Free Once Upon a Matchmaker by Marie Ferrarella Page B

back and give him total access to your hardware.”
    Tracy could tell that he took this to be the ultimate show of distrust, even if he could probably see the reason for the random tests.
    “No last-minute keying in of any codes or saving any material you might have been working on,” Micah continued. “You have to instantly raise your hands away from the keyboard and give the guy room to run his test.”
    Tracy saw the need for this, but at the same time, it was incredibly invasive. It showed that there was no trust, no bond between management and the people who worked for them.
    “Have you ever had one of these tests run on your hardware before?” she asked.
    “No, but I’ve only been working on black programs for the last two years—I’ve had the laptop for eighteen months,” he added, trying to give her as much information as he could.
    “Black programs,” she repeated.
    “That’s what they’re called,” he explained, answering her unspoken question. “Most likely because whenever there’s any paperwork involved, whole sections are indelibly and permanently blacked out with a black marker.”
    Interesting though it was, she was getting sidetracked and got back to the pertinent questions. “All right, so this is the first time that this has happened?” she asked again.
    His smile was just the slightest bit lopsided as he told her, “There is no second time if they find something to arouse their suspicions. This kind of thing is grounds for instant dismissal, not to mention being brought up on charges.”
    “But you haven’t been dismissed yet, have you?” she asked. He’d told her that he was working today. If what he’d just told her was true, then he’d lied about working. Something wasn’t adding up here.
    “Due to all the layoffs that have been taking place in the last couple of years, the company’s really shorthanded. I’ve been with Donovan Defense for more than ten years—I interned with them while I was still in college,” he explained, in case the numbers didn’t work for her. “Because of that, and the fact that I’ve worked for several different areas within the company, I’ve got a broad spectrum of knowledge that they need so they don’t want to get rid of me altogether. But I have been placed on restricted duty,” he assured her, none too happily. As far as he was concerned, he was now doing grunt work and he hated it. “They have me doing end-of-day reports and quantifying—well, never mind. It’s actually even more dull than it sounds,” he told her.
    And he didn’t do “dull” well, she thought. Who did? Tracy mused, knowing how she’d feel in his place. A person liked to be challenged, to strive to do their very best. Rote work didn’t allow for that factor. It tended to put the person who was doing it to sleep.
    “So exactly what was found when they did their impromptu raid on your laptop?” she asked.
    He’d gone over this a hundred times in his mind, trying to figure out how it had happened—and when. He still had no answers.
    “That the firewall had been breached and it looked as if someone outside the company got into my hard drive. These laptops are programmed so that only certain internal computers can communicate with them.”
    A closed circuit, she thought. “In other words—ideally—if I sent you an email from my office to your laptop, it would just bounce back,” she asked, wanting to make sure they were on the same page with this.
    Micah nodded. “Exactly.”
    She was fishing now, but she had to start somewhere. “Could you have done something to, say, tweak your laptop so that you could receive messages from me if you wanted to?”
    She was asking him if he was a hacker, Micah thought. “That is entirely above my pay level,” he told her whimsically. And then he became serious as he gave her a little more background about himself. He had a love/hate relationship with computers. “Computers for me are an acquired taste. When