Author's Note: The prologue is from Cody's POV, but the rest of the story will be from Bethany's POV. Updates will be every Sunday! I hope you enjoy reading about these characters as much as I enjoy writing about them! If you do, star, comment, follow :)
Prologue
Friday, September 12th 4:27 p.m. PST, 29 days to deadline
Cody pushed open the door to the Sand Shack Surf Shop, setting off a jangling noise as a bundle of sea shells and colored glass above the entrance shook. Thanks to his team’s previous surveillance reports, he knew the pretty brunette who approached him was named Bethany Meyer before she ever got close enough for him to read her name tag. Thanks to his own research, he knew the girl’s name, age, address, social security number, and even that she’d broken her arm in third grade. Maybe accessing her medical records had been overkill, but he’d had a feeling they would need to use this girl, and he liked to be prepared for all eventualities.
“Hi! Welcome to the Sand Shack. Can I help you find something today?”
Her speech was clearly rehearsed, something she had said hundreds of times before, but her smile was genuine. It reached her crystal blue eyes, and Cody was struck by how light they were. The DMV photo he’d seen of her didn’t capture the way they pierced you when she looked at you.
Cody shook himself and returned her smile, feeling unexpectedly glad he was the one to make first contact. “Actually, I was wondering if I could speak to your manager. I want to put in an application.”
“Oh, sorry. I’m the only one here right now and we’re not hiring.” The sympathetic look she gave him was just as genuine as her smile, and he had a moment of regret that he wouldn’t be the team member working with her. Then again, she might be the one that ended up making room for his team. He hoped not. Her answer confirmed what he already knew, and with her assertion that the shop was empty he initiated the next phase of his plan.
He hung his head in mock disappointment. “Damn.” Then he slowly raised his head, winked at her, and grinned. “Since you’ve destroyed my dream of working in a genuine California surf shop, would you at least let me use the bathroom before I go? You have to say yes now.”
He expected the kind of girlish giggle Dominic usually elicited from the girls he flirted with. Either he just wasn’t as adept at flirting as Dom, or Bethany wasn’t a giggler. He filed that away in his mental dossier on her as she rolled her eyes at him, still smiling, and pointed towards a door behind the counter at the back of the store marked Employees Only. “Second door on the left through there.”
Bethany followed him as he traversed the sales floor, and he momentarily panicked thinking she was going to come into the back with him. He was reaching for the phone in his pocket to send a text for backup when the door jangled, alerting them that someone else had entered the store. Bethany reversed course, going to greet the middle aged couple who walked in. Saved by the seashells.
Cody had memorized the blueprints of the building the week prior. It was basically one big square, with the front two thirds of the space comprising the sales floor and the back third divided into three areas. On his left was a door that led to the manager’s office, followed by the door that led to the bathroom. To his right was open space that held the extra inventory and the employee lounge.
Directly across from the door he’d come through was an emergency exit that led to the alley behind the shopping center the surf shop was located in. He could see now why Dom had been unable to break into the store through it the night before. No one was better at picking locks than Dom, but even he couldn’t open a door that was chained and padlocked from the inside. Cody shook his head at the hazard. It was breaking all kinds of fire and safety codes.
He scanned the ceiling, spotting a single wide angle security camera in the southwest corner of the room. Based on the angle, it would pick up the entire room and both entrances. There was a brand name and product number listed on the side of it. He quickly searched the camera model on his phone and read through the specs as he entered the office. It wasn’t high tech. You could buy one at any electronics store for less than $200.
Cody was the technical expert of his team. They called him a hacker, but he hated that term. The truth was, ninety percent of his job required nothing more than a smartphone and a search engine. He was fully capable of pulling off the kinds of cyber intrusions that constituted traditional “hacking”, but nine times out of ten it just wasn’t needed.
Accessing the store’s security feed was as simple as turning on the computer in the office and clicking on the desktop icon labelled “Cameras.” The program was a closed circuit system tied to the computer in the office and remotely accessible by anyone with access to the email address associated with the account.
Hacking was all about finding the flaw in a closed system that would allow you to access it—the back door. This system didn’t have a back door. It had a front door…that was wide open and had a sign out front saying Open House: Come on in! All Cody had to do was open the settings tab on the camera program and click “add account.” He entered a dummy email address he’d set up earlier, opened the confirmation email on his phone a second later, and clicked the link included that said “Confirm account.”
If anyone bothered to examine the program closely they would see that there were two email addresses registered to access the cameras. The original account was the store’s email account. The one Cody had created was similar, but he had added the word “management” to it. He felt confident the intrusion would go unnoticed, though.
He checked his watch, noting that three minutes had passed since he entered the back of the store. He had two minutes left before his self-imposed time limit ran out. A quick scan of the camera program showed there was no security camera in the office. The room was small, with a desk taking up almost the entire room. There was just enough space left for a chair and a couple of filing cabinets. It was an interior room, so there were no windows, and the walls were mostly bare except for a bulletin board above the desk that held a calendar, numerous post its, a few mug shots of shop lifters, and a single picture of a lone surfer riding a wave. The surface of the desk was piled with papers, office supplies, and random junk.
The best vantage point to plant a camera would be the ceiling, but there was nothing to camouflage it. Cody had three different cameras in his pocket. The smallest was designed to be hidden inside a smoke detector or ceiling fan, neither of which the office had. The second looked like an air freshener you plug into an outlet. Despite being close to the floor it had an impressive range, but the only outlets in the room were under the desk. Watching feet would be useless. The last option was a classic—the pen cam. It looked like a somewhat fancy ballpoint pen. It even wrote like one. There was a cup on the corner of the desk that held an assortment of writing utensils and scissors. He ran his hand through his hair, running through possible scenarios in his head.
The problem with putting a pen cam in a pen cup was that someone might actually use it. The pen had to be positioned just right for the camera to pick up an image. Cody looked again at the bulletin board. The rim of it was about half an inch thick. He carefully placed the pen on the top ledge of the board, aiming the camera out into the room. Hopefully it would go unnoticed, but if someone did see it chances were they would simply put it in the pen cup where it may or may not end up facing the right direction. It was the best he could do in the time he had.
He quickly erased the camera footage from the past five minutes and turned off the computer. He left the office, opened the bathroom door, flushed the toilet, then retraced his steps to the front of the store. Bethany was still talking to the couple that had come in earlier, pulling selections off a rack of wet suits. She looked up when he came back in and gave a quick “Have a nice day!” as he exited the store.
The entire enterprise had taken seven minutes. Sticking his hands in his pockets as he casually strolled down the street, he hoped the next phase would go similarly fast.
Fifty one hours later—relatively fast by stake-out standards, but mind numbingly slow by any other measure—the plan paid off. Cody was sitting at his computer desk, reading tech articles in one browser and periodically glancing at the surf shop’s security feed in another. So far he’d seen the manager pick his nose, play solitaire for hours, and partake of the kind of porn that made even Cody blush. All fireable offenses in his opinion, but the manager wasn’t the target.
The store had six part time employees—three that worked during the day on weekdays and three that worked evenings and weekends. Bethany, being a high school student, was an evening and weekend employee. The day employees were college students and other than a few instances of coming in late, seemed to be model employees. The last two that worked the same shifts as Bethany were a blonde, tan surfer dude in his twenties named Matt and a bookish looking Asian girl that couldn’t have been much older than Bethany named Jo. Like the day employees, they were totally boring to watch.
Cody was close to giving up and moving on to plan C when Matt did something unexpected. It was 7:30 and the manager had gone home, leaving Matt and Jo to close up. Jo was in the back, unpacking merchandise from boxes onto the shelves that lined the room. Matt was in the front turning the lights off. At this point in the closing routine Matt would normally go to the register and clock out, followed by Jo, then they’d both leave through the front door, locking it behind them.
Tonight, however, Matt bypassed the check out and entered the back. He gestured to Jo, pulling open the office door and backing in until his butt hit the desk. Jo dropped the bar of wax she was holding and ran full speed towards Matt. At the last second, she jumped, clinging to him like a monkey with her legs wrapped around his waist. Cody watched, mouth hanging open, as Matt and not-so-bookish-now Jo did things on the desk that made him wonder if there was something in the water at that surf shop. Between the manager’s solo acts and this surprise interlude, the manager’s office of the Sand Shack Surf Shop saw more action in three days than his own bedroom. Sadly.
As he opened the fake Sand Shack email account and started crafting an email, he felt a small pang of guilt for what he was about to do to Matt and Jo. He knew from his research that Matt had another job teaching private surfing lessons, but Jo was a student on scholarship at UCLA. Her tuition was covered, but she needed the job to pay for living expenses. He decided to monitor her and help her find another job—anonymously, of course—in case she wasn’t able to get one on her own.
When the email was finished he attached the selected pen cam footage and hit send. The Sand Shack Surf Shop was part of a chain, which made it easy to pose as a member of human resources from the corporate office. He told the manager that due to an anonymous sexual harassment claim by an employee, a camera had been set up to record any incidents. Due to the footage obtained, both employees involved had to be fired immediately to avoid any lawsuits. He smirked as he added a note at the end that strongly hinted that any further sexual activity, among employees or “otherwise” (meaning the manager’s private exploits) would result in further action.
Sighing, he shut down the camera program and leaned back in his chair. His part was over for the moment. Now it was up to the rest of his team. They had twenty seven days.