Puck Off!

Chapter 3

Workdays always started early for me, though it was Friday, and I had a weekend with Ella to look forward to. I grabbed a few bagels and left them in the kitchen for her to enjoy once she was up too. A short subway ride later I was getting off at South Station, near the Boston financial district, and walked through the frigid morning air over to our building. I took a quick scan of the area around the front door and snickered as I found the latest flash drive. Slipping it into my pocket, I went through the revolving door, and then emerged into the warmth of the lobby.

Newbury Financial was big. Not quite as giant as some of the other financial services houses, but we were trending upwards, and we could compete with them soon. I was happy to have been a part of that, and if things kept going the way they were, then we might be playing in the same arena as the big boys soon. Unless we got bought by them, which was always a possibility. I didn't have much to worry about here though, as my skills would be in demand whoever owned the company I worked for.

I paused by the security desk, passing over the flash drive. "Hey Tom, we have another one."

"Damn, you make this gig too easy!" Tom said with a grin. He was a big, beefy man with ebony skin and a genial smile. But the man looked like he could be playing football on Sundays with the pros if he wanted to, and it was nice to have him watching the building.

"Yeah, well we can't have anyone else find them, right?"

"Not after Garry!" Tom snickered.

Garry was an ex-coworker here who had picked up one of the flash drives off the ground a few years ago. Now, we'd all been through the security training multiple times, and we knew that hackers had a habit of planting flash drives with nasty malware outside of targets in the hopes that some poor sap would be curious and put the drive in their corporate computer. Hell, we attested to taking that training every year, in some cases twice a year, and yet Garry still fell for it.

He was lucky. Oh, he still got fired, but it was an old malware program, and our antivirus caught it before it got too far, but it was a near thing. Some of those things were so advanced they could cripple a company, stealing financial data or encrypting everything and holding a company hostage to criminals who wouldn't pass over the encryption key without a ransom being paid. Had it been something like that, he could have been prosecuted per our corporate policy.

So now, not trusting the Garrys of the world, I do a routine sweep of the front door whenever I enter or exit the building. I've lost track of the number of drives I've passed over to Tom, and then he does his part by giving them to the IT Security team. I wasn't sure what they did with them, but I was sure it was something like a bomb disposal unit of some sort.

With that done, I got into the elevator and headed up to the office. I had a decent view of downtown, and I liked my job. That wasn't something many people could say, so I was one of the happy minority who enjoyed work, I guess. I hope Ella was able to get to a place like that in the future too.

Today was a big day for her, since she was going to be touring Boston University around lunch time, and then we had the hockey game tonight. Yes, she planned her trip around a game between BU and BC, just to see the two rivals face off, literally, in a game. She even hooked me into going to spend time with her, and I couldn't deny her that, since it should still be fun seeing her cheering on her favorite sport, even if I knew next to nothing about it. Oh sure, I watched them play when they were on TV, which was only every four years when the Olympics were on, but I still didn't know anything about the rules other than they wanted to get a puck into a net.

Ella was good at that. I knew she was fast and scored a lot of goals. Was she a forward? Or was that a basketball position? Hell, I should probably find out. Doing a quick search online, I found out that at any one time there were normally six players per team on the ice. One goalie to keep the puck out of the net, two defenders to help them out, then one center, and then two wingers on either side of the center to score. I guess Ella must be one of the wingers or the center! Maybe I could ask and sound a little more intelligent if I knew what all the positions were called!