Complementing Morgan Pt. 01

"I'm not sure you answered my question," Derek said slowly. "Why are you here if you haven't talked with Morgan? What do you want from me?"

"What do you think I want? I want her back."

Derek was still confused. "Why are you talking to me instead of her?"

"Let's say Morgan says yes. Something tells me she will, but the rules say that you have to agree too. As I see it, you're the one I need to convince."

Here was a way for Derek to get Morgan out of his life. She would no longer be his problem. The way she had tricked him, he should be eager for this. Unexpectedly, he found himself reluctant to agree to what Kevin was asking. Derek couldn't shake his earlier sense that something didn't feel right about his guest.

"I'll tell you what," Derek said. "Why don't you and I go schedule a visit with Morgan and let her decide. We'll talk it over together, the three of us. I'll agree to whatever she thinks is best."

"Don't you think that would be a little awkward?" asked Kevin. "I would rather settle this with you now, between the two of us."

"You could talk to Morgan alone. I just want to hear her confirm that this is what she wants."

Kevin paused for a moment. "I'd still rather settle this now, with you, first. I don't want to get her hopes up, and then have you break your promise."

Derek noticed Kevin's hesitation and it all clicked. This wasn't about Kevin's concern for Morgan or even jealousy. This was something else. He gently pushed the tumbler of Scotch off to the side. He was done drinking for now.

"Is it that you don't want to get her hopes up, or that you know she'll turn you down?" Derek asked. "If I don't want her, she's got no choice but to accept you, does she?"

"Alright, you've got me there. I don't honestly know what she'd say and I do want her for myself. Can you blame me? You know what she's like in bed."

Derek didn't know what Morgan was like in bed, but didn't feel like pointing it out. "Reminding me how hot she is isn't exactly helping your case."

"How about this, then? I'll give you one hundred," Kevin hesitated, quickly glancing around the enormous kitchen. "no, make that two hundred thousand dollars if you'll agree to back off."

"No," Derek said. "I think you're full of shit. I think you don't care about Morgan at all. I think this is about the money."

Kevin went pale. "What do you mean?" he spluttered, clearly agitated. He wasn't fooling anyone.

"Morgan stole twenty million dollars. You're not after her, you're after the money she stole. Get her Complement keyed to you, and then threaten not to show up for her conjugal visits. You'll tell her you'll give her what she wants only if she agrees to tell you where the money is. The Complement will make her so desperate, she'll cave within a few months. Am I getting close?"

Kevin downed the rest his drink in one gulp, then poured himself another in silence. He was clearly stalling, thinking. Derek didn't move to stop him, just waited. He didn't care if the asshole sucked down all of the expensive Scotch Lydia bought for him. It would be one less thing of hers in the house.

After the second drink, some part of Kevin finally seemed to relax. "Let's pretend you're right. I can see you won't believe me if I keep insisting that I just want my girlfriend back. Not everything is about money, you know. Either way, the two hundred grand is still on the table."

"I don't think so."

"What do you want, then?"

What he really wanted was a good reason to tell this son of a bitch that Morgan was not some piece of meat for sale.

"What do I want? You know what? How about I just give you what you want. Here, catch." Derek picked up the tiny, plastic drive and hurled it in Kevin's direction.

Kevin caught it. Despite the two large glasses of Scotch, his hand shot out and picked the drive out of the air. "What is this?"

"That's just a copy of course," he lied. Well, it was a half-truth really. The cops had the other one. "There's twenty million dollars on that drive if you know the right password."

Kevin looked at the drive. "Twenty million, on this drive?" he asked. He seemed genuinely incredulous.

"Alright, " said Derek, "technically, if you want to split hairs, what's on the drive are called 'private keys.' The cryptocurrency she stole, which can be accessed with those keys, is somewhere out there on the internet."

Keven continued to look incredulous. "Yeah, but, still . . . Where did you get this?"

"I got it from the desk in Morgan's office. That's how I met her, I'm the guy that built that desk for her. After she was arrested, I just recalled my own product from your company and I found the drive in the secret compartment. It's encrypted though, and I don't have the real password. Keep the drive, I'll tell you the password if Morgan ever gives it to me. I don't want the money. It's stolen and more trouble than it's worth."

"If you don't have the password, how can you be sure there's any money, or 'private keys,' or whatever on here?" Kevin asked. "My guess is it's just pictures of me and her getting naked. That would explain the encryption. To be fair, if I know Morgan, there's probably pictures of her and a few other guys along with the pictures she and I took. That would be a pretty good reason not to tell you the password."

"Technically, she already gave me the password," Derek admitted. "I'm just not convinced it's the only password. You know how encryption works. Enter one password and you get photos, enter a different password and you get cryptocurrency."

Kevin actually laughed. The tense moment seemed to have passed. "By that logic every encrypted drive is the key to hidden treasure. There just might be another password that will unlock millions of dollars?"

"Morgan specifically told me to retrieve that desk, but not why," Derek said. "That drive was the only interesting thing in that desk. She wanted whatever is on that drive."

"I think she just wanted to remember the wild times we had in the sack. How did I look in the pictures, by the way? I'm surprised you didn't recognize me, but I guess I can forgive you for focusing your attention on the smoking hot babe."

"Oh, the password I have didn't unlock any photos. It was all financial data for Morgan's division at Konnor Interactive."

Kevin tried to hide it, but that meant something to him. He tensed up again. "What kind of financial data? Why did she have it?"

"I don't know, it just looked like a backup copy of all the accounts and transactions of her division over the past few years. As I said, it's probably just a decoy for what's really there."

"That actually makes a lot of sense," Kevin said. He sounded distracted, and as he spoke he reached up and rubbed his temple. "Hey, the Scotch seems to have gone straight to my head, would you mind getting me a glass of water?"

Derek turned to a cabinet to get Kevin another glass for his water. As Derek reached for the glass, he noticed movement in his peripheral vision. Kevin was on his feet, and had pulled a large chef's knife from a knife block on the counter next to him. Kevin stood between Derek and the door to the kitchen that led back to the entrance hall and the front door.

"Where are the other copies of that drive?" Kevin demanded. He moved forward, extending the knife towards Derek.

Shit.

Kevin picked up the drive and dropped it in Derek's half-full tumbler of Scotch, destroying it and any information it contained. In that moment, while Kevin's attention was momentarily distracted, Derek bolted for his office.

The hall on the other side of the kitchen, the side Kevin wasn't blocking, led to a small bathroom, his office and the master staircase. The bathroom was tiny, with only one entrance. Going upstairs meant getting even farther from the exit.

There was a door in his office that led back to the entry hall, but he never used it. The large wardrobe where he kept his winter coat sat on the other side of that door, blocking it. That was probably his best shot, if he could push the wardrobe aside. He could try going out the window in his office too, but while the entire window was large, it was made up of several narrow sections and it would be a very tight, maybe impossible, squeeze.

The only other option was going out of his office through the door that led to his workshop. There were two doors that led outside from his workshop. The first was a very large door for moving raw materials in and finished furniture out, but that only led to the fenced in drone delivery patio. He used the gate from the fenced in patio to his backyard so rarely that he didn't usually carry the key with him, making that useless as an exit. The second door out of the workshop could be used as an exit, but it was on the far wall from his office, past a huge amount of machinery. There was also the elevator in there, but that had the same problem as the stairs — that would trap him on one of the higher floors.

When he reached his office he slammed the door shut behind him. He could hear Kevin's footfalls just a few feet away, coming down the hallway.

Derek grabbed a chair and wedged it under the doorknob with less than a second to spare. The doorknob turned and Kevin attempted to force open the door blocked by the chair. The chair creaked. It wouldn't hold for long.

Derek threw open the door to the workshop. He wanted Kevin to think he'd gone that way, while ducking out the other door towards the entrance hall.

He turned the door knob on the door to the entrance hall and pushed, hard, trying to move the wardrobe on the other side. It didn't budge.

Kevin's bulk crashed into the door with more force than before. The chair held, barely. A crack appeared in one of the legs. It would probably buckle under the next hit.

Derek had specially designed the wardrobe on the other side of that door to be wide and tall so that the door frame would not be visible behind it. He hadn't wanted it to look out of place. He'd succeeded there, but at the same time, that meant it was very heavy. No matter how hard he pushed, the door wouldn't open.

There was no time. He ran for the workshop.

The door opened out onto the a ledge overlooking the bulk of the workshop. The ledge was only one story high, while the ramp next to it led down into the pit with the heavy machinery. The floor had been removed there, the basement merged with the first floor to create the two-story workshop pit.

The door Derek needed to reach was on the other side of the pit, up a steep set of stairs, about a hundred feet distant. The door couldn't be seen over the bulk of the CNC machines, routers, lathes, conveyor belts, lumber feed mechanisms, robotic arms and paint-sprayers. There were narrow paths in between the equipment but the thought of being hunted by his unwanted guest down there in the maze of machinery made Derek nervous.

A thought occurred to him: Kevin didn't know the layout of the shop as well as he did. The way the various arms moved and twisted meant that the best way to access a given spot changed depending on where things were currently positioned. Even he wasn't sure the best path to take. Kevin would be at an even greater disadvantage. Well, Derek could extend his advantage here even further.

He heard the chair explode back in his office. Derek ran along the ledge, past the workbench with his hand tools, and paused at the secondary control console. It was a duplicate set of controls, the same as the one in his office. The last thing queued up in the workshop was a prototype of a new dining room table. He hit the start button to begin a new build. Lights flicked on across the machinery in the pit. Servos began to whir.

If the workshop was confusing while dormant, it was even more so when the machinery was running. It was also dangerous, but Derek was more worried about Kevin than anything else right now.

He ran down the ramp into the maze of machinery as it sprang to life. Next to him saws began chewing their way into wood, shaping lumber for the table, the first step of the build. The smell of sawdust filled the air.

Even over the noise of the saws, Derek heard Kevin run out onto the ledge. The heavy footfalls paused briefly, followed by a yell: "What the fuck?"

In spite of the danger, Derek smiled to himself. Kevin had thought he was in a modest sized home with a large, expensive kitchen and he'd just walked out into a cavernous, industrial robo-factory coming to life. As crazy as the situation was for Derek, things may have just turned equally bizarre for his pursuer.

Kevin only hesitated for a moment, then ran down the ramp towards him. Derek wasn't far enough away from the ledge to be hidden by the equipment. Kevin was looking right at him, and was moving towards him, fast.

Derek tripped over a rail for one of the robotic arms. The alcohol made him clumsy. He fell hard, his head hitting the metal external casing of a paint-spray chamber on the way down. He didn't lose consciousness but his vision went blurry for a few moments. By the time Derek was able to sit up, Kevin was on him.

Kevin still had the knife from the kitchen and he was staring down at Derek's prone form. "Right, then. The other copies of that account data. Where are they?"

Derek thought fast. If he told Kevin the truth, that there weren't any more copies of the drive, one of two things would happen. Kevin would either not believe the truth and start cutting off parts of his body with that knife, or Kevin would believe the truth and use the knife to kill him, the contents of the drive safely destroyed.

"There's just one other copy," Derek said. "It's in a safe deposit box in a bank downtown,"

"Right. Shit. Hmmm." Kevin thought for a moment. The saws continued to buzz. "Alright," he said. Here's what—"

Wham. A robotic arm moving a piece of lumber into position rotated the board, slamming it hard into the back of Kevin's head. It was his turn to go down, the knife spinning off across the floor of the workshop.

Derek bolted. It wasn't quite a full run, but he moved as fast as he could while still carefully steering clear of the moving machinery all around him. Better to move a bit slower and make sure he didn't trip again.

He didn't look back as he maneuvered towards the door. Behind him, he heard Kevin scrambling for the knife. At least, he hoped Kevin was taking the time to scramble for the knife. A guy Kevin's size would have no trouble kicking the crap out of him with or without the weapon, and he needed the head start.

The heavy footsteps of Kevin's boots echoed through the machinery. Fast at first, then slower. He was coming, but now that Kevin was down here on the floor of the pit, not up on the ledge, it wouldn't be so easy to spot where Derek was. On the other hand, the way the footsteps echoed meant that Derek didn't know where Kevin was either.

Derek had closed half the distance to the exit on the far wall and could see the stairs leading up to it now, towering above most of the machinery. Then he realized that if he could see the stairs and the door, so could Kevin.

Even if they couldn't see each other around the machinery, if he ran up those stairs and out that door, Kevin would see him and be close behind. Likewise, if he doubled back and went up the ramp that led to his office he would be clearly visible above the pit. In both cases, he would have to climb up above the machinery, where he would be easily spotted by Kevin.

What about the elevator? It opened onto the ground floor of the pit, no need to climb any stairs. He had installed it to move furniture directly from the floor of the workshop up to the higher floors for storage. If he could get to the elevator while Kevin was still wandering around in this machinery, he could simply take it up to a higher floor, go down the master staircase and out the front door without his pursuer ever realizing it.

The elevator was back next to the ramp that led to the ledge and his office. Derek circled around the way he'd come, avoiding the area where he suspected Kevin was stalking after him. Kevin's footsteps had gotten quieter, but Derek had a suspicion that this was because Kevin was now deliberately trying to conceal his presence by stepping softly, not because he was that much farther away.

Derek somehow made it to the elevator without running into Kevin. He pressed the button to open the doors and a loud chime echoed through the workshop.

He had forgotten about the chime the elevator always made when the doors opened. He heard heavy footsteps moving quickly. Kevin had heard the noise and was coming at him, fast.

Derek pressed the button for the third floor. The second floor was the obvious choice, closer to the ground. If Kevin tried to follow he'd be less likely to guess Derek had chosen the higher floor.

In this elevator, there was always a pause after he pressed the button before the doors closed. The guy who installed the elevator said it was a safety feature. The five to ten second pause usually didn't seem like much, but right now it was life or death. If he was too slow, he would be trapped in a small metal box with a big, crazy man who wanted to hurt him.

Every second felt like an hour. Kevin's footsteps rang in his ears.

Kevin would follow him, wouldn't he? The chime meant he knew about the elevator, would follow him one way or another. That's why he'd hit the third floor button, so that when Kevin followed him up, it would likely be to the wrong floor.

The doors remained open. This was stupid, better to go for the obvious exit rather than get trapped on the upper floors. Derek made a snap judgment, ducked out of the elevator and quickly re-entered the cover of the machinery.

A clatter of footsteps came from his right. Kevin ran straight past him, into the elevator, between the now closing elevator doors. The large man managed to slip into the elevator without coming into contact with the door, which would have prevented it from closing. Instead, there was a thump from inside the elevator just as the doors shut firmly. This was followed by muffled cursing, as the elevator began its ascent.

Derek wished he'd meant that to happen, because it couldn't have worked better if he'd planned it. Kevin was going up alone and Derek now had a clear shot to the exit. He made for the door on the far wall of the workshop he had initially tried to reach. If Kevin tried to come down the master staircase he didn't want to run into him in the kitchen hallway.

He made it to the door and kept on running, out into the forest around his house. It was cold out here. There were several inches of snow on the ground. If he tried to get far on foot, he would freeze. He ran around the back of the house to the garage, entered through the rear garage entrance and climbed into his car.

He'd been drinking. No choice but to use the auto-nav. He didn't care where he was going. Anywhere away from here would do. He selected a destination at random from the nav computer's memory.

Derek looked back as his car pulled out of the driveway. He expected to see Kevin running out of the house at any moment, but there was no movement outside.

It took Derek five minutes to realize he hadn't called the police yet. When Kevin came at him with a knife, all thoughts other than escape fled from his mind. Somehow it hadn't occurred to him to use his mobile to call the cops. He did so now.

Derek met three police cars and six officers back at the house. Kevin's car was still there, which meant he was probably still inside. Derek explained that there was a large intruder armed with a knife inside his home. Four officers went inside, while the remaining two waited outside with Derek and listened to him explain exactly what had happened.