Barefoot with a Stranger (Barefoot Bay Undercover #2)(64)

Chessie looked up, blinking at him. “Really?”

“There’s no other explanation.”

A message? Was everything always code words and secret messages with spies? She searched his face, feeling her heart ratchet up. “Okay, but until you figure that out, we dig for the needle in this haystack. Maybe when you reach Gabe, we can find out.”

Gabe had called back, but this time they’d missed his call and the message was garbled.

“In the meantime, I have an idea that you would call ridiculously hopeful,” she said.

“Hey, bring it. I’m starting to become a believer in you.”

She grinned at him. “Mal Harris, that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

He lifted a brow, the look a sexy reminder of all the nice things he’d said last night.

“In the last ten minutes,” she added, pulling out her laptop. “I think I can get on the Internet in here.”

“Possibly, but how is that going to help us go through these files?” he asked.

“See these?” She tapped the brightly colored papers on the desk with one hand and clicked to bring the screen to life with the other. “They’re copies. Pink, blue, green, and, my personal favorite, goldenrod.”

He looked at her like she’d slipped off her rocker, but she grinned back and touched the track pad.

“You know what that means, Mal?”

“I think I’m about to find out.”

“It means that somewhere there’s an original, which is white. Always white. You know what I don’t see? White paper, not anywhere in this room.” The screen hummed to life, and she waited to get Internet access through the Canadian server she’d lined up earlier that morning on the satellite phone. “The whites went somewhere. Most likely Havana. Didn’t you say everything funnels up to the national level in this country?”

“The national Communist level,” he said, lowering his voice as if there were a possibility they were being spied on. Of course Mal would think that.

“Communists keep files of births,” she replied.

“They do,” he agreed. “They just don’t put them in Excel spreadsheets or hackable databases.”

“They might.” No Internet. Chessie took a breath. “You obviously do not know my database-hacking skills, my personal level of determination to get shit done, and the burning desire I have to walk into my brother’s office and tell him he has a reason to live again.”

After a moment of staring at the damn spinning circle, she looked up to find his eyes boring a hole through her. “What?” she asked.

“I believe in you.” He sounded nothing less than stunned by the realization. His voice was low and genuine. A lot like he sounded in the throes—and aftermath—of sex.

“Well, thanks.”

“No, I’m serious. You’re impressive. You don’t quit, do you?”

“Not when I want Internet,” she said, going for light because the look on his face was anything but.

“Not when you love someone.”

She felt her jaw loosen in amazement and some blood rush to her face. “You’re right, I don’t,” she agreed. “Why do I get the feeling that surprises you?”

He shook his head as if he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, answer the question, pretending to be overly involved in a few of the papers in front of him.

“Mal?” Chessie prodded. “Who quit on you?”

“Everyone I ever knew,” he answered.

“As I said, you must be hanging out with the wrong people.”

He finally looked up, hurt around the edges of his eyes. “Must be.”

The computer flashed and stole her attention, the screen turning white with the home page of the Canadian website she wanted. “And I must be”—she grinned at him—“a miracle worker. I just got Internet.”

He leaned closer. “Really? Now what?”

She started clicking, slowly working her way through backdoors and secret places that were like a second home to her. “This could take a while.”

He shuffled papers. “So could this.”

“Then let’s see who finds something first, okay?” She tapped a key and found a little wormhole of information, but that place required a password. So she moved on to the next corner of the Internet maze.

“I found a pile of papers from 2011,” he said.

“Well, I found the SQL server injections that I need to crack any database in any secure environment,” she replied.

They both worked in silenced for a while.

“Aha,” Mal said. “I found four babies named Gabriel, but their parents are noted and not names I recognize.”

“Good,” she said, a tad condescendingly. “But I found a Metasploit command prompt. Time to play guess the password.”

He put his papers down and leaned closer. “How the hell are you going to do that?”

“I have my ways, master spy. I have my ways.”

They returned to silence as she battled configurations, threads, and password combinations, and he pulled more papers. And sure enough, the config emerged, and she landed the rhosts, and about two hours and sixty thousand fluttering word combinations later, she had sysadmin privileges.