Page 92 of Hot Intent

“Pull up the stopwatch app on your phone. When I tell you, start counting the time,” he muttered as he plugged a flash drive into a port in the side of the monitor.

“Okay.” She pulled out her cell phone and set it up.

“Go,” he murmured. She started the counter.

A list of files came up on the screen quickly. He didn’t mess with them, though. Instead, he pulled up a window and commenced running a program of some kind.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Trying to break the write protection on these files so I can download them.”

He typed frantically for another few seconds and then stopped. “Okay. That’s it. Now we have to let the program run and see if the algorithm can break through the copy protection protocols on those files before we’re kicked out of the mainframe.”

They were hacking the CIA? Whoa.

“Time?” he asked tersely.

“Two minutes elapsed,” she murmured.

They stared at the monitor in silence as his decryption program did its work.

“Three minutes,” she announced.

The fine muscles around his eyes looked tense, stressed even, but he didn’t acknowledge her minute-by-minute count in any other way.

“When will you give up?” she asked.

“As long as their security protocols don’t kick me out, I’ll let the algorithm run. I’ve got nothing to lose by trying. They already want you, and possibly me, dead.”

She announced four minutes, and then eight five. Every second seemed to crawl past, taking an eternity. The code continued to scroll down his screen too fast to read. She counted all the way to fifteen minutes without anything appearing to happen. And then, all of a sudden, a download progress bar popped up on the screen and started to turn fill with white from left to right.

“You did it,” she breathed.

“We’re not out of the woods, yet,” he warned.

His words turned out to be prophetic. The download was at 98% complete when all hell broke loose. A new window opened of its own volition on the monitor and more code started scrolling down the monitor.

Alex must’ve been able to read it at least in part because he hunched over the keyboard and started typing, his nimble fingers flying across the keyboard. He muttered unintelligibly to himself, and she made like a mouse beside him, not wanting to distract him.

“Pull out the flash drive,” he ordered suddenly. “Now!”

She reached up and yanked the drive out of the port. The screen went black. “Did we get the files?”

“We’ve got to get out of here,” he said by way of an answer. He jumped to his feet and raced toward the exit with her running beside him.

“Well?” she demanded as they burst out into the street.

“I won’t know until I see what made its way onto that flash drive before the agency’s countermeasures kicked in. But first, we have to get away from this location.”

Her shoulder wounds throbbed as he took off at a brisk walk. She noticed they were covering a lot of ground, but not in a way that would attract undue attention. They were just two people in a hurry to get somewhere.

She asked nervously, “It’ll take them a while to track down the computer terminal you were using, right? We’ve got plenty of time to get away.”

“It only works like that on TV,” he bit out. “We’re messing with the big boys, now. They have resources you can’t even begin to imagine.”

They’d walked briskly several blocks back toward their motel when Alex swore under his breath.

“Let me guess,” she muttered in dismay. “We’ve got company.”

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