She squelched the panic that bubbled up in her chest. Would it be a risk? Maybe. But what good was she if she wasn’t ready to risk it all for something she believed in?

She could do this. She would do this.

She was going to make the Just Friends app happen.

Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

Daniel sat hunched over his keyboard, a Philadelphia 76ers hoodie covering his head, Wu-Tang Clan blasting through the headphones covering his ears. He was dimly aware of the activity going on around him, but his brain’s focus remained locked on the continual string of white letters and numbers flying across the black screen. The feeling that came over him when writing code like this was a natural high.

Writing code was part of what he would be doing if he’d gone into the private sector. But that wasn’t the path he’d chosen and he was okay with that.

He didn’t regret his decision to join FinCEN after graduation, despite it costing him his ex-girlfriend. Joelle had assumed his four years with the Marines would be the extent of his commitment to embracing his family’s long history of serving the country. She left after he turned down a lucrative offer from a tech firm in Boulder, Colorado, claiming she didn’t sign up to be with someone who wanted to live as a pauper in some government job.

Yeah, his bank account would look better if he’d gone with any of the offers he’d received after finishing at Stanford, but Daniel knew he would never feel fulfilled in those jobs. The obligation to serve had been ingrained in him since birth.

Not to say he didn’t enjoy plunging into some ColdFusion or Python or any of the other programming languages Trendsetters allowed code heads like him to indulge in. And when one of his new coworkers clued him in to a new programming language being developed by some hotshots on GitHub, Daniel realized just how out of the loop he was. He wondered what other cool things he’d missed while spending the past couple of years on assignment at FinCEN.

He straightened in his chair, stretching his neck from side to side to regain his focus.

Learning about new innovations in coding wasn’t the reason he was here. He was here to catch a criminal.

At this very moment, someone in this building was using Trendsetters as a front to launder money. If only he could find a way to breach their airtight security so he could uncover the intricacies of how they were doing it and bring in the bastards running the thing.