Page 47 of The Mogul: Leonard

“Okay. A full meal. But yes, why not?” She sounds puzzled.

I grab the beef from the fridge and walk to the kitchen counter where she is propped on a stool.

“What’s wrong with you and eating at scheduled times?” I’m curious.

She shrugs. “I don’t know. I suppose it’s something I carry from when I was a kid. Our mom scolded us if we ate outside of meals. We always ate at the same time. I think my parents still do.”

“Do you miss them?”

“It’s not like they’re dead. We talk a lot on the phone, and we see each other a lot. I miss them, but I’m not homesick.”

She watches me prepare the meat for the grill. She is fascinated, like I’m some rare experiment, trying to gauge whether it will explode or not.

“What about you? Do you miss your family?” She gives in to her curiosity.

“They’d like to see me more.” I chuckle. “But they know that after I founded fifteen companies besides this one, I don’t have as much time to get together as often as they want.”

She stops with her fingers in mid-air as she was trying to steal some of the seasoning I have in front of me to read the label. The frown that obscures her smile makes me alert.

“What?” There is a hint of concern in my voice.

“Nothing, or maybe everything. You said you have fifteen companies besides this one. There are fifteen transactions,” she says, and I can feel my gut twist in a vice of unease, my heart pounding in my chest.

“And the sum of all those transactions is exactly the one we used to start this company, the first one.” Her words hit me like a thunderbolt, and I quickly grasp the implications.

She raises an eyebrow. “It can’t be a coincidence.”

I shake my head, dropping everything I’m doing and wondering if there is a connection. “No, it’s not a coincidence. But right now, this is just information that doesn’t take us any further.”

She stares at me, hope in her eyes. Her brain is running a thousand miles per hour—I can see it from here.

“We focused on this company because we thought they wanted to prove they could beat your cybersecurity system, but maybe it’s something more personal. They want to beat you,” she suggests, and the dread sneaking into my chest is unbearable.

I can’t even imagine someone going to that length to hurt me. I’ve made many enemies along the way, but never someone so resentful as to hack into my systems and hurt me where I’m most vulnerable. My work is my life; if you take that from me, I’m lost.

“It’s worth a try.” My voice is firmer than I thought.

Roxanne is off the stool before I even finish my sentence. We almost sprint toward my office. When I close the door behind us, she is already picking up her laptop from the backpack she put on the floor near my desk. I drag the chair from the front around my desk next to mine. We both sit behind the monitor of my computer and dig into the network we know like our pockets.

“Do you use your system to protect the other companies?” she asks when I’m already checking the first one.

“Yes, but we didn’t receive any notification about that. If someone tries to access one of them, the ticket escalates to me. They page me day or night, no exceptions,” I inform her, and a grin appears on her face.

“You are a pain-in-the-ass boss, you know that?”

“I’m proud to be one,” I reply with a smug smile.

She shakes her head without any further comment. We work side by side like the trained team we have become since she started to work with me. We dig into every single system for hours until the steaks are forgotten in the kitchen and the sun is deep over the horizon.

“Okay. On one hand, I’m happy we proved your system is solid fifteen different times. On the other, I thought it was a good hunch to follow,” she says when the last check confirms what we already know: they didn’t hack the other companies.

I stare at the computer. Something is missing, but I can’t grasp what.

“I think we should keep going in that direction. I don’t believe in coincidence,” I state, and the idea that someone is trying to hurt me is even more disconcerting.

“Me too, but where’s the common pattern between the fifteen companies? Besides your system, I mean,” she asks.

I ponder it, my mind racing. “I’m not sure,” I mumble, my uncertainty palpable.

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