Bonus Epilogue
Alec...
Six months later...
“Darling, if this delay is due to you doing what we specifically agreed you would not do, I will be very displeased.”
Her voice came over the comm wedged in my ear. “Hello, I’m Fiadh Cassidy-”
“-Davies,” I added.
“And we must be strangers,” Fee said sternly, “if you believe anyone has any business telling me what to d-”
“Aside from your husband who generously doles out orgasms on demand.”
There was a short silence. “Well, there is that. I suppose I will take your ideas under advisement. Later,” she said grudgingly.
I could hear Terrence and Lucy, who had a combined IQ of 350 but the emotional maturity of a fourteen-year-old boy, giggling.
“Do you two have the ransomware software ready to download or are you both jerking off to Hentai porn again?” I snapped. “My wife is putting herself in danger here.”
“Yes sir, we do!” Terrence hastily said, “I mean- the first thing not the second thing. The first thing was the software, correct?”
“Oh, my god!” I could hear the sound of Lucy slapping him on the back of the head. “Yes, boss, the software is primed and ready and really, it will penetrate the system just fine from the exterior location. Mrs. Boss doesn’t have to get into the main server.”
“Already here,” Fee sounded genuinely happy, a state of being that I knew both pleased and revolted her.
“Kyle,” I clicked over to the other comm line, “we’re up.”
We’d surrounded the biggest of the Cardenas Cattle Corporation stockyards. It dominated the outskirts of Leticia, Columbia, edged by the Amazon rainforest. The CCC was a cattle company supplying beef worldwide by knocking down hundreds of acres of rainforest every day for grazing areas.
As far as Fee was concerned, that was reason enough to rain hell down on the CCC Board of Directors and their equally destructive subsidiaries. But within this compound lay the true jewel of the Cardenas’ corrupt crown, their data compound that meticulously tracked their financial interests worldwide. Drugs, blackmail, assassins for hire... a long and illustrious list.
Since the interior compound was such a well-kept secret, security was focused outward on the millions of pounds worth of prized beef in the massive stockyards.
“If those pretentious would-be gourmets really knew what was going into those $300 steaks,” Fee said, “the herbicide they’re spraying in the forest that the cattle are eating? The shock of knowing they were really eating would kill them faster than their clogged arteries.”
Such a way with words, my lovely bride.
As my crew attacked the exterior compound, forcing all the security’s attention outward, Fee and her two best people, Raul and Meghan Emily, would be breaking into the data compound to upload a new form of ransomware so precise and perfect that Lucy bragged no IT genius on earth could stop it. I knew her part of the plan was the least dangerous, but the thought of my Fee in any danger at all was making my molars grind into a fine powder.
“Partner in crime, and I mean that literally, are you ready?” Her voice crackled over my earpiece, sounding remarkably calm for a woman currently breaking into the headquarters of one of the most vicious cartels in South America.
“I hear you, darling. Starting the exterior assault in three... two...” An explosion rocketed through the huge ranch house by the stockyards, destroying the structure but - as my wife had insisted - and hopefully killing any of the sick animals more quickly and painlessly than the drugs and diseases were. Spotlights flared, lighting up the exterior like high noon as we fired on the jeeps blazing toward us. I shot through the radiator of the first vehicle, crashing it into one of the electrified fences. Kyle hummed as he took turns shooting out the jeeps and the spotlights with me.
It was, as Macbeth said, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. After fifteen minutes of decimating the Cardenas soldiers with grenades and Dmytro’s excellently modified Kalashnikov rifles, I got the “all clear” signal from Fee and we pulled back.
***
“Remember the old days when we went to war against rival crime families?” Kyle said nostalgically, “We’d loot and pillage...”
“Driving them before us like cattle and hearing the lamentations of their women?” Fee plopped down next to me in the leather sectional where we held meetings in the jet.
“Was that from Genghis Khan?” Kyle asked.
“No,” Fee slung a leg over mine, “Conan the Barbarian.”
Kyle laughed. My head of security was American, ex-Special Forces, and stern and humorless on the best of days. The ease with which my wife could make him laugh was unsettling.
“What the hell?” Raul gagged, “I’ve got cow shit all over my boots. There’s a reason I’m a vegan, man!” He left - no doubt to burn his footwear - and Lucy took his place next to Meghan Emily, who didn’t seem to mind the intrusion as she snuggled in.
“Okay, Boss and Mrs. Boss, check this out,” she said excitedly, opening her laptop. The vast majority of what we saw were cascading numbers, binary code that seemed incomprehensible until she switched tabs to show us the ransomware gliding through the Cardenas’ financial records like a boa constrictor embracing an ox.
“The sheer overload of data will smother the first three rounds of alerts from their security system. On the fourth, they’ll see this.” She tapped a key and a stylized version of a bird popped up, tweeting malevolently.
“Is that a...?” I leaned forward. “That’s a Willow Tit, isn’t it?”
“Poetic justice, that!” Fee cackled, kissing me.
“Yep,” Lucy agreed cheerfully, “nothing but Willow Tit, Willow Tit, Willow Tit until we’ve drained all their financial reserves and their servers shut down. They’ll be waiting for a ransom demand that will never come.”
“The cattle side of the company will be forced to shut down after word if what’s really in their beef gets leaked to the USDA,” Terrence added.
“Then, we supply the farmer collectives around the rainforest with enough supplementary income, courtesy of the CCC’s money, that they won’t need to continue the logging,” I said, “along with greasing the palms of enough local politicians to keep them out of it.”
“This is deeply satisfying,” Fee said. “We should celebrate.”
“We should,” I agreed, picking her up and bouncing her in my arms as she laughed, taking her to our bedroom at the back of the jet.