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Except he’d practice this wrong for the rest of the night. Every repetition would burn the error deeper. And when he sat down at a terminal inside the Diehl brothers’ operation and his hands moved on autopilot, they’d move wrong.
On a live system, wrong meant caught. Caught meant dead.
Her discomfort in having to talk to someone didn’t outweigh that. “The second sweetener goes before the fork.”
He went still. Then he turned around.
She braced herself for his response. Nobody liked to be corrected. She’d been on the receiving end of his frustration once, and she figured the balance on that account hadn’t fully cleared.
“Show me,” he said instead. He didn’t look surprised to see her. Didn’t look irritated.
She walked over to the table and pointed at the sweetener packet and the fork. “These two. The directory verification has to come before the log bypass. You’ve been doing them backward.”
“Both times?”
“Both times.”
He looked at the table. Ran through the sequence in his head, lips moving silently. Reached out and swapped the sweetener packet and the fork and walked through the rest. Clean.
“Damn it,” he said quietly. “I’ve probably been doing that wrong for at least an hour.”
“Then it’s good I showed up.”
“Yeah.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “It is.”
He looked tired. Not the brittle, angry tired from the first day in the lab. A different kind. The kind that came from caring about something enough to sit alone in a café at two in the morning and fight your own brain until it cooperated.
“Sit down,” he said. “Walk me through the rest of it. If you’ve got time.”
“Let me grab some coffee before my body completely revolts. Want a refill?”
“Sure. Three creams, four sugars. Thanks.”
She laughed. She couldn’t help herself.
He raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“What sort of save-the-world kind of guy drinks coffee with half a cup of cream and sugar?”
“Yeah, I know.” He shot her a rueful look. “When I go undercover, I go straight black, even though it tastes gross. Lest I earn the nickname princess or some such shit.”
She was still chuckling as she got their coffee. Black for her. Half the world’s supply of cream and sugar for him. She walked it back over to the table. “Here you go, princess.”
He winked at her, and she ignored whatever just flashed through her body and sat down.
They ran through the full sequence. She watched his hands move from object to object and caught two more small errors in the later steps. The first was a transposition in the data copy protocol. The second was a missing step in the exit sequence, a cleanup command he was skipping entirely.
“That one will leave a log entry,” she said. “The Diehls might not check their system logs every day, but if they do, that entry tells them someone was in their files.”
“So it’s not optional.”
“Nothing in this sequence is optional.”
He nodded, added the step, and ran through it again. She watched his hands on the table, broad and steady, moving the salt shaker and the pepper shaker and the sugar caddy with a deliberateness that shouldn’t have been interesting to watch but was.
She noticed the way his fingers wrapped around each object, the controlled precision of each movement, and then made herself stop noticing because that was not a productive line of thought at two in the morning.
Or at any point of any day ever.
