“Mom...” Her voice was small and hoarse. “Olivia’s in the waiting room and she’s crying...like hard.”
For a moment, Muriel legs refused, but then she leapt for the clinic doors, dread a rising swamp inside her. Something must have happened to Samuel. Olivia wouldn’t be in the waiting room unless she’d been kicked out of Samuel’s room. Plus, the woman hadn’t cried the entire time she sat beside Samuel’s bed. She’d cried for Daniel’s loss, cried at Muriel and Gracie’s grief, but she hadn’t cried for Samuel.
Instead, she’d insisted Samuel was in a healing trance, that he’d awake mentally recovered, even if his physical injuries remained. She’d waited beside his bed with stubborn optimism, without shedding even a single tear. But now...she sat hunched over in the waiting room chair, her elbows braced on her thighs, tears streaming down her face.
Muriel rushed to her, dropping down to her knees. “Livvy! What happened? What’s wrong.”
Olivia’s head lifted. Her eyes were red, her cheeks were wet, tears dripped off her chin. But her eyes weren’t drowning in sorrow; they were alight with relief.
“It’s Samuel. He’s awake!”
Chapter eighteen
Day 29
Washington, D.C.
“It’s definitely a virus of some sort,” the IT guy said through Clark’s laptop screen. As though that information, which Clark already knew, was worth the big bucks Clark was paying him. “It’s shutting down your systems one by one.”
Clark clenched his jaw. “How about you tell me something I don’t know?”
The ongoing systems shutdowns was why he’d called the jackass in the first place. The Nantz Building had already lost its wi-fi, elevators, and security panels. They couldn’t afford to lose anything else.
A grinding pain shot through his jaw. Damn, he was grinding his teeth again. Much more of this and his pearly whites would be nothing more than gritty nubs.
The IT guy was sitting in front of the main interface computer in the computer hub. The hub was located on the second floor. A good thing too, since the overweight and under-exercised computer nerd only had to huff and puff his way up a single flight of stairs. Not that Clark had witnessed the huffing and puffing since he was currently stuck on the fifteenth floor.
Damn elevators.
He could walk down the stairs, of course, if he could access the security panel in front of the fifteenth-floor door. Too bad the panel was inoperable. He’d been stuck here for three days, while various IT companies tried to get the infected systems back up. None of the companies he’d hired had proved successful. Instead, more operations kept failing.
Luckily, the penthouse floor came with a suite of rooms behind his office. He had a kitchen, with a refrigerator full of food, along with a bedroom and full bathroom. All the comforts of home.
He might not be able to go anywhere, but at least his prison was a gilded one.
“Have to say,” the IT guy said around the pencil clamped between his yellow teeth, “I’ve never seen anything quite like this” He hammered away at the keyboard for what felt like minutes, but was probably only a few seconds, then leaned against the chair’s backrest and tossed down the pencil. “This virus is quite...unusual. I’ve never seen code like this.”
A comment that did not inspire confidence. Clark unlocked his jaw long enough to ask, “Can you clean it?”
The guy picked the pencil back up and twirled it between his fingers. “Maybe. Maybe not. Depends on whether I can crack its code. Any idea how you picked it up?”
“No idea.” Clark lied.
He knew exactly how he’d picked the virus up. Hell, he’d installed it himself. Not that he could admit that. It had been a serious error in judgement to hire TermX to create the virus. And now he was looking at millions of dollars in damage for a virus that hadn’t affected the NNB26 prototype at all.
He’d tried to claw back the first half of the payment he’d sent TermX, but the money was long gone. Even worse, the second half of the payment, along with all the money sitting in that account, had vanished. The bastard had stolen over fifty million from him.
He found it enraging that he couldn’t do anything about the theft. But he couldn’t go to the authorities. Reporting the con would raise questions. Too many questions. Questions he couldn’t afford to answer.
“When will you know if you can neutralize the virus?” Clark asked.
“A day or two.” The IT guy mumbled, as he tapped at the keyboard, that disgusting pencil clamped between his teeth again.
“Keep me apprised.” Clark exited the video call and pushed back his chair.
He considered worst-case scenarios as he wandered over to the penthouse window and stared down at Washington DC. The view wasn’t as impressive during the day with all the sparkling lights and reflections muted. Even the White House and Pentagon looked tired and shabby.
Nantz Industries’s data was automatically backed up multiple times a day on an offsite server. The firewall around the server was virus resistant. If he had to ditch the building’s computer system, he wouldn’t lose anything irreplaceable. But damn, talk about a time and money suck.
