Lip Lock by Susanna Carr Read Free Book Online Page B

reflecting off of her? Damned if he knew.
    “Kyle!”
    Oh, yeah. He was in a meeting. Kyle turned and looked at the chief financial officer. “What?”
    “Our security systems have been upgraded and tightened,” Glenn said, obviously annoyed. “But there’s no guarantee that it will foil any attempt.”
    “Any progress in finding the accomplices?”
    “Accomplices?”
    “Come on, Glenn,” Kyle said as he loosened his tie. “Even Julia at the last meeting said she bet the programmer didn’t act alone. Surely you listen to every word she says.”
    Glenn flinched. “What?”
    “Never mind.” He wasn’t going to pursue that line of questioning. It wasn’t top priority. “I’m not going to play cat and mouse with these thieves. Let’s draw them out. Set a trap.”
    “But we don’t know what level, or even the department the thieves are in.”
    “So?” Kyle unbuttoned his collar. He never was a suit and tie guy, but he liked how they conveyed a sense of power. He’d suffer through a tie just for that.
    “It’s going to require a trap of…great…great magnitude!” Glenn started to bluster. “A strategy that would take time we don’t have!”
    “Glenn, subterfuge is not your strong point.”
    The guy blushed. Kyle watched, almost fascinated, as the chief financial officer’s face turned brick red.
    “You are making it more difficult than it actually needs to be,” Kyle continued. “Keep it simple.”
    “How?” Glenn asked as his flushed skin slowly faded.
    “Add a fake spec.”
    When Glenn frowned, Kyle remembered once again he wasn’t dealing with a programmer.
    “We are going to add a fake form to our patent process. It’s going to say that we want our product to include”—Kyle thought for a second—“an online image search application.”
    “Say what?”
    Kyle didn’t know how to break it down into simpler sentences, but he’d give it a shot. “You can train the program to recognize people’s faces.”
    Glenn’s forehead puckered. “Our product can do that?”
    “No. It’s too expensive right now, and we haven’t researched how to develop this. We only know of a thousand ways that it won’t work.”
    “But it’s a great idea!”
    “Wait for the upgrade. But our competition doesn’t know this. They are going to try and take this spec before we file it.”
    “Why are we going to throw a really good idea to our competition?”
    “Stay with me, Glenn. It’s not a good idea. Not unless we want to delay our release date by years. Or make our product too expensive for our target customer. Or lose money on our new product.”
    “Oh.” His brow cleared as understanding dawned on him. “So it’s going to be a good idea in five years.”
    “Right,” Kyle said as he unbuttoned the cuffs of his dress shirt and started folding them. “So let it be known that this spec is going to be added to the blueprint, but it’s not going to be available online. This addition will force the thief to make a grab for the blueprint.”
    “Okay. Got it.” Glenn rose from his seat and stopped. “Where do I get this bogus spec?”
    “There’s not going to be one,” Kyle said slowly. “We’re telling people that there’s one.”
    Glenn nodded and then hesitated. “Just out of curiosity, how far-reaching do you think this theft is?”
    “I think it’s on every level.” Kyle leaned back in his chair and sighed. “We are going to clean house with this.”
    “Are you sure you want to do this? We have the best in the business working for us.”
    “And they are possibly working for the competition,” Kyle replied as he reached for his keyboard.
    “You don’t trust anyone, do you?”
    “I don’t have any reason to,” Kyle admitted. When he noticed Glenn didn’t move or speak, he looked up from the computer screen.
    “What about me?” Glenn’s face was tight and drawn. His eyes were flat and his mouth pinched.
    Kyle didn’t want to get into this right now, but some things