Wicked Sexy (Wicked Games #2)(2)
My brows climb my forehead. “Is there a problem?”
“No, no, of course not.” There’s a pregnant pause. “Only, to be completely honest, I think you’ll have to let them search your briefcase before you go in. You know, protecting the trade secrets and whatnot.”
Here we go, I think. So far this has been pathetically easy.
“Of course! No worries at all. I wouldn’t want to get you in any kind of trouble.”
Hoffmeier looks ridiculously grateful that I didn’t try to bluster or pull rank, which makes me wonder how many other people have tried to bully their way into IT. Judging by the way he fawns all over me as we make our way from one building to the next, still happy I didn’t bust his balls, probably more than a few.
We pass through a set of pneumatic metal doors, accessed by Hoffmeier’s security badge and a ten-digit code punched into the keypad on the wall. Inside the doors is a desk with a uniformed guard sitting behind a bank of monitors. The guard slowly rises.
Even in four-inch heels, I’m looking up. The dude is psychotically tall.
“Morning, Mr. Hoffmeier.” The guard nods at my companion. Without waiting for a response, he turns his gaze back to me. “Your name and company name, ma’am?”
I hold his gaze and keep my expression impassive. “Dena Johnson. I’m a Senior VP visiting from corporate.”
The guard nods, punches a few keys on his keyboard, scans the monitor for what I assume must be a list of employee names, and then nods again, apparently satisfied that I am who I say I am.
Mistake number six: No picture to accompany the executive personnel name in the computer file.
“Do you have your security badge with you, ma’am?”
I have the fake badge in my pocket that would pass a visual inspection—I googled what they looked like, laughing that the information was accessible online because some dummy posted a shot of himself on Facebook at the company picnic with the security badge clipped to his shirt pocket for all the world to see—but if the guard runs it through the scanning unit on his desk, I’m dead in the water. So I wing it.
“Sure. It’s here in my case.” I set my case on the edge of his desk, open it, make a big show of rifling through it, and then frown. “I thought it was in here. Oh, shoot—did I leave it in the car?”
Hoffmeier says impatiently, “Surely you can let her in—you see her name there on the roster. And,” he adds, sounding pompous and smug, “she’s with me.”
When the security guard’s expression sours, I know Hoffmeier has said the wrong thing. Obviously there’s no love lost between the two.
Wide-eyed and blinking, I protest, “Oh no, no. Please. I don’t want to be any trouble.” I turn to the guard. “You have a very important job to do, sir, I completely understand. I’ll just go get my badge from the car.” Patting my pockets, I mutter to myself, “Gosh, I hope I didn’t leave it at the hotel.”
Then I hesitate as if something has occurred to me. “Or maybe you could just give a quick call to Cathy Suzinski in corporate HR? She could verify my identity.”
Cathy Suzinski does indeed work in corporate HR, but today any calls to her from this facility are being rerouted to my home in Manhattan, where a skinny, scary-smart high school kid named Juanita “One Eye” Perez who has a voice like a forty-year old woman with a two-pack-a-day habit is lounging in front of my TV, feet up on my coffee table, stuffing her face with Cheetos and Red Bull.
I pay Juanita well for the work she does for me, but she’d probably do it for free just to get out of her house. She’s the youngest of seven kids—who all still live at home.
But the guard, after a moment’s thought, shakes his head. “That’s all right. Cathy’s got her hands full this week with new-hire orientations. I probably won’t be able to reach her for hours.”
Another reason I picked a Friday afternoon for this sting is that people aren’t nearly as diligent at their jobs when they’re counting down the minutes to the weekend.
The guard notes my arrival time on a clipboard, prints out a sticker bearing my name that I affix to my blazer’s lapel—avoiding the dragonfly brooch that’s really a tiny camera I’ve been using to photograph everything—and then takes a cursory look inside my briefcase. Then Hoffmeier and I walk through another set of locked doors. We enter a large room inhabited by quietly humming towers of computer mainframes arranged in long rows. Everything is white and gleaming. Combined with the chill in the air and the faint scent of ozone, it puts me in mind of virgin snowfall in a winter woods.
I grin. This virgin’s about to get her cherry popped.
“As you can see, we have state-of-the-art equipment in this facility,” Hoffmeier says, chest puffed. He adds, “It has to be kept air-conditioned for the computers, you see.”
I bite my lip to resist unleashing a scathing tongue-lashing on him. Because apparently the Senior VP of Corporate Information Technology would be ignorant of the fact that large banks of computers have to be temperature controlled on account of her vagina. Which makes her stupid.
Obviously.
Mistake number…oh, hell I’ve lost count: Don’t put the sexist dipshit in charge of VIP tours. Or anything else for that matter.
“Hmm,” I respond, acting impressed and clueless, a nearly impossible combination for me. “And where does the IT team work?”