His colleagues back at FinCEN had learned as much about Trendsetters as they possibly could before Daniel even applied for the job. The plan had always been for him to get hired without having to tip anyone in management off to what the government was doing, because it was unknown whether anyone in management was in on the laundering scheme. Getting hired had been the first obstacle. His impressive résumé was complete fiction, but if anyone at Trendsetters called the people at his previous places of employment, they would get glowing stories of how much of an asset Daniel had been while on their payroll.

He hadn’t realized getting hired would be the easy part. Breaching Trendsetters’ security so that he could gain access to the particular database he needed made getting hired seem like a cakewalk.

He’d come up with the plan to go into the Security Department by mistake, using the excuse of being the new guy who didn’t know his way around as his cover. He’d calculated that it would take between seven and ten minutes to copy the portion of the database he needed onto a flash drive.

But just before he’d started, Trendsetters had undergone a massive overhaul of their security system after highly publicized security breaches at several big companies across the country. Now there were only a handful of people with access to the closed-off room that housed the cybersecurity personnel. Those few had separate keycards that allowed them to enter the room, and he wasn’t one of those people. His assignment had gone from difficult to downright impossible. Two weeks since he’d started and he was no closer to infiltrating the database than he’d been on day one.

An alarm bell sounded and a voice rang out. “Two minutes until a flash! It’s R&D versus R&D. Implementation and Software Development, you’re up!”

The first time he’d heard that bell, Daniel had bolted out of his seat, his body instinctively switching to rescue mode. He’d hardly registered that no one else seemed alarmed. He soon learned that the bell had nothing to do with an actual crisis. It was the signal for the contests Trendsetters held between employees.

Each department had been broken up into several teams, and even some subteams for the larger departments like Research and Development, where he worked. The teams were pitted against each other to “promote healthy competition.” The contests ran anywhere from twenty minutes to about an hour, with parameters set by each team leader, based on the project the teams were currently working on. Whichever team got closer to accomplishing its goal won whatever prize was up for grabs.

Last week his team had missed out on all the caramel corn and cotton candy they could eat from a local food truck. He’d been pissed. He loved cotton candy.