Always You (8 page)

“No, Mother.” He winced in sweet, silent delight as Chiara leaned farther forward to tempt him with the tip of her breast.

“I don’t want you burning my electricity all night,” Almadine complained from the corridor. “Go to bed!”

His mouth occupied with the silken sweetness of Chiara’s flesh, John was unable to answer his mother. He moved Chiara slightly so he could roll on top of her without separating from her. He took her breast and lightly flicked his tongue over the tip of it before tasting it fully, drawing on it in long, gentle tugs that complemented the slow, deep rhythm of his hips. Chiara, her eyes closed, bit her lip to stifle her noises of pleasure as her body clenched around John, forcing him to smother his own cries against her breast.

“Do you hear me, John?” Almadine nearly shrieked.

“Yes!” he groaned, pulsing into Chiara with the force of his climax.

“All right then,” Almadine responded. “Good night.”

John shuddered in Chiara’s embrace and held her tightly in his arms. He planted noiseless kisses in the sheen of perspiration covering her shoulder and collarbone. Then, as quietly as he could, he eased onto his side, fitting Chiara between himself and the back of the day bed. It was a tight squeeze, but he liked it.

She pillowed her head on his right arm and smiled serenely as she used her fingertip to wipe away a bead of sweat from his forehead. John cupped her breast, admiring its new fullness. Chiara pushed one of her legs between his, pressing her abdomen fully against him.

“What are you doing here?” John whispered so softly he practically mouthed the words.

“You came to me last night when I needed you,” she said just as quietly.

“How did you know I’d need you tonight?”

Her soft hand came to lightly rest on his cheek. “Because I know you.”

“I saw a house I think you’d like,” he told her. “It’s in Kirkwood.”

Her gaze went to his throat. “Mmm.”

“You don’t want to move back to Missouri, do you?”

“Not especially.”

“I know,” he sighed. “You don’t want to live too close to your family.”

She still refused to meet his eyes. “We’ve talked about this.”

John was forced to recall all the late night talks they’d shared in this very bed. They had outgrown the awkward, inexperienced fumbling of their adolescence, but one thing hadn’t changed. Chiara still longed to live her life far from the watchful eyes and uninvited opinions of her mother and sisters.

“We almost got caught tonight,” she giggled quietly. “It’s a good thing you locked the door.”

John smiled and passed a hand over her upper arm. “Remember the last time she almost walked in on us?”

The sparkle in Chiara’s eyes was answer enough, even though she said, “Do you really think that I could forget?”

Staring deep into her eyes, John could almost see her as she’d been twelve years ago, on the night of their senior prom. For once, Bartholomew had intervened on John’s behalf and forced Almadine to allow him to attend prom, but Almadine had forbidden him to attend any of the after parties. That hadn’t been much of a hardship for him, considering that he hadn’t been invited to any. But Chiara, his date, had been on the A-list for every party.

He’d taken Chiara home after their magical night aboard a Mississippi River paddleboat, and then he’d gone home himself, sulking the whole way. He’d barely gotten out of his tux before Chiara appeared at his window in the jeans, T-shirt and sneakers she’d thrown on.

John had welcomed her with open arms, and without words, without really expecting to, they had ended up on his cozy little bed as they had many times before. But this time, they hadn’t stopped at kissing and snuggling. Chiara had pulled away from him, and standing before him like a gift from God, she had removed her clothing. She’d silently watched as John had taken off his. They’d never seen each other nude; in fact, neither had either of them ever seen a live member of the opposite sex nude. Their explorations had begun innocently. But when Chiara had lightly gripped him between his legs, right then and there John surrendered ownership of himself to her.

He’d watched her face as he’d touched her in kind, and he thought he’d never seen anything as beautiful as her closed eyes, her parted lips and the slim column of her neck as her head fell back in response to his touch.

In retrospect, their first coupling had been unimaginative, but the logical extension of promises they’d made one month earlier during their senior trip to San Francisco. There had been a little pain at first, for both of them, but that brief discomfort had given way to an uncharted universe of unbelievable sensation.

Slightly tender and definitely exhausted, John had kissed Chiara farewell at the window just before dawn. Their exertions had left Chiara more jubilant than tired, and after climbing down Cecile Brunner, Chiara had stood on the ground beneath John’s window and shouted, “I love you!” before sprinting out of sight.

John, naked and thoroughly spent, was closing the window just as Almadine burst into his room. He never knew what had roused his mother and sent her into his room. She probably had forgotten herself, once she saw her oldest son standing fully naked in front of an open window at five
a.m.

Almadine’s wrath had been loud and swift, and had ended with her banning him from the use of a car, phone and computer for a month. But John hadn’t cared, not with Chiara coming to him under the cloak of night to share intimate moments in the bed where they had given each other their virginity. In the tiny bed they had grown more intimate emotionally as well as physically, and after their interludes, when they quietly mapped their futures by the light of the moon and stars, neither of them could imagine a life without the other. Nor could they imagine living within the ready grasp of either family.

“John?”

Her utterance of his name brought him back. “I’m sorry. I was thinking about prom night.”

She grinned. “I made you mine that night.”

He took her hand and kissed her fingertips. “I was yours long before then.”

Moisture welled in her eyes, and hung on her lower lashes before trickling over her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Everything makes me cry these days.”

He took her chin and kissed her. “It’s okay. I want you to stop worrying, though, about everything. I figured out what to do about the master chip.”

She wiped her eyes and looked at him expectantly.

“I have to go to Chicago on Monday to see Mr. Grayson. I’ll take the chip with me, and I’ll tell him that Zhou sent it to me by accident or something. No harm done.”

“He’ll never believe you.”

“I’ll make him believe me.”

“John, he can smell a lie. Remember what he did to Laura Van Oker?”

“I’m tougher than Laura Van Oker,” he smiled.

“But John, I—”

He caught her words on his lips. He kissed her, and his hands moved over her, until she relaxed against him. When she sighed his name and clasped his buttocks, he brought her right leg up and over his left and pushed into her. He loved her, driving thoughts of the master chip, Laura Van Oker and Emmitt Grayson’s suspicious mind cleanly out of her head.

Chiara quickly but carefully rifled through the neat stacks of bills, envelopes, notes and papers on Almadine’s desk while John yanked the covers from the daybed. The desktop thoroughly searched, Chiara focused on the drawers, pulling each one out and rummaging through it. Through her mounting panic, she was careful to replace the items as close to their original positions as possible.

“It wouldn’t be in there,” John whispered loudly. “I left it right here on the lamp table. It can’t have crossed the room by itself and jumped into a drawer.”

“Do you think your mother came in and cleaned up while you were at my house yesterday?” Chiara whispered back.

“My mother would have been too busy watching the front door to clean.” John lifted the mattress so Chiara could peek under it.

On another day, under different circumstances, they might have laughed at the idea of searching a room in the early morning light in their birthday suits, but with each passing moment, their panic grew. The master chip that John had left on the lamp table had disappeared.

“It’s gotta be here somewhere.” John settled the mattress back on the bed frame and dropped to his hands and knees to help Chiara look under the bed.

“This is just perfect,” Chiara said between gritted teeth. Terror flashed in her eyes and she took John’s arm in a death grip. “Do you think someone came in and took it?”

“I doubt Mr. Grayson sent someone to search my childhood bedroom, if that’s what you’re thinking. There’s no reason anyone would suspect that I have the chip, or that it was here at my parents’ house,” he assured her.

Chiara swallowed hard.
He watches…
“Did you bring it to the hotel with you the other night?” She had a hard time keeping her budding hysteria from affecting the volume of her voice. “You might have left it there. Oh God, if someone found it, or even worse, threw it away…”

“I left it right there.” John pointed to the lamp table. “I should have put it in my wallet, but I figured it would be safe here.” He ran a hand over his head in frustration. “I’ll admit this is odd, though. My father never comes in here and my mother is usually pretty good about keeping her hands off things I leave in the open. It’s the hidden stuff that she’s always trying to get into.”

Chiara barely heard a word. She paced the floor, anxiously worrying one hand over the other. “Mr. Grayson has surveillance everywhere at USITI. He monitors our e-mail and our phone calls. I’m sure he has ways of keeping tabs on us on the road. You head the information systems department, John. You know better than I do how Mr. Grayson spies on us.”

John sat on the edge of the daybed and pulled Chiara down onto his lap. “That’s work-related, not personal. USITI’s got the right to protect its interests.”

“Yes, but how far do you think Mr. Grayson will go to do that?” She shuddered and drew closer to him. “Remember when Laura Van Oker lost a set of R-GS chips? Mr. Grayson interrogated her in security for two straight days. He threatened to charge her with grand larceny, and then he put her on in-house suspension for six months, even after the chips were found right there in the building. She’d set the kit down in the coffee room and a maintenance person accidentally threw it away. She made an honest mistake and Mr. Grayson treated her like a felon.”

“It was more than that, Chi.” John wrapped his arms around her and locked his fingers together. “Laura wasn’t cut out for sales. Not many people are. You and Zhou were the exception to the rule. But in the end, you’re just as expendable as anyone else.”

Chiara had no argument. Technical sales had the highest employee turnover rate of any department at USITI. The travel and separation from friends and family made the job difficult, but the continual whispers around USITI blamed Emmitt Grayson for the short careers of his technical sales representatives. The pressure to sell was subtle, passive, like the movement of a glacier. It had crushed a lot of capable employees. But Chiara thrived in that environment. She and Zhou had earned kudos for their sales numbers and longevity in the department. The average tour of duty in sales was twenty-two months, and Chiara and Zhou had logged five years and landed some of USITI’s biggest accounts. Their recent acquisition, Siyuri Robotics in Tokyo, had been their most lucrative contract, and the last client she would ever snare with Zhou.

“Zhou and I brought in almost half a billion in contracts to USITI,” Chiara said, not nearly as proud of the statistic as she’d once been. “Mr. Grayson wouldn’t have wanted to lose us.”

“He might. If one of you took something that belonged to him.”

“Do you think that chip is worth killing for?”

“I’ve been in information systems for seven years, Chi, and I’ve never seen anything like it. You said yourself that you submit them directly to Mr. Grayson. They must contain information that’s useful only to him.”

“Do you think Zhou corrupted it somehow?” Her forehead wrinkled in thought. “Could that be why you couldn’t read it? When we were in Tokyo, Zhou didn’t have any trouble programming the sales codes and data onto it.”

“It’s got one-way loading, so to speak,” John explained. “Anybody can put data onto it, but you need a key to unlock it, to retrieve data.”

“What kind of key?”

He shrugged. “A password, most likely. Or it could have a timer that would disable the security programming at a certain time for a specific length of time.”

“You info systems people figure out passwords all the time,” Chiara said, recalling the days early in her USITI career when she shared a desk in that department with John.

He gave her a wary glance. “We don’t try to figure out Emmitt Grayson’s. He’s got fences around the walls around the vault that stores his passwords.”

“How do you know?”

“I helped him build the security system on his personal computer. I hate to brag, but Mr. Grayson is the only one who knows more about his systems and products than I do.” John abruptly stood, standing Chiara on her feet as well.

“What is it?” she asked, her eyes wide in alarm.

“There’s one person who might know as much about as USITI’s system as I do.” John grabbed Chiara’s coat and helped her into it.

“Who?” Chiara asked as John tugged on his black sports briefs.

John’s mouth became a severe line. “The same person who took the master chip.”

* * *

John used his fist to bang on the hollow steel door. “I know you’re in there, George,” he called, not caring if he awakened the entire fourth floor of the dorm. “Open the damn door. It’s John and Chiara.”

Chiara listened closely at the door. “He’s not there. It’s too quiet.”

John banged even harder. “That’s how I know he’s in there.” He maintained the banging until the door flew open and he was face to face with his little brother.

George Mahoney looked as though he’d just been freshly rolled in a downtown gutter. His yellow T-shirt, emblazoned with black letters spelling
byte me
, was stained under the armpits and had been splattered with what looked and smelled like two-day old taco sauce. Underneath his uncombed ten-inch afro he wore glasses with thick black frames, and behind them, purple-black circles hung under his chocolate eyes. George had his mother’s stick-like build, and his legs looked like kindling in the red and white horizontally striped sports briefs he wore. He scrubbed his long, bony fingers over the stubble covering the lower half of his face as he greeted his visitors with a pleasant, “Wha’s up?”

John recoiled from the stench of his brother’s breath. “What the hell have you been eating?” he asked as he barged past George and into the oddly lit room.

Chiara followed, but drew up short when the smell hit her, too. “Decomposition, and I think I just stepped in the body.” She scraped her shoe on a bare patch of carpet.

“Happy holidays to you, too.” George indignantly shut the door, closing out the light from the corridor and plummeting his room into eerie blue-white light.

Once John’s eyes adjusted, he realized that the only illumination in the room came from George’s giant pair of flat-panel computer monitors. “I want it back, George. Now.”

“Want what back?” George asked far too innocently.

“Let in some light, man,” John said. He tripped over clothes, books and an inflatable chair on his way to the window. He snapped the shade and it wildly rolled up, flooding the room with bright light that made George wince sharply and cover his eyes with his splayed fingers.

“Easy on the UV, bro,” he pleaded. He rushed to the window and drew down the shade. “What day is it?”

“The day after Christmas.” John shook his head.

“Really?” George took off his glasses and cleaned them with a corner of his shirt. When he replaced them on his face, Chiara saw that they were actually dirtier than they’d been before.

“I should probably go to the cafeteria and get some food,” George said.

“And some water,” Chiara added. “To bathe in.”

John picked his way through a minefield of George’s junk to get to his brother’s computer station. Two computer processing units fed information to two flat-panel quad screen displays, but George had a separate table loaded with disembodied circuit boards and a Frankensteinian assortment of items he’d rigged from parts he’d ordered from computer catalogs, purchased at Radio Shack, inherited from John, or salvaged from the dumpster behind his dorm.

An empty clear plastic card sat propped on one of George’s keyboards, and the item John and Chiara had come to retrieve, the missing master chip, was snugly installed in one of the circuit boards.

John was all set to really chew out his thieving brother when something on one of the monitors redirected his attention. “No,” John gasped, his eyes wide.

“What is it?” Chiara rushed to his side, nearly tripping into his arms over a half-empty two-liter bottle of Jolt cola.

John, his face washed blue in the cold light of his monitors, stared at George. “You figured out the password?”

George smiled proudly and squeezed between Chiara and John to sit in his swivel chair. “I hit it a few hours ago. It took forever.”

“Or since yesterday when you left the house,” John said, stunned.

Chiara peered closer at the screens. A different website was displayed on each quarter. She recognized all of them. Their sales data was programmed onto the master chip.

George pointed to his left hand monitor. “This screen shows Asia-based pharmaceutical companies. The right screen’s domestic, all U.S. biotech firms.”

Chiara cleared off a folding chair full of empty Mountain Dew bottles and Fritos bags. She sat down, her eyes dancing from screen to screen. “I know these companies. They’re USITI clients. Zhou and I sold to them. These look like secure pages.”

“Look at this.” George grinned in delight. He double-clicked his wireless mouse, bringing one company to full view on screen. “ChemoTech has a new arthritis drug coming out in a few months. The Food and Drug Administration just approved it so the company’s ready to go public. I’m going to borrow some money from Dad and buy a few hundred shares of stock.”

John spent another long moment staring at the screen before he turned his worried gaze to Chiara.

“R-GS,” she said, understanding dawning. “
Argus.
The monster from Greek mythology who had a hundred eyes.”

“Turn it off, George,” John commanded.

George was too excited about his discoveries to heed his brother’s order. “I’ve got the inside scoop on every company on this chip.” He greedily rubbed his hands together. “This is only the tip of the iceberg. There’s at least fifty corporations—”

“Get out of it, George!” John shouted. He squatted and reached under the table to yank the power cord from its dust-covered surge protector.

“Hey!” George cried as John crudely plucked the master chip from George’s motherboard.

“This thing might have gotten a man killed,” John said gravely. “What can you tell me about it other than what we just saw?”

* * *

George agreed to share his findings under two conditions: that they treat him to breakfast and that Chiara sit next to him in the cafeteria. The cafeteria was sparsely populated since most of the students were away for the holiday break, but there were enough foreign students milling about to suit George’s purpose. Whenever he saw someone he knew, he’d scoot closer to Chiara or put his skinny arm around her shoulders.

Chiara was too concerned about the master chip to object to George’s using her to impress his chums.

“Now that all your little schoolmates have seen you cuddling up to Chiara, are you finished collecting your cool points?” John asked him over their now cold breakfast plates.

George hunkered over a plate heaped high with eggs, bacon, ham, pork sausage, home fries, and flapjacks. As he began to speak, he dressed his food from small dishes of applesauce, butter, whipped cream and maple syrup. “That chip is a thing of beauty,” he started, “a real masterpiece.”

“Could you lower your voice?” John suggested. There weren’t many students around, but George seemed to know enough of them to want to show Chiara off. George only knew fellow computer nuts, and the last thing John wanted was for his brother to leak the existence of the chip to hackers who were as obsessed as George.

George bowed low over his food and leaned farther over the table. Very quietly he said, “That chip is nothing but a big ol’ catalog of rootkits.”

Chiara’s eyebrows drew together in thought as she searched her memory. Much of what she’d learned in her early days in information systems had been forgotten or was now obsolete, and she wasn’t as up-to-date on current security information as she could have been. But then it came to her.

“Rootkits.” She swallowed hard. “That’s hidden software. It can be used for—”

“Spying,” George said through a mouthful of eggs and syrup. “Duh.”

“Rootkits are practically undetectable,” John said. “USITI implants them in all of the R-GS chips as part of its digital rights management technology. It’s supposed to prevent unauthorized users from gaining access to a company’s computer system. It’s a security feature that USITI has perfected, and why the R-GS system is so popular. In five years, no system USITI has sold to has reported any hacking troubles.”