Code of Conduct (Cipher Security Book 1) Read online

  Code of Conduct

  Cipher Security Series #1

  April White

  www.smartypantsromance.com

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, rants, facts, contrivances, and incidents are either the product of the author’s questionable imagination or are used factitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead or undead, events, locales is entirely coincidental if not somewhat disturbing/concerning.

  Copyright © 2019 by Smartypants Romance; All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, photographed, instagrammed, tweeted, twittered, twatted, tumbled, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without explicit written permission from the author.

  Made in the United States of America

  eBook Edition

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Sneak Peek: Weight Expectations by M.E. Carter

  Dedication

  “There is boring. There is sensational. There is mediocre. There is lazy. There is good. There is evil. People do implausible things all the time, and they run the gamut of moderately weird to truly extraordinary. But there is no normal. The world is an unbelievable place full of unbelievable people doing unbelievable things.”

  Penny Reid, Love Hacked

  1

  Shane

  “If you think they’re cheating, they probably are. Or you are, and you’re just trying to wipe your conscience.” – Shane, P.I.

  I intimidate people. It’s one of my superpowers.

  I learned the benefits of intimidation early. When I was thirteen, I was five feet-nine inches tall and could wield a well-timed glare like a weapon. Now in my late twenties and six-one, I had bravado, athletic ability, and superior survival skills to add to my arsenal of intimidating glares.

  I also had a pretty badass array of prosthetic legs with cool functions and Swiss Army-type gadgets at my disposal, but most of my clients didn’t realize they were getting Black Widow with an Iron Man leg when they hired me. And monogamy-impaired Chicagoans certainly had no idea who was coming for them.

  Another superpower, my private investigator’s license, added a little extra steel to my spine, which also helped disguise the limp that no amount of carefully-weighted titanium could erase.

  The limp and the height were the reasons I’d arrived early to the little, out-of-the-way north side restaurant for my eharmony date with Chicago businessman Dane Quimby.

  I say “date” because that’s what he thought it was. To me it was a job with a high probability of being mostly unpleasant, but also served with a side dish of smug satisfaction.

  I use the Black Widow analogy because of my Iron Man leg, but I grew up on a steady diet of Charlie’s Angels reruns. Even though I’d been compared to Jaclyn Smith, the glamorous P.I., I was way more Kate Jackson, the athletic one. My own P.I. license had taken six thousand hours and a test to earn, and as far as I was concerned, the fact that it was only legal in California, where I’d lived until the previous year, was a technicality. To get a license in Illinois required a twenty-hour training course and forty hours of firearms training, neither of which I’d done. I wasn’t a fan of guns, and I didn’t really want my fingerprints on file with the State of Illinois, because … reasons.

  So, there I was, waiting for a married guy to buy me dinner before he tried to get into my pants. They happened to be my favorite skinny jeans, with enough Lycra to make sitting possible without blood-flow constriction, and they were tucked into my super-favorite tall riding boots. The boots were flat and therefore comfortable. They also did a great job of hiding my prosthetic lower leg from casual judgment and stale notions of “handicaps.” Someone would have to get me naked to know I was a below-the-knee amputee, and no one but my dog ever saw me naked.

  Dane chose the location for our date, which was notable for its lack of pretension, a curvy waitress, and a cheap menu. I had nothing but respect for large-busted women, since I could only imagine the back pain and underwire bras they endured. I was just as happy with the two-dimes-and-a-piece-of-tape version of lingerie which kept my nipples from becoming a distraction that diminished my powers of intimidation.

  The waitress greeted Dane with an enthusiastic kiss on the cheek when he came in, and I smirked at the difference between his internet dating profile picture and the truth of him.

  My date for the evening was somewhat vertically challenged and sported blond from a bottle. He had the athletic build of a man who did his treadmill miles with the Nasdaq scrolling under his news, and the smile of a shark who negotiated deals for a living.

  His eyes found me with just the slightest double-take, and I watched him take stock of all my visible body parts with a vertical visual sweep as he approached the table.

  “Sophie?” he asked, wearing his attempt at a rakish grin. I didn’t bother to point out the bit of something green stuck in his teeth. Sophie wasn’t my real name, of course. I am far too paranoid to use verifiable information on the internet, and a name came with a degree of identifiability that was outside my comfort zone – my comfort zone encompassing all four U.S. time zones.

  I held my hand out to shake his. “Hello, Dane. It’s nice to finally meet you.” Dane was obviously not paranoid enough, or just exceptionally cocky, as that actually was his real name. His wife hired me to discover if he’d been cheating on her, and it had only taken three internet searches and fifteen minutes to determine that he was on four dating websites and was practically a platinum member of Tinder.

  He sat down across from me and shook his head with a chuckle. “You look exactly like your picture. I guess that means everything else in your profile is true?”

  It had taken me twenty minutes to hack into the website and data-mine his search histories, and another ten to build a profile to match his wish list. “Yes, I really am a tantric yoga instructor. Doesn’t everyone tell the truth online?” I said with nary a blink.

  He licked his lips, and I felt queasy. “I can’t really talk about my time in Special Forces, so I guess you could say my profile is true-ish.”

  It had taken thirty minutes of background checks using mostly public databases to determine he’d left the milita
ry in disgrace. “Oh, wow. Were you, like, a spy or something?”

  He chuckled. “You’re from California, aren’t you?”

  Smile. Blink. “I basically grew up on the beach.” I’d grown up backpacking in the Sierras, but I threw the guy a bone and added a bikini to his mental image of me.

  “I always thought I should live in Cali,” he said. “I’d work out on the strand like those guys in Venice Beach, and be friends with movie stars.”

  The effort not to laugh out loud was costing me. “I’ve seen those guys in Venice. You’d fit right in,” I simpered. My first job as an insurance investigator had been in Venice, and I’d had to navigate sneering gangbangers and strung-out homeless guys every day. Also, no one in California ever called it Cali.

  He held up a finger and did the “I’ll have what she’s having” thing to order a drink like mine. I smirked at the waitress’s raised eyebrow. Wouldn’t he be surprised when he got sparkling water with lime instead of the vodka tonic he thought I had?

  “You must wonder what attracted me to you,” Dane said with a knowing smile.

  Actually, I was mentally calculating my billable hours and hoping to be done here in less than thirty minutes because … round numbers. “You read my mind,” I said with a low, breathy voice. To my own ears I sounded asthmatic, but experience had taught me that horny guys dug breathless women.

  Dane set his cell phone on the table next to him, screen up, so I’d see how very important he was when he got all those calls and texts he was expecting. A call from a number I recognized as his wife’s flashed on the screen as the phone buzzed, and he quickly declined it.

  “Your profile says you’re looking for uncomplicated with a side of kinky,” Dane said, leaning forward to trace the path of ice sweat down the side of my glass. His meaningful glance was all imagine me doing this to you, and I barely suppressed a shudder as I forced a languid smile.

  “I guess that’s one way to interpret my profile,” I said. The other way is to actually read the words, dumbass, which said I like simple pleasures and I’m open to trying new things. I pushed my drink away because he’d touched it and now his cooties coated it like crap smears on a public toilet. Dane took the gesture as an invitation to share, because he was presumptuous like that. He slid his hand down the outside of the sweaty glass with a suggestive wink. This guy had all the moves.

  “So, tell me about tantric yoga.” His hand fisted up and down the glass before he took a big gulp. To his credit, he hid his shock at the bubbly lime-water well, but I shot the waitress a grateful smile when she set the fresh drink down in front of me.

  “Are you ready to order?” she asked. Dane was about to answer, but I quickly interrupted.

  “Could I have a minute?”

  “Sure, take your time,” said Tiffani, with an “i” dotted by a smiley face sticker. She walked away with the self-assured hip-sway of a woman who knows her own appeal.

  I turned my gaze back to Dane and answered his question with a slow, seductive smile. “Imagine the possibilities of a person who can hold her leg behind her head.”

  I conveniently forgot to mention that said leg wouldn’t actually be attached to the rest of me at the time. I pictured my peg leg prosthetic resting on my shoulder like a wooden bat. Of course I had a peg leg prosthetic, because who wouldn’t?

  Dane thought my low chuckle was for him, and I could just imagine the mental images with which he was torturing himself. And because the thought of giving him even a moment of pleasure was approximately as appealing as sucking all the snot out of a dog’s nose, I changed the subject.

  “Tell me about yourself, Dane. What do you do? I mean now that you’re out of Special Forces, there must be something you do besides work out.”

  He actually preened. “Oh, you know, I dabble in web development, mostly for social media.”

  This guy was awesome! What he really did, according to my background check and an hour’s worth of research on his company, was sell digital ad space. It explained his confidence in the ex-Special Forces cover, because if you could sell the promise of eyeballs – not the actual eyeballs themselves, mind you, just the possibility that x-amount of people might look at your thing for the two seconds it takes to scroll past it – you could probably sell birth control pills to your Great-Aunt Fanny.

  “You must be really good at computers,” I purred. Actually, I was trying not to giggle and had to drop my voice to keep from choking.

  “Oh yeah, baby. I’m the best.”

  Seriously, how had this guy ever gotten laid? Ever.

  “Are you on Tinder?” I thought about batting my eyelashes, but decided I’d probably blink out a contact lens.

  “Of course I am. Aren’t you?”

  I shook my head and bit my bottom lip. I’d practiced the move in a mirror once and thought it made me look dim, but apparently dim was like catnip to men who lied to get laid. I looked at his phone. “Can I see your profile? I’ve been trying to decide if I want to join.”

  His grin went wide, and he quickly unlocked his phone for me. “Sure,” he said, as he scooted closer and showed me the app. “You get in like this, and see, here’s my profile.”

  “That’s a great picture,” I said. “You look super fit.” In the ten-year-old photo.

  “I know, right? I get a lot of matches with that pic.”

  “Do you mind if I scroll around for a minute, just to look?” I asked sweetly.

  He waved his hand at me. “Go ahead. Just don’t swipe right on any ugly chicks.”

  Just for that I’d be swiping right on the biggest, most redneck, Deliverance-looking guy I could find.

  Tiffani approached the table again. “What can I get you, Dane?”

  I silently blessed her for her timing, and after my right-swipe on Junior No-Teeth, I navigated to Dane’s Notes app, and about a second later air-dropped the whole file to my own phone. He had three banking apps in his office folder, and I clicked on one randomly. The account name was ADDATA, which was his business, so I switched to the next one. Dane was ordering something off-menu with a whole bunch of substitutions, so I took a minute to look back through his notes.

  I had been counting on Dane’s arrogance and the simple statistics of probability, and neither one disappointed. The Notes app from his phone included a page of account information and passwords, which listed, among other vital things, his social security number and all his banking passwords. It took only a few more seconds to find Dane’s private bank account – the one which his wife suspected paid for his “entertainment” – and another minute to transfer half of the rather large sum of money into an account she’d already set up in her name. The wife had wanted to take it all, but I convinced her that a cornered dog was likely to bite, and she’d have a better chance of getting away with it if she left him some operating cash.

  “Hey,” Dane said suddenly. I cursed myself for jumping as I pasted a smile on my face. “Since you have my phone, you should just put your number in my contacts.”

  “Oh, sure. Do you want me to put it under my first or my last name?” I was pretty sure the answer would be neither, and he confirmed my suspicions.

  “Just leave it open to that page, and I’ll add your name.”

  I typed in the number to my favorite bankruptcy specialist as he finished up his elaborate, high-maintenance order with Tiffani, and then I slid the phone across the table to him.

  Tiffani stood patiently, waiting for me to order. “I just need another minute. Go ahead and put his order in, okay?”

  She shrugged charmingly. “Sure. I’ll get his appetizer started.”

  “So, what do you think about Tinder?” Dane asked with a slow wink.

  I bit my lip again and realized I’d chewed off all my lip balm in my attempts to appear unthreatening. Dry lips were my kryptonite, so I re-applied and took enough time so it seemed like a tease. “I’ve heard it can be hacked, and that makes me nervous. You seem pretty confident about putting your informat
ion online, though.”

  He shrugged. “Oh yeah, my company has the best private security money can buy. No one can touch me without setting off alarms all over the place.”

  I was about to ask about such mythical security, but just then Dane’s phone rang. Cipher Security Systems flashed on the screen as he picked it up.

  “Speak of the devil,” he said with a grin. “I’ll just be a minute.” He answered the phone with a deep voice. “This is Dane,” he said importantly.

  I looked up at Tiffani and said quietly, “I don’t think I can eat anything, thanks.” I’d heard about Cipher Security Systems, and they actually were pretty mythical. They were the kind of company banks used to check for hacking vulnerabilities. I hadn’t thought Dane’s business was big enough to rate that kind of protection.

  Someone spoke briefly, and Dane answered. “At the Northside Cafe, why?”

  My gut clenched in a way that usually signaled lactose intolerance or an attack of the flu. I didn’t like any association between Dane Quimby and Cipher Security Systems, much less one that placed me in Dane’s proximity.