Page 38 of Pressure

She started at the beginning and looked for any signs of recent updates and patterns that didn’t match the overall flow of the coding.

As she sorted through it, her eyes were drawn to a section of code that looked messy. Lance was not a messy coder.

She wanted to go get him but knew he was preoccupied so she made a note and kept scrolling.

A hundred or so lines down, she spotted another line that didn’t seem to match Lance’s style. It was almost like he’d left text in the code as a note to himself. A lot of programmers would do that when they were working on developing a project, but they always cleaned it up before final implementation.

Unless… Her mind wandered to a hacker she’d run into before she met Lance. He was the epitome of a messy coder. He rarely followed a pattern and his tags were all over the place. If you were to pull up the raw code on anything he programmed, it would be littered with curse word filled notes that had no effect on the code itself. His thought was that most of the people who paid for his work would never actually look at the raw code so there was no need to clean it up.

Things like that made Lance cringe. The people who worked for him knew their code had to be impeccable before they brought it to him. They’d fought over her own coding style a number of times. She blushed as she remembered the time, he’d turned a coding fuck-up into a reason to punish her. Which of course led to sex.

“God damn it,” she muttered. Irritated with the path her thoughts had taken.

“What was that?”

She whirled to find Lance standing behind her.

“Nothing. Come look at this.”

“You sure are bossy for a house sub,” he teased as he sat on the desk next to her. “What am I looking at?”

She stuck her tongue out at him because the lobby was empty and flipped her laptop around.

“You’re not a messy coder. What is this?”

Lance leaned forward, his hand resting on her shoulder as he studied the lines of code she’d isolated.

His fingers dug into her shoulder and she knew it wasn’t his code.

“How the fuck did I miss this?”

She gently pried his hand from her shoulder.

“Sorry,” he murmured.

“You’re too close to it. You’ve probably spent hours going over this code. You wrote it. Your eyes saw what you thought you’d written. I haven’t isolated exactly what this code is doing but it’s definitely some kind of tracking. And they left some notes to themselves that remind me of a hacker I ran into before I met you.”

“FUCK,” he shouted.

“Now isn’t the time to come undone. Let’s go in the conference room and run this down. Is there someone else who can work the desk?”

He rapped his knuckles against the smooth marble surface. “Yeah. Stay here.”

He turned and walked back into the bar.

Five minutes later, he reappeared with Jodie. She didn’t look incredibly happy.

“Thank you, Jodie. I’m sorry but this is urgent,” Lance said. Marissa could hear the tension in his voice as she scooped up her laptop and other tech and followed him into the conference room.

“Did you have plans with her?” she asked as she set up on the table.

“Something like that. Nothing sexual. Just a sensory thing.”

“Forget I asked. Let’s get to work.”

He pulled his own tech bag from underneath the table and plopped it down

“I’m going to give you the sections I’ve already isolated. Figure out what they’re doing. I’ll keep looking for other instances. I’ll also run down some signatures I’m familiar with and see if I can trace them to an identity.”

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