He put his feet up on his desk and caught sight of the pretty young programmer in the cubicle across the hall from his office. Marina Nosovitskaya had first gained his attention the day before. She was quite a treat, too, with dark, slanted Asian eyes above high Slavic cheekbones, her long hair gold and flaxen. Her tight leather jeans and sweater did little to conceal a perfect body. He couldn’t believe he had not noticed her before, but now there was enough interest that Ustinov had taken the time and trouble to pull and review her records. She was as smart as she was beautiful. She had graduated with the highest scores from the prestigious Department of Applied Mathematics and Information Technologies at the Vladivostok School of Mathematics and Computer Science. Definitely worth further interest when he had the time. Russian immigrants to the U.S.A. needed to stick together, after all.

Marina must have felt his gaze. She looked up at him from her computer screen and smiled shyly, the glow of the monitor shining in her eyes. Ustinov stared right back at her, flicking the cruller crumbs from his shirt and tie before returning the smile. All the while, Gruver prattled on and on about the testing difficulties they were having with the new software. Ustinov grunted occasionally to verify that he was listening, but he never took his eyes off the pretty young programmer.

She would soon be his. Of that he was certain.

Gruver said something then that broke through Ustinov’s pleasant distraction.

“One other thing. I was doing a little white box testing on some of the modules. Maybe you can clear something up for me. There are some lines of code in there that I don’t understand. They don’t seem functional at all.”

Ustinov paused for a second and phrased his reply very carefully. “Oh yeah. I know what you are seeing, Chuck. Do not worry about those. It is check and monitoring code the SEC insisted on us putting in there. Their people put it in so they can track things later if they ever need to. We debugged it on our end already. It is good, solid code, even if it did come from the government.”

Ustinov held his breath and waited. Would Gruver buy the story or would he ask more embarrassing questions, questions that would be infinitely harder to answer?

Instead of asking for more information, Gruver snorted. “Yeah, damned government geeks! They gotta have their mitts in everything.”