They’d outbid her when she first tried to buy the penthouse, and it was a grudge she would not allow to go unanswered, although she’d bided her time for the past three years.
She swirled her cold liquor in the glass. I guess I am like my father in some ways.
If nothing else, she could have drugs planted in their unit and then, safely hidden in the wings, arrange for them to quietly leave the country and never return as long as they abandoned their assets.
Under the guise of being a concerned neighbor, obviously.
Not for the first time, she idly wondered about killing her father. It was an option she’d rejected for many years, but the older he grew, the easier it would be to make it look like an accident or natural causes. Swap out his medication so it looked like he accidentally took too much, overdose him with insulin—maybe even shove him down the stairs one night, or stage a fall in his shower and make it look like he hit his head.
The elderly did tend to have household accidents at a higher rate than the general population.
But if she could pull off this business deal and enrich herself, it would allow her breathing room, let her bide her time and not hastily act, not do something that would be easily attributed to a daughter wishing to speed up the timeline of her inheritance.
Besides, if she selected that course of action, she first needed to make sure he hadn’t done something like change his will.
With her own wealth, however, it would make her less suspicious should she need to investigate that path.
There was no rush. For all she knew, he might not wake up tomorrow morning, and her problems would solve themselves. She’d be free to run the company as well as pursue her other…interests.
If only I were that lucky.
Then again, sometimes people needed to make their own luck.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Ken
When Ken’s work phone buzzed with a text he softly swore. It was an alert he’d set up for Miranda Segura’s computer.
Peyton looked up. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” he muttered, setting his tablet aside and dragging his laptop in front of him.
Jake, Peyton, Trevor, and Ken were in the process of scouring satellite photos of the region near Jake’s old hideaway, backtracking in an effort to locate the lab site and the barn.
Ken’s fingers flew across the keyboard as he logged in and pulled the latest data from his back-door access point. “Goddammit, she plugged a thumb drive into her personal laptop. It’s got a bunch of spreadsheets and other files, but someone also dropped a spyware payload that loaded into her computer as soon as she plugged it in. Stupid woman.”
“What kind of payload?” Peyton asked.
“Not sure yet.” It appeared to contain several scripts, a keystroke logger, and had been configured to send data remotely to an IP address on a server located in South America. It didn’t appear to give the person remote access, however, much to Ken’s relief.
“Did someone find your software?” Peyton asked.
“No, not yet.” As he traced through the spyware that had downloaded to her hard drive, he realized it was older, not as sophisticated as the software he used. Whoever had copied the other files onto the drive, it looked like they all originated from the same computer that copied the spyware to the thumb drive.
Fortunately, he quickly spotted a way to render the keystroke logger ineffective by having it hash and encrypt the data, so it routed it through Ken’s hands first so he could scrub it before bouncing it on its way.
And this software was one-way—data out only. They couldn’t use the software they installed to remotely access and send data or instructions to her laptop.
Phhpt. Amateur.
He tuned out the other men as he worked, setting up a hidden partition on her hard drive so the spyware wouldn’t be able to see Ken’s software, and simultaneously cutting off swaths of her hard drive to its access while shifting it to a hidden guest function. It would look like it was still accessing the drive, but not be able to get to the partition she was actively using. Unfortunately, the keystroke logger was a different beast, and to silo that completely would likely look suspicious to whoever had infected her laptop.
She still had the thumb drive plugged in, so he quickly mirrored its full contents, including all the metadata included when it was formatted, to another encrypted cloud drive he was using for this. Then he could go through it and not worry if she logged off her computer.
He sat back when, thirty seconds later, she did just that.
“Whew.”
