Page 99 of Rescuing Rebecca
Angry and in need of escape, he pivoted and walked away.
“Grant,” she called out, a note of desperation hanging in the air between them, but already too far gone, he couldn’t turn back now.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
After two-and-a-half hours in the boardroom, Becca had a good understanding of how the JTT operated. She also had a tension headache rivaling Grant’s, going by the pinched look on his face, and when he popped the top on the Tylenol he’d brought, she wasn’t surprised.
Despite arriving freshly showered and sporting a vintage-looking Stay Puft Quality Marshmallows T-shirt, he looked every bit as bad as he probably felt.
The pills rattled as he shook out a handful, and after downing them dry, he waved the container in a silent offer of pain relief to the rest of them. She accepted with an eager nod, and he slid the plastic bottle across the table in her direction.
His aim off, the bottle careened toward Jay, and he caught the high-speed projectile before it landed in his lap. “Headache?” he asked, lifting off the cap.
“Yeah, just a small one.”
Beside her, Zander grabbed the pitcher of water, and without being asked, he refilled her glass and handed it to her.
“Thanks.”
“Anytime.”
She liked him. Kind. Quiet. Thoughtful. His easy-going demeanor put her at ease. So did the marks stretching along his neck. From the underside of his jaw, and disappearing beneath the cotton of his shirt, the raised, uneven skin told a story of pain and resilience.
A history of battle burned into his flesh, Zander carried himself as if his scars were neither a source of shame nor a badge of honor, but simply a part of him, and she wondered how he got so comfortable with his body and himself, and if she ever would too.
“Here.” Jay upended the bottle into his hand and extracted two of the bright red pills before dropping them into her waiting palm. “Do you need a break?”
“No, I’m fine.” She swallowed the little nuggets and chased them with water while he watched her intently, and she felt the weight of his stare as he no doubt assessed her fitness to continue. “I’m fine, Jay. Really. Let’s keep going.”
“You’ll tell me if your headache gets worse?”
“Yep,” she nodded.
“So, if I understand correctly,” Cody said, summarizing the last thirty minutes of their discussion into layman’s terms that really didn’t do the issue justice when compared to the degree of difficulty in combining two distinct codes before converting them into a bleeding-edge quantum encryption. “You two”—he swept his finger back and forth between her and Jay—“merge your computer codes, and bibbidi-bobbidi-boob the world is saved from the big bad Dominion virus.”
Jay huffed and shook his head. “It’s boo, not boob, dipshit, and it’s not that simple. It’s going to take us time to engineer a quantum-compatible interpretive framework that can process both encryption streams without collapsing their structures.” He gestured to the Smartboard, where cascading streams of code offered a meaningless visual representation of the work they had to do. “Every operation needs to be sequenced precisely to avoid triggering the adaptive defenses baked into the virus. One error, and Dominion recodes itself to render the lock and key useless.”
“Not to mention,” Rebecca added. “The decryption algorithms will need to run in a controlled quantum environment. If there’s even a slight variance in quantum states, the entire system could destabilize. This isn’t magic, Cody. It’s math, and math doesn’t forgive mistakes. Neither does Dominion. We’ve got one shot at putting the lock and key in place, but having control of Dominion doesn’t solve the problem of the Imperium Council.”
“I don’t understand,” Davis said. “Why would the Imperium Council still be a threat?”
“Because having the lock and key in place is the only way to control the virus, and that puts a huge ass target on Jay’s back, doesn’t it?” Gray looked at Becca from her spot next to Chase. “They’ll never stop hunting him, will they?”
Impressed with her quick deductive reasoning, Becca nodded. “Whoever controls Dominion controls the World Wide Web. If that person is Jay, then nothing will stop the Imperium Council from coming after him. Not even the JTT.”
“They have to find him first,” Cody growled.
“They will,” Becca replied. “They’ll find all of you. It’s just a matter of time.”
“Fuck,” Jamie groaned. “So what you’re saying is we’re screwed either way.”
“Not exactly.” Nervousness swirling deep in her belly, she took a deep breath and continued. “There’s a black rose.”
“A what now?” Cody asked.
“A black rose,” Jay repeated, swiveling in his chair to face her. “You created a kill switch?”
She looked at him, and with her heart beating hard enough she swore the sound could be heard around the room, she swallowed her fear and told him about the secret she’d kept. “When you asked me to code the key, I just…uh…I had a bad feeling, so I created a self-destruct mechanism designed to annihilate Dominion’s adaptive matrix.”
