Page 93 of Bro Code

The GM came in a moment later, closing the door too hard behind him, the way very important people do because they’re too busy to be careful about things like that. He sat at the head of the table, unbuttoning his suit jacket and laying down another manila folder.

“Holly, Louis, thanks for joining. This is Bob Langdon, Chief Legal Officer, and Ted Hendrix, our Director of Cybersecurity.”

Louis’ heart skipped. Cybersecurity? As in…the guy in charge of making sure the team’s data was safe?

“I’ve been alerted to an issue in our cloud security monitoring systems.” The GM gestured to the cybersecurity director. “Ted, do you want to take it from here?”

“Sure.” Ted flipped open a laptop and swiveled it on the table to face them. “So, as you guys know, we have integrated software that alerts us of unusual activity in the data pipeline.” He swiped through screens Louis recognized – logins, charts, data graphs he used on a daily basis. The back of his neck began to prickle. “Over the last few months, there’s been a lot of unexpected accessing of player telemetry data – someone’s been pulling it down via a local tethered download instead of processing it through the standard pipeline.” He pointed to a line on the screen. “Mostly a lot of data for Riley Webb.”

Louis kept his hands very still where he’d clasped them on the table in front of him, and stared intensely at the screen as though it was the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

“Our concern is that an employee could be selling Webb’s data to rival teams,” said the lawyer. “With Riley Webb being such a sensitive asset right now, it’s a given that other teams are trying to get their hands on him.”

“And if they had access to detailed information about his poor performance, they’d have pretty strong leverage to lowball us on any offers,” said the GM.

Holly cleared her throat and shifted beside him. Blood was pounding so hard in Louis’ ears that he felt like he could barely hear what these guys were saying, and sweat had broken out all over him.

Ted the security guy continued. “So we called you both here because when we went back through the logs, the first request we flagged came from the Ritz-Carlton Marina del Rey in Los Angeles, when the team was on the West Coast swing.” He tapped open another window and pointed. “Where Louis was the only analyst present.”

Oh, Jesus. They knew.

The room was probably silent, but Louis couldn’t hear anything over the pounding in his ears. How could they possibly know? He’d been so careful. Spoofed the MAC address, public WiFi, data-masking, air-trapped sandbox… The only thing he hadn’t been able to do was use an outside VPN: the team had their own, and without it, you couldn’t get into the system at all.

Evidently, that had been the downfall.

He felt every single pair of eyes in the room on him. There was nothing to do but own it.

He kept totally still – he wasn’t sure he could have moved even if he’d wanted to – and risked a single glance down the table at the GM. The GM was sitting back in his chair with his fingers tented, glaring, to Louis’ surprise, not at him, but at Holly.

“Can you explain to me why one of your direct reports is siphoning data from the team repository?” he said.

Louis shut his eyes.

“Yes,” said Holly. “I authorized it.”

His heart nearly jumped out of his chest. He just managed to keep himself from looking at her in surprise. He clasped his hands more firmly to keep them still with his insides doing Olympic-level gymnastics while Holly continued.

“Louis had a hunch about Webb’s performance. Maybe you remember – he brought it to us a couple of months ago. He wanted to look into it and I told him to go ahead.”

The GM’s eyes had narrowed. The lawyer leaned forward. “You authorized a local extraction of sensitive data for a sixty-million-dollar asset? If that laptop had been lost or stolen on the road, this franchise would have faced a tremendous compliance fine. Why didn’t you clear this through the central server?”

“Because the central server logs are visible to league offices,” said Holly, not missing a beat, “and I wasn’t going to let rival scouts catch wind of an experiment we were running on an unstable player. You said it yourself, Dave.” She looked at the GM. “If that got out, buyers would be all over us with lowball offers, and how long before that got out to the press? I told Louis to keep what he was doing entirely off-network to protect Webb’s asset value. I didn’t raise it to management for the same reason: confidentiality.”

Shit. That was…actually plausible. Had she practiced that, or something? Louis suddenly felt terrible: she probably had. When he’d shown her what he’d been up to, she’d probably panicked and started working out a story to cover them if something like this ever happened.

The GM exchanged a look with the lawyer, who leaned back, uneasily releasing a breath. “I can’t just look the other way about this, Holly. It’s a serious compliance violation.”

“It worked, didn’t it?” said Holly, briskly. “Webb’s metrics came up.”

The room was dead silent. In Louis’ head, a single word was going round on a loop: Please. Please please please please let this work. He couldn’t for the life of him understand why Holly would go to bat for him like this, but Jesus fucking Christ he was glad she was.

“I took a gamble,” said Holly, glaring down the table at the GM. “And to be perfectly blunt, Dave, it saved your ass. If his stats hadn’t come up, you would have offloaded him before the roster freeze, and if you’d done that, it would have made us a laughingstock. You would’ve lost your job. Don’t act like you don’t know your career is tied to this Webb trade now. He was your gamble.” She sat back, spreading her hands. “So honestly, Dave? You’re welcome.”

Fucking. Terrifying.

But totally badass.