Ben Whalen had known for the past two weeks that something was eating at his girlfriend, Cassy Levin, and he was almost certain it had to do with her work on the cybersecurity floor at Burnham Pike, the nation’s premier investment bank. But he had mostly left her alone about it, figuring that sooner or later she would tell him.
As a former Navy SEAL lieutenant he had learned by combat experience how to face any problem head-on. Not that he appeared very aggressive. At five-ten and a lean 170 pounds, his blond hair and open blue eyes made him look more like the appealing boy next door than a highly trained killer.
“My hero,” Cassy had called him from the first moment they’d met at Toni’s, a bar on Long Island.
She was thirty, petite, with a pretty face and a nice figure, and he was turning thirty-two next week, and sometimes, like this Thursday morning, looking at her lying in bed beside him in their third-floor loft in the Village, he could only marvel at his good luck. They’d lived together for nearly a year now, and on the fifteenth, his birthday, he was going to ask her to marry him. And it scared the hell out of him that she might say no.
She’d been moody lately, which wasn’t like her. She was usually feisty and spirited, but something was bothering her. Yet every time he’d brought it up, she’d just smiled and looked away for a moment. “It’s work, but I can’t talk about it right now. Okay, sweetheart?”
“When?” he’d pressed two days ago as they were having lunch at the Old Town Bar on Eighteenth Street.
She’d started to object, the corners of her mouth turned down, but he’d kept going.
“Is it like Murphy Tweed?”
“Don’t push it, Ben, please.”
“Is there an intrusion?”
“Could be,” she’d said, and she’d abruptly tossed down her napkin. “I’m late.” She’d gotten up, pecked him on the cheek, and left.
At her previous job over at Murphy Tweed, a small investments firm, she had worked as a cybersecurity analyst and designer. On her first day of work she’d prepared a detailed report for the brass informing them that their data system was woefully out of date and prime picking for hackers. She’d recommended a complete overhaul of the system, which at her best estimate would take as much as a half million dollars to put in place.
She was voted down, and less than a month later, the company’s system had been hacked and mined for the user names and passwords of nearly one thousand customers. The stolen money had been channeled to overseas private banks where no one could find it.
In less than ninety days the company had gone belly up, the execs had been bailed out with golden parachutes, and Cassy had been blamed for the entire mess. She’d found herself out on the street with no job, no money, and no real prospects.
Until Francis Masters, a research chief at Burnham Pike, had recognized her talent and almost literally plucked her off the street.
“I would like you to do for us what you tried to do over at Murphy Tweed,” he’d told her in his office. “You have the chops, Wharton and Harvard. I went to MIT myself. And believe it or not, MIT’s old VP Tom Foley gave you the best recommendation of all: ‘Hire her and listen to her.’”
“Malware,” she’d told Ben, later that night at home. “Someone put a program into our system that can steal passwords and user names, like at Murphy Tweed, and create all kinds of other mischief.”
“I know how to blow up stuff, and shoot bad guys, and seek and find.”
“Macho man.”
He’d shrugged. “I didn’t have Wharton or Harvard, but I did have the SEALs, including hell week,” he said. “But you know how to stop it.”
She’d tilted her head to one side—a move that meant she was agreeing with him and thinking at the same time—a move that had turned him on from the get-go. “I think I do, and now it’s up to me to convince Francis so he can convince his boss, the chief technology officer.”
“O’Connell?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, they hired you to improve their cybersecurity operation, so you’d think they’d listen to you.”
“We’ll see.”
For the last week or so he’d watched the worry lines grow at the corners of her eyes and mouth, and heard her laugh, which had always been light and musical—one of her many fabulous attributes—go south.
“Screw it,” he’d said at their apartment yesterday after work. “Your systems are in place, let’s take a month off. Paris, get a little efficiency on the Left Bank, walk the Quai, spend the afternoons at sidewalk cafés, maybe take in a museum or two here and there. Versailles, Mont Saint-Michel, maybe a canal barge in Burgundy.”
“Not now,” she’d said.
“Later?” he’d asked.
“Promise.”
He was going to propose in Paris. All he had to do was get her there.