He wondered what Tessa was doing right now and if she’d cried when he’d left…or just shrugged and moved on with her life.

He wished to fuck he understood why she’d lied to him, tossed them aside, and sold him to the enemy for a buck. Then again, he’d never understand that behavior.

“Coffee?” he asked Trees.

“Yeah. It’s going to be a long night.”