Here’s a bonus chapter so you can meet the other lead character, Spencer Rollins. – KG  

“I think you ought to call her.” Spencer Rollins scooted across the small office in her swivel chair, a move that intimidated the man almost more than the thought of making a date.

“And I think you’re insane.”

“Aw, come on! How are you going to get a date if you don’t ever ask anyone out?”

Henry scoffed at his coworker, though he appreciated her encouragement more than he could ever say. Spencer was quite simply the best friend he had ever had.

“You like her, don’t you?” Spencer continued to prod him.

“Yes,” he answered meekly.

“And she waved you over to her table at lunch. I’m telling you, Henry, she likes you too.”

On the surface, Henry agreed with his friend’s assessment. Kim from payroll had been very nice and it seemed that she was going out of her way to be friendly. But the young man’s confidence fell short when it came to personal relationships. At twenty-six years old, he could count on one hand the total number of dates he had ever had.

“Maybe just a movie or something, you know, something casual,” Spencer encouraged. Guys as nice as Henry Estes were rare, she thought, but few women were willing to see past the snow-white hair, red eyes, and chalky skin. In the spirit of political correctness, he called himself “pigment challenged.” But Henry was her kind of guy—smart, funny and decent—except that guys weren’t her thing.

She and Henry had worked together as programming partners for six years, the last four at Margadon Industries, where they had applied as a team when their former company went under. Headquartered amidst several industry giants in Rockville, Maryland, Margadon was a leading manufacturer of pharmaceuticals.

“Here comes another one. Only three to go.” Henry logged the report and sent it to the queue for processing.

Each Friday between five and six o’clock Eastern Time, product managers from the Margadon plants submitted final inventory figures for the week. The complex system that Spencer and Henry had designed tracked not only production, but also materials, thereby automating the inventory control and accountability. Tracking inventory was a continuous process, as each new unit of materials was earmarked to a specific product and to a unique lot number. Should quality control issues arise, line producers could easily isolate the affected shipment. Another benefit of their system was that supplies and materials were automatically reordered as they were consumed, assuring uninterrupted production.

The product managers at each of the Margadon plants, which were scattered throughout the country and abroad, were required to constantly monitor the inventory for their line of pharmaceuticals. But senior managers in Rockville couldn’t absorb that level of detail, so the Friday reports formed the basis for the executive summary that was sent to management each week. Spencer and Henry had even automated the production of the summary report so that it would be processed over the weekend and available first thing Monday morning.

“What are we missing?”

“Let’s see…we’re missing the Dolicaine…the Kryfex…and the—wait. Here comes the Dolicaine now. And the Topectol. So it’s just the Kryfex.”

Kryfex was Margadon’s new wonder drug for the Dawa virus, an autoimmune disease that was prevalent throughout eastern Africa. Last spring the company had won a massive government contract to distribute the drug through diplomatic and humanitarian channels in Ethiopia. In return, the United States military was given permission to locate a permanent air base in the northeastern part of that African country, an area essential to operations in the Middle East.

The Kryfex account was by far Margadon’s largest and most profitable contract. The terms guaranteed payment for a minimum of ten years, even if the virus was defeated.

“Come on, guys! Find your butts and get them in gear.” Spencer was growing impatient at having to wait for the final report. She had a party on tap tonight and had promised Elena she would try to get there early to help set up.

“Why don’t you go on? I’ll wait,” Henry offered.

“Nah, then I’d owe you, and you’d ask to borrow my bike.”

Henry chuckled. “Fat chance.” He had no interest at all in borrowing the big Kawasaki. It was all he could do to get on behind Spencer just to go to lunch.

Twisting in their chairs, they chatted another ten minutes as they waited for the last report from the plant outside of Little Rock. “I think I’ll give ’em a call,” Henry finally said.

As if on cue, the phone rang and Spencer lunged to grab it first. “Margadon, Spencer Rollins... Oh, no wonder.” Holding the phone aside, she explained the holdup to Henry. “It’s Tim Wall in Little Rock. He said somebody dropped the barcode reader and they didn’t have another one that worked. They had to do it all by hand.”

“Do they have the numbers?”

“Yeah, he’s going to read them off. I’ll pull up the screen.” With a few short keystrokes, Spencer accessed the Kryfex form. “Okay, Tim. Go ahead.”

One by one, Spencer entered the numbers into the corresponding fields, watching as the “Cost” columns filled automatically. That was the beauty of a well-written program, she thought, mentally congratulating herself and her partner. The final report would show the week’s production of Kryfex, its expenditure of resources, and its corresponding cost and net for the company. Only a handful of people at Margadon got to see these production figures and it was rare that Spencer or Henry did. When the data were uploaded from the barcode readers, the reports generated automatically and went directly to their boss, James Thayer, the company’s controller. He would then route them for distribution to company executives.

Spencer and Henry figured out when they were writing and testing the code that they could just about deduce the chemical formulas for nearly every product on Margadon’s shelf using only the gross quantities of ingredients and the size of shipments. As the dock manager read off the figures, Spencer found herself playing the game in her head, trying to guess the number in advance, knowing approximately how much of each component would be used for the week’s total. She was close on each part until they got to the cytokines, which were the active proteins used in Kryfex. By the quantities already listed in the report, she expected a larger number than the one Tim supplied.

“Wait a minute. Let me have the cytokines again.” She backspaced to clear the field and waited for Tim to find his place again on his sheet.

He repeated the number and she verified it. “Does that sound right to you, Tim?”

He had no idea, he said. Clearly, Tim didn’t play these formula games in his head. His job was to get the shipments in one door and out the other.

“Okay, go ahead.” Spencer tabbed to the next field and the most amazing thing happened.

“What the fuck? Sorry, Tim... Hold on.” Spencer backed up again to the cytokines field and hit the delete key. “Something’s wrong here. Give it to me one more time.”  She jotted the number on a yellow legal pad and read it back.

Her obvious confusion got Henry’s attention and he quickly came to stand behind his partner. He watched as she entered the number and tabbed to the next field. Both were shocked to see the number change.

“Did you guys switch suppliers on the cytokines? Or did they change the packaging or something?”

No, nothing had changed as far as he knew. He finished his list and Spencer finally let him go.

“Something’s fucked here, Henry.”

“Cool! I was looking for something to do this weekend,” he joked.

“I mean really fucked. If this is doing what I think it’s doing, we may be looking for new jobs next week.”

Spencer re-entered the numbers and watched as both the quantity and cost columns for the cytokines inflated when she moved to the next field. “That’s how many I think there should be, but that’s not what he said they used. Either way, somebody had to write something in our code to get that number to change all by itself.” With that thought, she was pissed. It wasn’t cool to patch someone else’s program when the original programmer was still available to do it.

“Pull up the code,” Henry suggested, wheeling his chair close to hers.

She did and they pored over what would be gibberish to most but to them was a source of immense pride. Line by line, they studied the program. Nothing in their code explained the adjustment on the data sheet.

“Look at Alvadin. It’s set up the same way,” she said.

Henry slid back to his terminal, called up the weekly report for Margadon’s protease inhibitor, and studied the field calculations. “This one’s okay. See the cytokines?” He deleted the field and re-entered. “They stay the same.” 

“So what the fuck’s going on with Kryfex?” Spencer scrolled down to the bottom of the program to see if any comments were written to denote changes, though she didn’t expect to find any.

“You sure are saying ‘fuck’ a lot.” It was an observation, not a criticism.

“That’s because I’m pissed.”

“Okay, I don’t know what’s doing that. We didn’t write it. Unless...”

“Unless it’s calling a different module.” Modules were application programs—lines and lines of syntax that caused a program to do what it was supposed to do.

“Exactly.”

Henry opened the global file, the one they applied to all of the uploaded data in order to generate the weekly reports. Without this master program of macros and loops, they would have to repeat procedures for each product manufactured by Margadon. Using the global file, they could execute all the reports with a single command. “It’s calling the right module.”

“Then where the hell is the new number coming from?” Spencer used the calculator on her partner’s desk to compute the number change for the cytokines in Kryfex. The altered figure was one-fourth higher than the one she had entered. “Okay, watch this.”

She entered 80 and hit the tab. The number changed to 100, and its cost increased by the same percentage. Then she entered 100. It changed to 125. “Somebody’s fucked with it.”

“Tell you what,” Henry offered, “why don’t you let me look at this? You’re going to be late for your party.”

“I can’t just leave you with this mess.” Spencer knew it could take hours, maybe even days, to track down a problem like this and fix it. On the other hand, Henry was the smartest programmer she knew—though she wasn’t about to give her friend the satisfaction of knowing that—so he might find the glitch and have it fixed in no time.

“I don’t mind. It’ll be fun. Besides, if you’re late, Elena will think it’s my fault and kick my ass.”

“I don’t know why you’re so afraid of her. She’s only this high.” Spencer stood up and held out her hand shoulder high, gradually moving it upward until it passed her own five-foot, ten-inch frame.

“Yeah, and not only is she taller than you, she carries a gun.”

“That’s just to pick up chicks.”

Henry laughed. “Go on. I’ll work on this and park whatever I find on the server so you can look at it over the weekend.”

The two had set up their own server years ago in Vienna when they took on a small contract for after-hours. Last year, when Margadon implemented a new policy restricting file access to the local area network, they had gotten into the habit of parking bits of code on their server so they could work on things from home. The company would have a fit if they ever found out, but no one at Margadon knew of the server except Henry and Spencer. Besides, programmers were notorious rule breakers.

She looked over his shoulder at the code. “If somebody did this on purpose, it’s really going to piss me off, Henry!”

“Fuggedabouddit! Go have fun. If it’s really that bad, it’ll still be here on Monday.”

Spencer picked up the black helmet beside her desk and grabbed her leather jacket and gloves. “Okay, but call me if you need me.”

“I will. Tell Elena I said hi.”

“Thanks, pal. I’ll tell her.”

Spencer bounded down the steps of the fire escape and exited through the back door to the employee lot. Most of the staff had gone home already, and her red Kawasaki 650 stood alone in a corner space where it usually sat alongside two Harleys. On occasion she would arrive or leave at the same time as the others and would have to endure their ridicule over her ride. But Spencer liked the feel of the Kawasaki, and the brand would always be her sentimental favorite because it was the kind of bike her father had ridden. It was also the first one he had bought for her.

She had taken up motorcycles at twelve when her father began taking her to dirt trails where youngsters could ride. When she was old enough to get her license, she got a bigger bike, and they took trips to the mountains and coast, detouring off the roadways whenever they could for a more rugged ride.

With rain and a cold snap in the forecast for tomorrow, tonight would probably be Spencer’s last ride before parking the beast on the patio of her garden apartment and covering it for the winter. Next week, she would be sitting in a long line of commuters in the car she had picked up several years ago as her “basic transportation.” The jibes she got for the Kawasaki were nothing compared to those for her Chevy Cavalier.

Spencer’s best bet for getting to Alexandria in rush hour traffic was to hop on the George Washington Memorial Parkway, as most of the commuters would be pushing their way out of the city in the opposite direction. In just under an hour, she was squeezing the bike between two cars parked in front of her friend’s townhouse.

“Agent Diaz?” she called playfully, letting herself into the foyer.

“Thank God you’re here,” a woman’s voice called from the kitchen. “I’ve got six bags of ice melting in the trunk of my car. Will you bring them in and take them out to the back porch? The keys are by the door.”

Without taking another step forward, Spencer dropped her helmet and gloves in the coat closet, grabbed the car keys and headed back out and down the steps. Making oneself at home had a whole new connotation at Elena’s house. Clutching a ten-pound bag of ice in each hand, she made the first of three trips up the stairs and through the kitchen, stopping to greet her former lover with a quick kiss on the lips.

Women and men alike admired the beauty and charms of Elena Diaz, an IRS criminal investigator whose wide brown eyes could slay from across the room. Spencer knew from experience what it felt like to have those eyes on her, and for a very brief time, she thought that she might be just the one to tame this beautiful creature. But it wasn’t to be.

“You only invited me for the heavy lifting, didn’t you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re here in case I get dumped by my date.”

“Serpiente.” Even before they became lovers, Spencer learned of Elena’s love ’em and leave ’em reputation, and dubbed her The Snake. The IRS agent had insisted that the Spanish word was much more exotic, so it became her moniker.

Spencer tossed the two bags into the large cooler and returned to the kitchen, this time wrapping her arms around the taller woman from behind. Elena was one of her favorite people in the universe, someone Spencer trusted with her life and limb, but not with her heart. The word “monogamous” just wasn’t in the Latin woman’s vocabulary.

“Kelly asked a few of her friends over,” the agent said. Kelly was Elena’s Woman of the Month.

“You mean there’ll be people here you haven’t slept with already?”

“There are always a few, Spencer.”

With a snort, Spencer bounded out the front door again for a second load, then a third, finally stopping in the kitchen to await her next orders.

Elena stopped her preparations to address her friend. “I was just thinking that if one of Kelly’s friends turned out to be cute, you might be able to turn on that charm of yours and get lucky tonight.”

“God, it’s been so long since I’ve been lucky, I wouldn’t know which end to fuck.”

“Now that’s exactly the charm I’m talking about!” Despite herself, Elena laughed at the crude remark. “Just keep talking like that and you won’t have anything to worry about.”

In the deep recesses of her heart, Elena knew that one day she would regret not accepting the simple gift of love that Spencer had offered her seven years ago. Like all of the other relationships in her life, she and Spencer had started out as passionate lovers, getting to know each other as more of an afterthought to their sexual adventures. But the more they talked about their lives, their interests and their values, the closer they drew—until one day when Spencer had uttered the words that gave a name to what they had together. 

“I love you.”

“You shouldn’t say that, you know.”

“I can’t help it.” Twisting in the bed, Spencer rolled on top of her naked lover and pinned her in place. “And I don’t want to share you anymore.”

Elena reached up and pulled her down, tucking her dark head to the side so she wouldn’t have to look into the insistent blue eyes. “You know I’m no good at that kind of stuff, Spence.”

Elena could give her heart easily to the likes of Spencer, but she knew herself well enough to know that sooner or later, another pretty lady would turn her head. She wouldn’t risk hurting someone she loved by making promises she couldn’t keep.  

With the realization that they couldn’t go forward, Spencer had taken the painful step to end what they had. She wanted more out of love than Elena could offer and she couldn’t ask Elena to be someone she wasn’t. In the end, they had forged an unbreakable bond of friendship and trust, finally getting past the lustful pull.