Fire And Flame

After having lunch, Brandon dropped Laura off at her office.

"Thank you for the lunch, Mr. Reynolds." Laura gave an honest smile. She was truly very satisfied with the quality of food and the old couple's homely service. Now that she knew the address of the restaurant, she would definitely go for a second time.

"You're welcome." Brandon smiled and slightly nodded his head.

"I'll pick you up at noon tomorrow, then." he offered.

"No, that's alright. I can drive by myself. Thank you." Laura hesitated for a moment. She can always drive anywhere when she has her own car.

"Please?" Brandon gave a requesting smile to which Laura couldn't say no.

"Alright. I'll see you tomorrow sharp at noon." Laura finally accepted his request and turned around to walk into her office. Her cabin was on the fifth floor. To her surprise, Lily was already waiting for her near the elevator.

"You're back, Boss. You might not want to deal with him for now." Lily was really tensed as she held the files tightly.

"What is it?" Laura asked as both of them stepped into the elevator.

After the door closed, Lily was back to her cool Lily mode of not addressing her Boss as 'Boss' but 'Laura'.

"Laura, you know about David?"

"Yes, is that what you're talking about. How did you know?" no one else knew about Jacob being a hacker.

"The reports updated from David's computer were uploaded yesterday. When I had checked all the reports this morning, I found the errors. I started working on the papers to see what exactly was changed in the uploaded data. By the time I figured it out, it was too late. Someone had already changed the wrong reports to the original one. And to my surprise, it was Jacob's computer. I had tracked the audit log of all the systems of the company, it turned out to be Jacob who solved all this mess. No wonder why he was in your cabin when I had come to you." Lily was smart enough to figure this out. Being the assistant of the company, she had all the powers to see the functioning of the company.

"What do we do now?"

"We will do what we need to do." Laura smirked. Lily looked at her best friend and knew that David won't get an easy resignation from the company.

As soon as they reached her cabin, Laura asked Lily to make a call to David.

Lily called David and the call was received in three rings.

"Good afternoon, Mr.David. Boss wants to meet you in her office. Thank you." she ended the call right after speaking, not giving David a chance to speak.

Soon after a few minutes, a middle-aged man appeared in the cabin knocking on the door three times.

"Good afternoon, Ms. Williams…" David's confident face showed no signs of nervousness.

"Come, have you seat, Mr. David." Laura smiled and gestured him to take his seat across the table, in front of her.

"How's your day going?" she asked, her smile never left her face.

"All good so far." David answered.

"That's good. What I am going to say isn't good news." Laura typed something quick on her keyboard and turned her personal computer towards David.

"Have a look." she ordered.

David tried to maintain his calm to not get nervous seeing the charts displayed on the screen.

"Our company's stock charts. I never expected a slope in the chart. What happened that made the chart slope down?" she asked, acting innocent.

"Oh, this isn't good. I'll look after it." David apologised.

'How lovely.' Thought Lily to herself.

"Ah, that's not required I guess?" Laura smiled again. Now David started to find the smile creepy.

"Sorry?" he was confused. Didn't she want to correct the reports?

"You're fired, Mr. David." all of a sudden, the smile turned into a straight line and the soft expression on Laura's face turned into a fierce one.

"Pardon?" David thought he heard something wrong.

"You're fired, Mr. David. Simple as it is. Bother to explain who gave you money to change those charts? I'm pretty sure, you got a hefty amount for this. Sadly, we found this out before your plan worked out."