Chapter Twelve

Drake

“What the fuck happened between you guys?” My palms are planted on Cooper's desk as I stare down at him.

He raises his hands in the air, shrugging his confusion. “I have no idea. Nothing happened. I thought we were good.”

“Well, he's obviously targeting you. Are you sure nothing happened? You didn't insult him or piss him off in some way?”

Cooper laughs. “I insulted him and pissed him off every day, but I don't think anything out of the ordinary happened. I certainly didn't think he was actually angry about anything. And why would he go after my dad's bank?”

“He either has a problem with you or a problem with your dad. Maybe you need to get on the horn and find out if Pops knows anything.”

“Fuck!” Cooper pushes his fingertips up his cheeks and curls them into his hair. “This just gets worse and worse.”

“Well, it’ll get a lot worse if it becomes public knowledge that a disgruntled TriTask employee tried to install a virus in a customer’s infrastructure.”

Cooper closes his eyes. “You can stop him, right?”

I push off the desk and rub my eyes. ”Yeah, we’re rewriting everything to remove any backdoors Chris wrote in.”

“And you’re positive it’s Chris?”

I give a gentle smile. I know he doesn’t want to believe his friend is responsible. Chris helped build this company too. It just doesn’t make any sense. “Yeah, I recognize his naming structure. It’s his little OCD marker.”

“Maybe someone copied it?” Cooper says, grasping at straws for an answer that makes sense.

“No.” I shake my head. “Chris would've noticed if somebody was doing anything to his code. Besides, he had the most access to it. Nothing would've gotten past him.”

“So what do I do now?”

“You let me repair the damage I caused when I disappeared. We’ll get this fixed, buddy. I promise.” I turn on my heels and head back to the war room, ready to hunt down that bastard and whatever exploits he put in our app.

When I get back into the room, everyone is in almost the exact same spot I left them a few minutes ago. And they're all staring at me blankly, waiting for some kind of direction.

“First of all…” I close the door behind me and step to the back of the room. “While I was gone, did any of you tell anybody what we just witnessed?”

Everybody shakes their head.

“I mean it. If you did, tell me now so we can contain this. Otherwise, I will assume that outside of Cooper and me, you six and Chris are the only people who know what just happened. That means, if any press comes sniffing around, I'll have to assume it was one of you who talked. Do I make myself clear?”

Everybody nods in eager agreement.

“Okay, then let’s move forward. Diya and Walt, you both are responsible for rewriting every line of code in Notes. Ron and Steve, you two will be reviewing each line as it's written to find any issue, any typo, anything. If it can go wrong, you guys have to find and fix it on the fly. We don't have time to do multiple rounds of QA. This is it. First draft goes, so you guys have to make it perfect.”

Dia is chewing on her lower lip, but she nods, obviously overwhelmed by the severity of the situation.

“Okay. Jeff and Kathy, the two of you will be monitoring our most critical customers. Bring up their dashboards and watch for any abnormalities. If you see one thing that looks funny, call me over immediately. We need to be ready to get in there before Chris can do any damage. You got it?”

“We got it,” Jeff says confidently, making me smile even through the thick tension in the room.

“Alright, then. I'll be back up for all of you, but I want to be available to defuse any situations that might come up.” I clap my hands together. “Let's do this.”