Lip Lock Read Free

if the receptionist didn’t tell him the truth? What was the saying about the devil you know? Yeah, he’d take that over the nameless, faceless people out to destroy him.
    He leaned back in his chair and faced his three top advisors across the conference table. Glenn, Timothy, and Annette had been through it with him from the start. Together they had achieved the impossible and amassed power, respect, and a fortune.
    But today, he felt vulnerable. Like he was the underdog—the one thing he swore he would never be again.
    “Our security procedures are expensive as it is,” Glenn said. “We don’t need to add on anything else.”
    “Glenn, you’re not getting it,” Timothy, the head of security, said from across the conference table. “Last night we caught a low-level computer programmer walking out of the building with the blueprint in his backpack. Obviously, we need to go on lockdown.”
    Kyle’s stomach tightened and pinched as the rage billowed inside him. Someone almost got away with the intellectual property for their upcoming product. It was his most innovative work. He had spent years coming up with the artificial intelligence for a program to analyze the content of a picture. Any picture.
    And he almost lost it.
    Sure, he was going through the process of getting it legally protected. But his idea was at its most vulnerable from the time they created the blueprint to the time they get it patented.
    It would be hell if they lost all they had researched and developed. If they missed out on the partnership with plaza+ tag, the revolutionary community on the Internet, they would stagger from the bad hit.
    But if their competitor stole the idea and patented it as their own…The possibility ate at Kyle’s gut like acid. He refused to let that happen. Ashton Image Works would never pay the competition millions of dollars for the use of one of his ideas!
    “I thought the blueprint was online,” Glenn said. “And you had to use a password to get to them.”
    “Parts of it are,” Kyle explained. Glenn never understood computers, which was how their friendship developed. They met in college when Kyle had to tutor him. “And some of the specs of the blueprint are not available online. Like the highly sensitive ones that we don’t want leaked.”
    Glenn rolled his eyes. “A lot of good that did.”
    Kyle felt the reluctant smile tug at his mouth. “You know the green book I’m always carrying around? That’s the blueprint this programmer tried to take out.”
    “Why didn’t he copy it?”
    “Because,” Annette interrupted, “it’s on a specially treated green paper that makes it very difficult to copy.”
    “Oh.” Glenn paused as he mulled over the information. “How many of these blueprints do we have to keep track of?”
    “There’s only one.” It was a thick book with hundreds of thousand lines of code.
    “One?” Glenn looked back and forth at the others, obviously wondering if he heard correctly. “For the whole company? Just one book?”
    “Yes,” Annette said, “we all have to share.”
    “In this book is a log of every programmer who has looked at the blueprint and why they looked at it. They have to be approved each time by a manager.”
    Glenn’s mouth dropped open. “This is your idea of a secured system?”
    “It has sensors embedded in the pages,” Timothy said. “It’s like trying to take a book out of the library before you checked it out.”
    Glenn practically sputtered with outrage. “And not once did anyone think of going high-tech security?”
    “No one has swiped the blueprint before this.”
    “Uh-huh.” Glenn rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “And you really wonder how a nobody got the book?”
    “The programmer is the fall guy,” Annette decided with her usual intensity. Right now the blonde radiated with deep anger. “No way was he working alone.”
    “Don’t be too sure,” Timothy said.
    “He didn’t have the security clearance,” she