This was it. It was do or die time. Quite literally, might I add.
I let out a quiet, deep breath through my nose as I sat in my office, the white noise playing in the background of the cubicle area through speakers. It wasn't a 'nice' office, it was essentially a cubical with real walls, but that was beside the point. In a few days, it wouldn't even matter because I would be gone and the Russian government would be scrambling.
If I wasn't a sniper, my heart would be pounding in my chest. The only thing I couldn't control was the slight sweat of my palms which was he only indication my true nervousness. I'd be hung for this.
There were no laptops on this floor. Everything was hardwired to avoid data leaving the building. The only place that had laptops was in testing underground where the simulations where. Luckily, my husband just so happened to be a quality tester. And while Ashton had nothing to do with actual weapons testing, he tested the machines that tested the weapons which meant he had access to many of the important testing files we needed. I was in charge of cybersecurity, which meant that while I didn't have access to schematics, I could easily slip in without notice.
That's where everything came into play. Ashton and I had been slipping into servers and migrating data to a specific laptop's hard drive for two months now. Yesterday, I planted a wrong code in the system through one of my coworkers ID's and then went down to testing to ask them if their machinery was having issues operating. The head of testing insisted I take one of their laptops so I could compare their results with what should be happening, an almost blank laptop which Ashton had switched with the cache laptop two days before.
Now I had the correct computer and no one could call me out for stealing it. Quietly, I glanced at the time displayed in the corner of my hardwired desktop. Five o'five. Perfect.
Without wasting a second, I causally logged off of my computer and shut the laptop off, slipping the cool chrome into my black purse where I kept the rest of my things like my wallet and sunglasses. There was always a possibility of cameras in my office which made my hacking and migrating of data very risky, but I usually disguised it well with other tabs and tasks. This, however, I could not do in my tiny office, if you could even call it that.
I stood from my chair, pushing it in while running my hand through my chestnut hair. It's a shame it would probably end up black in a few days. I quite liked my natural hair color. Just as I had done every day, I closed my office's wooden door and locked it with my key. I dropped the steel piece in my bag before moving out of the hoard of cubicles and into the hallway. My heals silently padded against the tightly threaded tan carpet with the other stragglers who were waiting to get out of work at exactly five.
It wasn't unusual for someone to go to the bathroom before leaving the building or waiting for their security scan, so I did exactly that. Perfectly on cue, Ashton turned the corner from the elevators and smacked right into me, his hands banding around my biceps and my hands flattened on his chest. Unbeknownst to the cameras, my left hand sneakily plucked a small screwdriver from the inside of his navy suit pocket, slipping it up my blazer's sleeve.
"I'm sorry, Margaux. I wasn't paying attention," he laughed lightly and somewhat awkwardly, letting go of me to scratch the back of his neck. "I was going to head out soon. Are you done with work?"
"I just have a few things to finish up. You can wait in line if you want, it won't take me very long," I reassured my devilishly clever and handsome husband. Every employee at Gorizont had to go through airport-style millimeter-wave machines. Even our bags had to be sent through scanners to make sure we didn't have anything we shouldn't. That made my life exceptionally more difficult.
"Okay, I'll see you in ten, then," Ashton mused, smiling kindly at me before we both went our separate ways. We were a no PDA couple at work, though there was plenty of evidence of our relationship in public to make up for it.
