Chapter 10: Digital Espionage
Travis’s laptop hummed like a trapped insect on the rumpled comforter. The blue glow painted the stale room in monochrome, deepening the shadows in the hollows of his cheeks and turning Mavis into a small, animated silhouette. The hole in the wall was a dark maw in the periphery.
“This is it,” Travis said, his voice a low scrape in the quiet. He clicked open a folder labeled ‘Q3 Vendors – ARCHIVE’. “The vendor code that didn’t match. ‘Granite Peak Supplies’.”
Mavis, perched on Travis’s bare thigh just above the knee, tapped a tiny foot impatiently. “A mountain of a name. It sounds sturdy. Fraudulent things often do.”
Travis navigated, his fingers clumsy on the trackpad. He was hyper-aware of Mavis’s presence, the slight weight, the warmth. The intensity of the previous night hung between them, a silent, charged understanding. This was its aftermath, a redirected energy.
The first few invoices were bland. Cleaning supplies, lightbulbs, office furniture. All marginally overpriced, but plausible.
“Boring,” Mavis declared. He stood, walked up Travis’s thigh, and without ceremony, stepped onto Travis’s softened cock where it lay against his stomach. He settled, straddling just below the head with a view of the screen. “The vista is better here. Proceed.”
Travis inhaled sharply, the sudden, intimate contact sending a jolt through his spent nerves. Mavis wasn’t being seductive; he was being practical. It was utterly disarming. “You’re… distracting.”
“You are easily distracted. I am merely optimizing.” Mavis leaned back, his palms resting on Travis’s skin. “The numbers, Travis.”
Travis forced his eyes back to the screen. He dug deeper, cross-referencing delivery manifests with inventory logs. A pattern, ghostly at first, began to solidify. Granite Peak Supplies billed for fifty high-end ergonomic chairs. The warehouse log showed ten received.
He took a screenshot, dragged it into a new folder he’d created and named ‘? The snap sound effect seemed loud.
A soft, pleased hum vibrated against his abdomen. Mavis shifted, a tiny, deliberate roll of his hips. The sensation was a direct line to Travis’s spine—a reward, a tease, a command to continue.
“Forty phantom chairs,” Travis murmured, his voice tighter now.
“Floating in the ether,” Mavis said, his tone light. “Perhaps they are very quiet chairs.”
Travis found another. Industrial-grade air purifiers. Billed: twenty. Received: four. Snap. Another drag into the folder.
This time, Mavis did more than hum. He pressed down, grinding in a slow, circular motion, the friction a delicious, maddening shock. Travis’s breath hitched. His cock, traitorous and responsive, began to fill beneath the small body seated so close to it.
“See?” Mavis purred. “The work is its own reward.”
“That’s not the work,” Travis gasped, his fingers pausing on the keys.
“It is now. Find another.”
It became a rhythm, a perverse, thrilling circuit. Travis would scour, find a discrepancy—toner cartridges, specialized software licenses, premium cable packages—and with each confirming screenshot, Mavis would react. A slow grind. A gentle, rocking pulse. Once, he leaned forward and let his tongue trace a faint line on the pulsing vein along the underside of Travis’ cock, causing him to jerk and almost send the laptop sliding.
The folder ‘?!’ swelled with evidence. Each file was a brick in a wall of fraud. But it was still circumstantial. It pointed to Granite Peak, not to Don.
“He’s covered,” Travis said, frustration bleeding through the haze of pleasure. Mavis was now astride him fully, his back against Travis’s lower stomach, watching the screen. “The orders are approved by him, but the vendor is the shell. We need the link.”
“The man Hank,” Mavis reminded him, his voice a thin thread of focus. He was panting slightly, affected by his own game. “You said he was a ghost.”
Travis navigated to the employee directory. Hank Fischer. Procurement. A profile picture placeholder—a gray silhouette. He opened the HR files he shouldn’t have access to, his hacking a clumsy thing of guessed passwords and remembered IT memos.
The file was nearly empty. A start date three years ago. No prior employment listed. A bank routing number for direct deposit. And an address.
It was a P.O. Box in a town two hundred miles away.
“A ghost with a mailbox,” Mavis mused. He squirmed, his body hot and damp. Travis could feel his own heartbeat everywhere, throbbing in his temples, his gut, between his legs, where Mavis’s movements were stirring a relentless, building pressure.
Travis cross-referenced the P.O. Box with property records, a free public database. His clicking became frantic, urgent. The search spun, then resolved.
The P.O. Box was registered to a commercial entity: ‘Granite Peak Holdings, LLC’.
A perfect, closed loop. Don approved inflated orders to a shell company, Granite Peak, which was owned by a shell employee, Hank, whose salary was paid by the very funds he was stealing. The money went into a P.O. Box and presumably, from there, into Don’s pocket.
“Got you,” Travis whispered, the triumph cold and sharp.
He took a final screenshot—the LLC registration page, the name glaring on the screen. His finger hovered over the trackpad to drag it into the folder.
Mavis chose that moment to push back firmly, arching his small spine against Travis, a full-bodied, claiming press. The sensation tore through Travis, short-circuiting the cold triumph with a wave of white-hot release. He came silently, a shuddering convulsion that made his abdomen jump and his vision blur at the edges. The laptop screen swam in the blue haze.
For a long moment, the only sound was Travis’s ragged breathing and the hum of the computer fan. Mavis slowly relaxed against him, a tiny, spent weight.
Travis blinked, dragged the final screenshot into the folder with trembling fingers, and saved it. He then saved two more copies to different drives—one to a hidden cloud account, one to a USB stick he fumbled out of the bedside drawer.
“Proof,” he exhaled, the word tasting like victory and exhaustion.
Mavis turned his head, resting his cheek on Travis’s skin. “A good haul,” he said, his voice satisfied and soft. “You have your threads. Now what will you pull?”
Travis looked at the darkened hole in the wall, then at the glowing screen, then down at the small creature collapsed against him. The world outside this room was vast and hostile, full of Dons and fraudulent chairs. But here, he had a weapon, a companion, a secret.
He gently scooped Mavis into his hand, bringing him up to chest level. Mavis didn’t resist, curling into the offered palm, his energy spent.
“I don’t know yet,” Travis admitted, staring at the folder icon on his screen, a tiny trove of grenades. “But I’m not letting it go.”
“Good,” Mavis sighed, already half-asleep. “Wake me when you start the war.”
Travis stared at the sent folder icon for a full minute after the whoosh sound faded. The silence in the room felt thicker now, contaminated. He’d attached three of the clearest invoice mismatches. His message was clinical, stripped of any accusation: ‘Don, noticed these variances between PO approvals and received inventory. Can you confirm you authorized these? Wanted to check before month-end reconciliation.’ He’d copied no one.
It was a grenade with the pin pulled gently, set neatly on Don’s desk.
“You sent it.” Mavis’s voice was muffled against his chest, no longer sleepy but sharp.
“Yeah.”
“A polite grenade.” Mavis pushed himself up on Travis’s sternum, a tiny silhouette against the laptop’s glow. “Will he throw it back, or will he try to pocket it before it explodes?”
“I don’t know.” Travis’s throat was dry. The post-adrenaline crash left his hands feeling hollow and light. He closed the laptop, plunging the room into deep, textured darkness relieved only by the streetlight bleed around the blinds. The sudden absence of the screen’s buzz was a physical relief. “I gave him an out. A chance to explain.”
Mavis barked a tiny, incredulous laugh. It sounded like a rustle of dry leaves. “You gave a spider a chance to explain the web. He will only offer you more silk.”
Travis had no rebuttal. He lay back, the reality of the action settling into his bones like a deep chill. He’d kicked the hive. Now he had to wait for the direction of the swarm.
His phone buzzed on the nightstand, the vibration a violent snarl in the quiet. Travis froze. Mavis went perfectly still, a small, tense statue on his chest. The screen lit up the ceiling, casting a frantic, bouncing light. It wasn’t a call. It was a cascade of email notifications.
“That,” Mavis whispered, “was fast.”
Travis’s hand felt like a lead weight as he reached for it. He fumbled, nearly dropping the cool plastic. The screen showed three new emails. All from Don. Sent within sixty seconds of each other.
He opened the first.
‘Travis – Thanks for the diligence. Let’s discuss first thing tomorrow. My office, 8 AM. Don.’
The tone was all wrong. It was too calm, too appreciative. Travis’s stomach tightened.
The second email was a meeting invitation officially booked in the company calendar. ‘8:00 AM – Follow-up on Q3 Vendor Query.’ It looked professional, benign.
The third email had a single attachment. A PDF. The subject line was blank.
“He’s sending you a document,” Mavis said, his tiny head craning to see the screen. “Open it.”
Travis tapped the file. It loaded slowly. A scanned document appeared. It was a carbon copy of an old-style invoice from ‘Granite Peak Supplies,’ dated two months prior. It was for the forty missing ergonomic chairs. Scrawled in pen across the bottom, in handwriting Travis recognized as Don’s, was a note: ‘Variance due to rush-order premium and custom engraving for executive suite. See attached authorization.’
Beneath that, stapled to the corner in the scan, was a second sheet. It was a memo on company letterhead. It was a project authorization for ‘Executive Floor Branding Enhancements,’ signed by someone two levels above Don. The project code on the memo matched a code handwritten on the invoice.
It was a perfect, pre-made alibi. A paper trail constructed after the fact, now presented as prior justification.
“He had this ready,” Travis said, his voice flat. The cleverness of it was dizzying. Don hadn’t panicked. He’d prepared.
“He had many things ready,” Mavis corrected, his voice cold. “This is one thread. He shows you this, you nod and apologize for your mistake, and the other threads—the air purifiers, the software, all of it—suddenly have similar memos attached tomorrow. Your polite grenade just got dismantled in his hands.”
Travis locked the phone screen, returning them to darkness. He felt foolish. Naïve. Mavis was right. He’d presented a puzzle, and Don had simply shown him a pre-assembled corner, proving the picture was always meant to look exactly like this.
“So tomorrow, at eight,” Travis said to the ceiling.
“He will be calm. He will thank you again. He might even offer you a better project, a small promotion.” Mavis settled back down, his body a tense bundle. “It is how a predator soothes the prey that has stumbled too close to the den. You will leave his office feeling embarrassed and grateful.”
“I won’t,” Travis stated, but it sounded weak.
“You will have to,” Mavis said. “Or you will have to escalate. Show your full hand. Go to someone above him with everything we found.”
The ‘we’ landed heavily in the dark room. Travis turned his head on the pillow. He could just make out the darker patch on the wall, the hole where Mavis’s world met his. That world felt more real, more honest, than the one in his inbox.
“I can’t go in there tomorrow and pretend I believe him,” Travis whispered. “He’ll see right through it.”
Mavis was silent for a long moment. Then he shifted, a slow, deliberate crawl up Travis’s chest until his small face was close to Travis’s chin. His breath was a warm, faint tickle.
“Then do not pretend,” Mavis said, his words deliberate. “Go in. Listen to his story. Look at his papers. And then ask one more question.”
“What question?”
Mavis’s teeth glinted in a sliver of streetlight. “Ask him to explain the P.O. Box.”
The air left Travis’s lungs. He hadn’t mentioned that in the email. He’d held it back. It was the link, the undeniable thread tying Don’s fake employee to the fake company.
Don wouldn’t have a memo for that.
Travis felt a slow, cold smile spread on his own face. It wasn’t a warm feeling. It was the thrill of a gambler who’d kept an ace hidden. “Yeah.”
“Yeah,” Mavis echoed, a shadow of satisfaction in his voice. He patted Travis’s cheek, a minuscule gesture. “Now sleep. The war starts at eight.”
He curled into the hollow of Travis’s throat. Travis stared into the dark, listening to Mavis’s breathing even out, and felt the grenade, pin still firmly in his grasp, resting cold and ready in the hidden folders of his laptop.
Travis stared into the dark, listening to Mavis’s breathing even out, and felt the grenade, pin still firmly in his grasp, resting cold and ready in the hidden folders of his laptop. His own breath felt too loud. The silence after sending the HR email was a vacuum, sucking all the certainty out of him. He’d cc’d his personal address, a tiny flag of self-preservation.
“You did the right thing,” Mavis murmured into his neck, half-asleep. His voice was a rasp of gravel. “Now stop thinking. The ceiling isn’t going to offer any better insights.”
“They might tell him,” Travis whispered. The fear was concrete now, a cold slab in his gut. “HR and Don play golf. What if they just forward it to him with a laugh?”
Mavis sighed, a faint puff of air. He wriggled out from the crook of Travis’s neck and sat up on his chest. In the near-total dark, he was just a deeper shadow. “Then you fight sooner rather than later. The outcome is the same. You have the proof. He has the excuses.” He poked a tiny finger into Travis’s sternum. “You have the P.O. Box. He does not.”
Travis grabbed his phone from the nightstand, the screen blazing painfully in his eyes. He opened his sent mail folder, staring at the entry. ‘HR: FYI – Variances.’ It looked so small, so innocuous. The body was just two lines: ‘Attached are some documentation discrepancies I noticed with Granite Peak Supplies. Just wanted to let someone know about this in case something comes up later.’ He’d addressed it to Cynthia in HR, who’d once confided in him about her own boss being a creep at the holiday party. He was banking on her silent ‘don’t tell Don’ understanding.
He put the phone down, screen first. The room swallowed the light again. “It’s out there.”
“It is,” Mavis said. He laid back down, his head on Travis’s collarbone. “You cannot call it back. So sleep. You need your wits tomorrow. Your boss will be wearing his.”
Sleep was a shallow, fitful pool. Travis kept jerking awake, heart hammering, imagining the muffled ping of a reply that never came. The blue dawn light finally seeped around the blinds, etching the room in grim, grayscale detail. The hole in the wall looked like a wound.
Travis moved through his morning routine on autopilot. Shower, dress, coffee. Mavis was a silent observer from the top of the medicine cabinet, then from the kitchen counter edge. His usual mischief was absent, replaced by a watchful intensity.
“Eat something,” Mavis said, as Travis stared into the black void of his mug.
“Not hungry.”
“Eat it anyway. You’ll need the fuel.”
Travis forced down a piece of toast. It tasted like dust. He checked his phone for the hundredth time. No reply from HR. No new email from Don. The silence was a grinding pressure against his temples.
“Okay,” Travis said, shrugging on his jacket. His hands felt numb.
Mavis scrambled down the counter, using a dangling dish towel as a rope, and crossed the linoleum to Travis’s waiting hand. He climbed onto his palm, looking up. “Remember the plan. Listen. Let him talk. Then ask about the P.O. Box. Watch his face.”
“What if he has an answer for that, too?” Travis’s voice sounded hollow in his own ears. “What if he’s just that good?”
Mavis’s smile was thin, all sharp edges. “Then he is a spider who has woven a perfect web. And you will have to be the bird that tears it all down anyway.” He stepped onto Travis’s shoulder, nestling into the fabric of his coat. “But I do not think he is that good. I think he is a man who got used to no one looking.”
The drive to the office was a smear of grey streets and red taillights. Travis’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel. Mavis was a silent, warm presence against his neck, a tiny counterweight to the vertigo.
The office lobby was too bright, the fluorescent lights humming a judgmental note. Travis rode the elevator up, his stomach flipping. He could feel the USB drive, a plastic shard of potential ruin, in his inner jacket pocket. The folder was duplicated there, a digital ghost waiting to be born.
Don’s office door was open. He was at his desk, smiling. It was the worst thing Travis had seen all morning.
“Travis. Come in. Shut the door.”
Travis did, the click of the latch sounding final. He sat in the guest chair, the leather cold even through his pants.
Don leaned back, steepling his fingers. He looked relaxed, avuncular. “Got your email. And the one to HR. Cautious. Smart.” He nodded, as if confirming something to himself. “I appreciate a detail-oriented mind.”
“The variances were pretty significant,” Travis said, forcing his voice to stay level. It came out flat, robotic.
“They were. And I owe you an apology.” Don opened a folder on his desk—a physical folder, thick with paper. He slid a few sheets across the desk. “My fault entirely. I should have looped you in on the executive project. We were under a serious time crunch. Half that stuff was routed to the refurbished offices downtown. The other half…” He tapped a memo. “Custom engraving, like I sent you. The auth got buried.”
Travis looked at the papers. They were perfect. Freshly printed, but the memo headers looked aged, the signatures fluent. He recognized the name of the Senior VP. It was plausible. It was a masterclass in cover.
“I see,” Travis said.
“I’ve already spoken to Cynthia in HR,” Don continued, his smile warming. “Smoothed it over. Told her you were doing exactly what we pay you for. Being vigilant. No harm, no foul.”
The casual mention of Cynthia’s name was a punch. It meant he knew. He’d already contained it.
“There’s just one thing,” Travis said, the words coming out before his brain could stop them. He felt Mavis shift minutely under his collar, a press of tiny fingers against his skin.
Don’s eyebrows lifted, a polite, open invitation. “What’s that?”
“The P.O. Box.” Travis kept his eyes locked on Don’s. “For Hank Fischer. The procurement guy. The one who processed all these orders.” He let the sentence hang, a bare hook in the air between them.
Don’s smile didn’t falter. It just… cooled. The warmth bled out of it, leaving the shape of a smile, empty. His eyes, which had been crinkled at the corners, went flat. He didn’t blink. He didn’t look at the papers. He just looked at Travis.
The silence stretched, taut and electric. The hum of the computer tower under Don’s desk sounded like a distant swarm.
“What about it?” Don asked finally, his voice stripped of all its previous friendly padding.
“It’s registered to Granite Peak Holdings, LLC.” Travis heard himself speak, amazed at how steady he sounded. “The vendor. It’s a closed loop. Hank doesn’t exist, does he?”
Don leaned forward very slowly, placing his elbows on the desk. The avuncular mask was gone, completely shed. What remained was something harder, colder. “Where,” he said, each word a distinct, frozen stone, “did you get that information?”
Travis’s mouth was dry. He’d done it. He’d pulled the thread. Now the whole tapestry was beginning to unravel right in front of him, and he was holding the loose end. He could feel the shape of the USB drive in his pocket, a hard rectangle of truth.
He said nothing.
Don leaned back again, the chair creaking. He studied Travis, a new, calculating light in his eyes. “You’re a smart kid, Travis. Ambitious. I like that.” He spread his hands. “Sometimes, in a large company, projects get… complicated. Funds get moved. It’s administrative. To streamline.”
“This isn’t streamlining,” Travis heard himself say. “This is fraud.”
The word sat in the room, ugly and final.
Don’s face tightened. The last pretense of civility evaporated. “Be very careful,” he said, his voice low. “You have a copy of everything, I assume. On a drive somewhere. In your pocket, maybe.”
Travis didn’t move.
“Give it to me,” Don said, not a request. “Walk away. You’ll get a promotion. A significant raise. This never happened.” He gestured to the perfect papers on his desk. “This is the story. It’s a good story. It has memos.”
Travis felt his heart hammering against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat. He thought of Mavis, a hidden pulse against his neck. He thought of the polite email to HR, now a weapon in Don’s hand. He thought of the silent, watchful hole in his bedroom wall.
This was the moment. The grenade pin was between his fingers.
He stood up. The chair scraped loudly on the floor. “The story has a P.O. Box,” Travis said, his voice quiet. “And I just forwarded it to people who actually care about receipts.”
He turned and walked out, leaving Don’s frozen, furious face behind him. The office air felt thin, his ears ringing. He didn’t stop at his cubicle. He walked straight to the elevator, pushed the button for the lobby, and rode down in a bubble of pure, trembling silence.
Only when he was in his car, the engine roaring to life, did he feel Mavis crawl out from under his collar and onto the passenger seat headrest.
“Well?” Mavis asked, his voice tight.
Travis looked at the building shrinking in his rearview mirror. “He offered me a raise.”
Mavis was silent for a beat. “Ah.”
“I walked out.”
A small, satisfied sound escaped Mavis. It wasn’t a laugh. It was the sound of a lid being sealed on a box. “Good. Now the war starts in earnest. Where to?”
Travis pulled his phone out. There was a new email notification. From Cynthia in HR. The subject line was: ‘Meeting Request.’
“Home,” Travis said, putting the car in drive. “We have more emails to send.”