In Deep with the FBI Agent (9 page)

How did he have the patience to keep the kiss this slow? It was a prelude, an interlude, and she'd be thinking about it all night, she realized when he suddenly pulled back.

“Sam,” she said on an exhale, and it sounded as if she was asking for more, but he was helping her off her stool and leading her into the living room and onto the couch. He took a seat in the rolling computer desk chair, keeping his distance from her, which was probably a good thing, because she couldn't guarantee she wouldn't jump on him and invite further intimacy.

She needed time and space to think about this new development in her long history with Sam. And her mom was having a bad week. She didn't have time to get fired or mess around.

University of Maryland, Fall 2005

C
asey,” Sam shouted across the large, crowded campus food court. He was sitting with a group of his new friends, all from his C++ coding class, and thought he saw Casey Cooper's doppelgänger until he realized it actually was Casey Cooper. What was she doing here? She was supposed to be at Williams.

Casey didn't turn around, and so Sam ditched his lunch, asking his tablemates to watch it for a second, then sprinted out of the building. It was too late; she was gone. Sam squinted into the bright sun and then went back to his meal. He'd just joined MySpace, and he could log in later and check to see if Casey was on there too.

Or he could email some high school friends who might know why she was at U.M. with him. Maybe she'd made the same financial decision he'd made. Although he'd received financial aid from MIT, he still would have ended college in serious debt. He and his parents had made the mutual decision that it was smarter to go to his state university and graduate with honors and no debt.

Casey had been on scholarship, same as him, back at Montgomery Prep. Perhaps her mother had crunched the numbers of a prestigious private university over the summer and given the command for a public university.

“
Where'd you go?” his roommate, Kevin, asked as Sam rejoined his lunch mates.

“
Thought I saw a high school friend,” Sam replied. “No worries. I'll find her later.”

“
That skinny chick? She was hot.”

“
You were friends with her?”

Sam could understand the disbelief. Now that he was out of a small high school, he'd discovered the world was a big place with lots of kids who preferred HTML to hockey. “Uh, yeah, sort of. My high school was a small place. Everyone knew each other.”

“
Well, introduce me,” Kevin said and made some kind of weird huffing noise crossed with a laugh.

Sam gave a noncommittal smile. First he had to find Casey and discover what she was doing here.

Sam stared at the email he'd typed and hovered his mouse over the Send button. It had been exactly seventeen hours since he'd driven Casey back to her car at Montgomery Prep and roughly eighteen hours since he'd kissed her.

Man, his lips still tingled from the taste and the sheer glory of finally kissing her and having her reciprocate. His stupid senior year graduation impulse didn't count. He'd been at a graduation party, one of the few class parties he'd attended, and chased after Casey as she'd been leaving. In his mind he was never going to see her again and he wanted to do something crazy.

So he'd run outside after her, called her name, congratulated her on graduating, and he'd kissed her. A quick peck on the lips—nothing like last night's sexy torture—and then he'd congratulated himself on being Mr. Cool as he'd turned and walked back into the party. He hadn't dreamed that over the summer she'd change her mind about attending Williams College and would instead enroll at the University of Maryland, same as him.

Sam reread the email and then hit Save As Draft instead of selecting Send. He'd spent several hours into the early morning researching eating disorders, and he realized how little he knew about Casey Cooper. If there had been a high school poll about which student had life the most together, she would have won, hands down. She had, in fact, won Girl Most Likely to Succeed in their senior year and was pictured in their yearbook smiling with an arm around Ian Hochstein, who, last Sam had heard, was just out of medical residency.

Casey's life had all been a front, a façade to hide her deep insecurity about her body image. Never in a million years would Sam have guessed that the most popular girl in school, and, in his opinion, the prettiest, would be anything less than one hundred percent confident.

It might make him a horrible person, but he actually liked her better because of her eating disorder. Her condition made her real, and while he absolutely wanted her physically and emotionally healthy, he liked knowing she wasn't actually as perfect as she pretended.

He also understood that he had to go slowly with Casey. If he was going to earn a relationship with her, he couldn't play games. Not that he normally played games in his dating life, but Casey had trusted him with her biggest secret last night and now he had to prove he was worthy of her gift.

Therefore, the email he'd typed early this morning was on hold. It was the kind of email he typically sent the morning after a good first date. He never wanted to keep women guessing, so he always sent a quick
I had fun, hope to see you soon
email or text if he wanted to see a woman again. If they responded, great, and if they ignored him, either they were playing a head game and he had no inclination to pursue them or they weren't interested, and better he should know early.

After he'd dropped off Casey last night, he'd had to force himself to drive home and not text her from the parking lot to tell her he had a good time and wanted to see her again. For one, it was borderline stalker behavior, and two, he'd made his intentions pretty clear in his kitchen. Casey had liked his declaration if the hitch in her breath and body language had been any indication.

Sam had had a little training on body language and facial clues, and Casey had given clear signals that she liked when he got in her face and told her they were going to date. She'd more than liked his kiss. It had taken all of Sam's willpower to back off the kiss and not take it further. He'd purposely sat on his office chair, leaving her alone on the couch, even knowing that he likely could have gotten a lot further with her if he'd tried.

It would have been a one-night thing. He didn't know how he knew this, but he knew if he'd let Casey share the ugly details of her eating disorder with him and then he'd taken advantage of her vulnerability and their mutual attraction, it would have been a great night, but it would have been the only one with her. He wanted more; he wanted it all.

It was going to take planning and finesse. His usual post-date one-line email wasn't going to cut it. She needed a phone call, and it was one he didn't want to make from the non-privacy of his work cubicle. And then he smiled, because he knew exactly how to communicate with Casey: the same way he had all through high school—with a note, but this time, instead of her locker, on her desk at work.

Speaking of work, another private school had been hit. Sam had done his best to track the source of the hack, but the guy was good. Russian mafia good. None of it made sense. With all the multibillion-dollar corporations and banks out there, why waste time and energy hitting small private schools? Someone this good at infiltrating was wasting his talents. The question was why.

He picked up the phone to tap his usual source when a hack had him stumped, and set an appointment for ten the next morning to give him time to drive out to West Virginia.

The next day, it took him a little longer than usual to get to Morgantown federal prison. He tried to get out here at least once or twice a year in a non-official capacity to visit his college roommate, but today it was all official business.

Kevin entered the private secure visiting room clad in the dismal required uniform. He was only a month older than Sam, but he looked at least fifty. Prison did that to a person. Two years after they graduated, Sam had learned how his roommate had always seemed to have money during their cash-strapped student days. He'd been installing spyware on nearly every computer and kiosk ATM on campus. He hadn't touched Sam's computer, because it would have been uncool to steal from his best friend, and Sam was smart enough to catch the malware.

It was shortly after Kevin was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison that Sam joined the FBI. He'd been recruited his senior year, but turned it down in search of more lucrative offerings until he was confronted up close and personal with the effects of a hacker.

“Sam Cooper.” Kevin's greeting was his usual effusive voice, but there was weariness in his tone. He was more than halfway through his prison sentence, and the lack of freedom had to be getting to him. Granted, it was a minimum-security prison, which some liked to joke was a country club, but there was nothing luxurious or fun about having your every movement monitored and regulated by someone other than yourself. “What are you doing here? I usually expect you around Christmas.”

Sam pulled up a chair. “I can't come visit my old college roommate?”

“It's not visiting hours,” Kevin pointed out.

“What's the point of being an FBI agent if I can't use the perk to visit you on a day and time convenient for me?”

Kevin's eyes narrowed. “It's ten o'clock on a workday.”

Sam said nothing and waited. A light of interest sparked in Kevin's otherwise dimmed expression. “Something's going on, but I haven't read anything in the papers. You always call me to discuss a hack you can't solve. What is it this time? A bank? Walmart?” It was one of Kevin's punishments that he was not allowed on or near a computer for the duration of his incarceration. He was forced to read the newspaper in print, something Sam knew grated.

Sam kept his silence in a mutual understanding. Kevin might have been his closest friend at one time, but he was still a criminal and Sam was in law enforcement. But if anyone could understand hacker motivation, it was Kevin.

Sam watched as Kevin's excellent computer-for-a-brain memory went back through the last week of news.

Finally, Kevin snapped to attention. “The school in California. It was hacked.”

Still, Sam kept his silence.

“There were other school hackings, weren't there? Nothing big was stolen or it would've made the papers in a bigger way. Am I right?” But Kevin didn't pause or wait for Sam's confirmation, which was good because he would have received none.

Kevin tapped the table, his brain on overdrive. “Lots of school hackings, but no big financial losses…you need a motivation…” The finger tapping stopped and he looked Sam dead-on. “Grade changing.”

“At more than one school?” Sam let slip and inwardly cursed. This was supposed to be a social visit in which he said nothing and Kevin gave his investigation a boost.

“You hacked into your school computer in high school, didn't you? And you weren't even slightly tempted to change any grades?”

“What would've been the point? I already had all As.”

“And if you hadn't?” Kevin asked.

Sam shrugged. “Then, sure, I would've been tempted, but I wouldn't have done it.”

“You have to find out who stands to benefit from changed grades.”

“You think students across the country might have banded together in a conspiracy to change grades?”

Kevin grinned, revealing teeth badly in need of a dental checkup. “Hey, stranger things have happened, right?”

“True.” Sam stood, knowing their twenty minutes were up and he had a long drive back to D.C. “Good seeing you, Kevin.”

“Thanks. You too.”

Sam turned to go, but Kevin called to him as his hand was on the door handle to leave.

“Hey, Sam, maybe when I get out, I could come work for the FBI? You know, as a consultant or something.”

He sounded eager, and Sam didn't have the heart to tell him a criminal record was a no-go in his office, but there were other departments that loved to hire former hackers. He swiveled back to give Kevin a grin. “Stranger things have happened. We'll keep in touch.”

He drove back to D.C. in a funk. Seeing Kevin in prison always affected him. It was easy to deny that he would have changed his grades in high school, but he'd never been put to a true moral test. As always, when he saw Kevin, the expression “There but for the grace of God go I” resonated.

The similarities between Sam and Kevin were striking. Both had similar computer skills and academic acumen, both boys had been on scholarship, and both had been computer science majors. Paying tuition and other expenses hadn't been easy for Sam's parents and him. Who was to say whether he would have made a better choice than Kevin if faced with having to drop out of college because he hadn't been able to pay his tuition, which was what happened to Kevin.

Without much forethought, he pushed his earpiece in his ear and dialed a phone number that was on top of his most recently dialed list.

“Sam?”

Casey's voice instantly soothed something inside him.

“Sam, is this you? I'm busy at work, can I call you back?”

He ignored her request to call him later. He wanted—no, needed—to hear her voice now. “Did I ever tell you my college roommate was convicted of grand larceny and three felony counts?”

There was a startled silence. “No. I never knew that. He was that tall kid with the bad haircut, right?” Casey and Kevin had met once in college.

“He's serving a six-year sentence in West Virginia. I visited him this morning, and I'm driving back from there now. But you have to go back to work. I didn't mean to bother you.”

“No,” Casey said, “no, I can talk.”

So Sam talked. He shared with Casey how hard it was to see Kevin's mental and physical health deteriorate under the federal prison system. He shared how easily he could've been caught up in Kevin's scam.

“Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night dreaming that Kevin had asked me to hack computers with him and I said yes. I wake up dreaming I'm in prison,” he confessed.

“Did he ever ask you to be part of his scam?”

“No, but what if he had? I wonder if I would've had the moral fiber to say no. And even more, would I have had the balls to turn him in? He was my best friend.”

“Yes,” Casey said immediately. “You're one of the most moral people I know. You would've turned him in, and you never would've stolen from people.”