“Hop out,” he said, “I have something to show you.”
Rob went around to her side of the car and guided her across the sidewalk to a picket fence.
“I saw it one morning last week when Tim and I were out biking,” he said. “What do you think?”
The white Cape Cod occupied a corner lot with a collection of nicely trimmed shrubs. A young boy and girl were playing on a swing set in the back yard.
“What am I supposed to be looking at?” Lesley asked.
“There are bigger ones but this one seemed perfect.”
“You mean the house?”
“I can’t live in an apartment forever.”
She turned to face him. “You mean you want to—”
Her breath caught in her throat. Rob was down on one knee and held a tiny box open in his hand. The box contained a diamond ring.
Lesley found she could no longer breathe. Was this really happening? Right here? Right now?
He reached out with his free hand to hold one of hers.
“Some day I’d like to carry you over the threshold into a house like this,” he said, “but first you have to agree to marry me.”
Lesley felt tears well up in her eyes. She had never realized before then just how long she had been dreaming of this moment. She bit her lip and stared at the ring that sat so innocently in the little box with the lid flipped up. Two smaller stones flanked a good-sized diamond in the middle of the setting.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
“Will you marry me?”
Lesley peered into his dark brown eyes and felt a flush of warmth flood through her. His gaze made her feel loved and safe, like there was nowhere else on Earth she would rather be than with him, now or at any other time.
“Of course I’ll marry you,” she said.
He rose to his feet and took the ring out of the box. Lesley’s hand trembled as he slipped it on her finger. She flung her arms around his neck, gave him a hard squeeze, then pulled back to look at the ring once more.
“It fits perfectly,” she said.
“I borrowed a ring from your jewelry box so the store could size it for you.”
“Mom will freak.”
“Probably. You want to call her tonight? Or we could drive home and show her on the weekend.”
Lesley’s eyes were still on the ring. “I don’t know. I’d rather do it in person but I don’t think I can wait that long.” She looked up at him. “Have you told your parents?”
“I haven’t told anybody. I was dying to tell Tim before I left work today, but I didn’t.”
She looked back at the house.
“Do the kids in the back yard come with the house?” she said.
“I think we have to supply those ourselves.”
She wiped at her cheeks and ended up with black smudges on her hand.
“We better stop somewhere so I can fix my makeup.”
“We can stop at my place,” Rob said, “but we should probably get going. Antonio’s has a bottle of wine chilled for us and a corner table with our name on it.”
“I like the sound of that.”
“It’s a nice place.”
“No, I mean what you just said … our name.”
The kiss was long and passionate, after which Lesley’s face wasn’t the only one with smudges.
Tim looked around the spare bedroom while he waited for Rob’s computer to boot up. He was searching for a suitable place to hide the sheet of paper he had brought in his knapsack.
A sagging ski poster hung on one wall over a set of bookshelves made of one-by-eights and red bricks. Some of the textbooks on the shelves took Tim back in time. Database Design. Rob had made one mark higher in that course but ended up with an A-minus to Tim’s B-plus. It still pissed Tim off to think of it.
The computer sat on a beat-up oak desk. Tim remembered the struggle he and Rob had squeezing the old desk out the front door of Rob’s home back in Worcester when they were both leaving for college.
The desk was probably the best place to hide the paper. He needed somewhere Rob wouldn’t happen upon the page for a couple of days, but where a dedicated search would be sure to find it. Tim wasn’t sure if the bank’s security people would actually search Rob’s apartment. He had no idea whether they had the legal right to do so, or what sort of investigative capabilities they had. Could they check fingerprints? Would they be able to trace the electronic trails Tim was creating? He didn’t know, but he was going to make sure all the evidence pointed in the same direction.
Tim smiled at the thought of a grim-faced crew pawing through all the desks and file cabinets of the bank’s IT staff, and of the moment when one of them would call to his supervisor, “Sir, I think you should look at this.” Tim could only guess which of his bread crumb trails would lead them to Rob, but he was certain of one thing; the bank would keep it quiet. He had seen it before when a First Malden teller named Janeen Colwell was caught helping her friends with a check kiting scheme. She had been quietly fired, with no charges laid and no police involvement. The only long-term consequence was that she would receive no reference from the bank. As Tim understood the policy, protecting the public image of the bank’s security trumped any desire for punishment.
Tim had every confidence that policy was about to be invoked again, in a big way.
He pulled open the top desk drawer and selected one of Rob’s pens. Laying the sheet of paper on the desk, he circled part of the text, drew a happy face next to it, then turned the paper over and doodled on the back. He put the pen away and the paper went in the bottom desk drawer, face down under a mound of junk mail and old bills.
By this time the computer was ready. Tim produced a memory stick, which contained a program he had created to send emails to selected people at First Malden. The first batch of emails would go out right away, after which Tim’s program would wait until two p.m. Eastern Time the following afternoon and then send a second series of messages. The emails could not travel directly from Rob’s home computer to their final destinations, though. That was too obvious. Tim had to insert a couple of levels of misdirection to make the scenario realistic.
He was still amazed at how easy it had been to gain access to the computer accounts he needed. The scripts he had downloaded from the hacker web site had been easy to use. It had taken him less than half an hour to gather IDs and passwords for dozens of computer accounts across the country. Today he needed only two.
The first account was at the University of Kentucky. A few taps on the keyboard and the program containing his email message flew off down the telephone line to land in Lexington. It felt strange to type with the latex gloves on.
From the Kentucky account, Tim signed on to a UCLA computer and the program made another hop through cyberspace. He issued a few commands to create a new email id, then started his program running. In a second-floor lab on the west coast campus, the wait for tomorrow began.
Tim sat back and swiveled his head to release the tension in his neck. It seemed unreal that his plan was finally underway. He reached for the mouse to begin shutting down the computer, but then froze when he heard voices in the hallway outside Rob’s apartment. Adrenaline coursed through his body when he recognized Rob’s voice. What happened to dinner?
Tim didn’t have time to go through the normal steps to shut down the machine. He pushed the power button and held it until the computer shut off, did the same for the monitor, then looked around frantically for a place to hide.
There was only one option. He grabbed his knapsack, ducked into the spare bedroom’s closet, wedged himself in one corner behind some clothes and pulled the folding door shut.