Page 12 of Escape Girl

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Now

My chest wasaching, seriously aching, like a fifty-pound weight was sitting on it.

On the screen, the escape room had shown different parts of the Irvings’ home. We’d moved from the painting to the dining room, with a deep focus on place cards, and now the view was hovering at the front door where Bobby had asked me out.

A text box appeared:What is the phrase to escape this room?

I put my fingers to the keyboard and typed in “Attractive Nuisance.”

The screen filled with celebration images, but instead of the traditional balloons, negronis rained from the top of the screen to the bottom.

Congratulations, Em! You win!

I pushed myself away from the desk and stumbled back into the bedroom, my head pounding and my heart sick. What, exactly, had I won?

Chapter Four

“We’re going totake this nice and slow,” I said to Bella across the table in my office. A coffee carafe, a teapot, a pitcher of water, and an assortment of pastries and fruit sat between us. In front of me, my laptop was open and a stack of legal pads with at least eight pens sat off to the side. I liked to be prepared.

I’d had four cups of tea already, but I poured myself a fresh cup. I hadn’t fallen back asleep until after 5:30, and I’d only gotten a fitful hour after that. But the 3:00 a.m. insanity had passed, thank goodness. When I’d woken up, I deleted the invitation to the Irving Escape Room. I had no idea what Bobby thought that little act of memory would accomplish, but my morning brain knew that erasing the room—from my inbox, from my memory—was the right thing to do.

Bella looked as lovely as she did the day before. She was wearing a light blue sweater with brown leather patches on the elbows. When she arrived this morning, she mentioned that she was staying at a Marriott down the street, which surprised me. I’d made the assumption yesterday that she lived in the city. I didn’t know that she’d come to New York specifically to see me. Where did she live? Where did all the shenanigans she described yesterday go down? I guessed I’d find out today.

Bella took a sip of water and paged through a folder of notes she’d brought with her. Nice. I liked a client who knew how to document and organize.

“Tell me the long version of the story you told yesterday.” I picked up a pen. “Try to be as specific as possible on names,dates, and times. I’ll interrupt with questions when I need to. Start with your professional background.”

She nodded and took a deep breath. “I have a degree in computer science. When I was younger, I always intended to design and build software. I was the kid who loved Legos, you know? I took coding classes at the YMCA when I was in fourth grade.” She met my eyes briefly and sighed. “But when I graduated college, I got recruited by a management consulting company. I’m from a small, poor town in Wisconsin and I couldn’t believe the salary they offered. So I took that job and worked as a consultant for almost seven years.”

I jotted rapid notes, already pleased. She had a solid education and work history—immediate credibility for this kind of case.

“I enjoyed consulting for a while: the travel, the clients, getting exposed to new industries and technologies and business problems. Then, about a year and a half ago, I got an idea, a good one, for a software product. I was a little burnt out at work, and I had some money saved up. I decided to resign from my job and try to build the product myself.” She smiled sadly to herself. “I was really excited to dive into a coding cave and just…create.”

“What does your product do, Bella?”

She picked a stapled packet of papers from her folder and handed it to me. “I brought you a design document.”

Impressed, I read the first couple of paragraphs. “It has to do with fighting against ransomware?”

Very cool. I’d heard a ton lately about ransomware, a type of malicious software designed to block access to a computer system until a sum of money has been paid. While no industry was safe from ransomware attacks, law firms had recently become increasingly attractive as targets because of the confidential and sensitive nature of the data handled in lawsuits. Law firms also tend to be more vulnerable than other types ofbusinesses because they often didn’t have strong digital security. I’d seen more than one email from our small IT organization urging the firm’s partners to invest in encryption products.

“Yes.” She leaned forward. “Have you heard of GuardTower? It’s been available for three or four years. It’s one of the best programs out there for multilayered ransomware protection.”

I wrote down the name and underlined it. “It sounds vaguely familiar.” I did a quick Google search and saw that, indeed, GuardTower was very well reviewed and thousands of businesses used it for protection.

“It’s open-source software.” She paused. “Do you know what that means?”

I bit back a smile. People always forgot that IP attorneys often had technical backgrounds. “I do.” Open-source software is code that is designed to be publicly accessible—anyone can see, modify, and distribute the code. Most open-source software, like GuardTower, was also available free of charge.

“My product is an add-on to GuardTower,” she explained. “GuardTower works great, but its main criticism is that it’s not very user-friendly. You have to be an IT security specialist to really make use of all its functionality. My product was supposed to bridge the gap between GuardTower and users who aren’t super technical.”

“How so?”

She flushed a little. “I hadn’t named it yet, but I was going to call it TowerWizard or something like that. Basically, it’s an administrative console, a control panel, that makes using the product much simpler for most people. IT security professionals are really hard to keep on staff, because their skill set is so valuable. They often jump around to the highest-paid positions, and when they leave, companies have a big gap—no one who has expertise on GuardTower. My product was supposed to fix that. It’s a simpler front end. Non-security professionalscan understand the user interface and take advantage of the functionality.”

“OK.” I reviewed what I’d written so far and nodded to myself, comfortable I understood the basic gist. “What did you intend to do with TowerWizard?”

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