"So what?" Maura prodded.
"So, I pretended I had to hit the bathroom and escaped."
"Are you daft?" She smacked him hard on the shoulder. "You had two cute girls wanting to dance with you and you bolted? That makes you a legend among men, Nicholas! Why?"
His head dropped lower. "Don't know how."
"To what? You don't know how to what?"
"Dance." His guileless face looked back up at her. "I can't dance."
"Don't be silly, Nicholas. Everyone can dance," Maura encouraged. "Let me see."
"What?" His eyes were wide.
"Show me," she said, “it’s not like we can do anything else while we’re waiting. And god, I need the distraction.” Maura plugged her phone into a speaker and selected a song. Rising to her feet, she pulled her protesting lab partner up, taking his hands. "All you need are a couple of moves, rinse, repeat, and you're a brilliant dancer."
Nicholas whined, grudgingly moving his feet from side to side. "Loosen up!" she commanded, putting one hand on his hip and one of his sweating paws on her waist. "Okay, feel that? Just move your hips like so..." Getting into the music a little, he awkwardly tried to follow her. "Here, close your eyes," Maura encouraged. "Feel that bass beat? It's got a great African feel to it, swing your hips in the same rhythm, see? See? Like that!"
Closing her eyes too, she smiled happily. Nothing felt better to her than a night of dancing, where she could be invisible in a crowd, moving to the music, free from herself and the burden of all the secrets she kept. But no happy moment at the Corporation could last without being cut short, this time by the irritated clearing of a throat inside the lab. It was Holbrook who let out the feminine-sounding shriek of surprise as they turned to see James Pine and Simon Fassell staring at them disapprovingly.
"Oh, God!" he gulped, "Sorry, we've just been waiting for the search torrent to finish."
"So we see," Fassell said. "How... reassuring to see your people are on top of this major security breach, James."
"We are, Mr. Fassell," interrupted Maura. "The program is finishing its last cycle, so you'll have the report in minutes."
Fassell lazily strolled over, seating himself on her computer desk. "Very good, Maura. Why don't you show me how you implement this?"
She politely explained, staying as far away from him as she could without being obvious.
The next fifteen minutes were excruciating. Fassell’s creepy grey eyes never left her face and he forced her to continue the conversation while they all waited for the program to finish. The tone sounded for the end of the search program and she tried not to sag in relief. She disliked Fassell the most of any of the partners. The Murder Triplets (her never spoken aloud nickname for them) all ordered kills, sometimes even performed them in person. But he enjoyed the terror and the begging and was quick to take the gun himself. The one execution she was forced to witness was his, Maura stood shaking as he shot one of his own security detail for drinking on duty. She could still feel the hard grip on the back of her neck, one of the Corporation guards forcing her to watch.
Nicholas tried to comfort her when she stumbled back to the lab. "They make everyone watch one, an execution," he said as he offered her a mug of tea. "Ms. Kingston thinks it impresses the importance of doing our job well."
"Yeah, it did that." She forced her voice to stay level. After six years as an active-duty intelligence operative for MI6, Maura had seen death before. She'd even been forced to shoot and kill two men to save her partner. But the seriousness of taking a life turned macabre and disgusting when she saw how much he’d enjoyed causing it.
Forcing her attention back to the present, she watched James take the search results from Nicholas and walk over to Fassell as they examined them together. After a moment, Fassell looked at them both. "You know, of course, to never speak of this again. If you do, you'll receive the same fate as this fool is about to face."
"Don't threaten my team," James cut in irritably. "They've performed admirably and proved their innocence. You two, take an early day. You've earned it."
***
But when James walked past their office two hours later, Maura was still hard at work, intent on some programming model she was altering with deft taps to the keyboard. "I believe I told you to take the rest of the day off, MacLaren."
Eyes still glued to her monitor, she apologized, "I'm sorry Mr. Pine, the Tokyo division needed this program model to finish a net we're running on the Okahsa securities transfer. I'm nearly finished."
James leaned over her, looking at her monitor. "That's a surprisingly elegant design," he said. "How do you activate it?"
Maura lit up, she loved talking nerd code. "We found the firewall entry in Okasha's platform and sent the spyware back through a routine transaction. This program activates the net when the code sequence for the transaction inputs into the system. We'll have the tracking numbers for the next forty transactions and the routing numbers. I have a feeling Okasha Senior is skimming off every fifth transaction."
His dark brow quirked, "Why the fifth?"
Maura shrugged. "Anything closer together would disrupt the security algorithm and alert the system."
"Very well done, MacLaren," James gave her a nod. "Are you angling for another bonus?"
Maura was painfully aware of how close he was standing to her, feeling the heat of him against her back and smelling the crisp scent of his cologne. It troubled her that the feeling was vastly different than enduring the homicidal Fassell's scrutiny earlier. This felt... good? She frowned and quickly returned her gaze to her computer monitor. "You pay me enough, Mr. Pine."
