Chapter 39
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Asher
“Damn! Why would we look there?”
“You’re right. The guy’s been gone for two years.
But riddle me this: She’s traced the access attempts.
The intruder was never able to penetrate the subnets.
I get why they tried HR, R five lived in the local area, and they met occasionally at a bar south of Seattle.
This had been going on for nearly three and a half years.
The other four were Hugo Wayne, Baylor Moore, Greg Webster, and Lee Milligan.
I knew that in the tech community, like other professions, especially in a local area, eventually, if you lived and worked in the same area long enough, everyone knew or knew of everyone else.
After we fired Baylor, he was hired at one of the big box electronics stores, hated the job, but couldn’t get hired at the big tech firms. No surprise.
Hugo was a different story. Doug said he couldn’t get a job, and his unemployment had run out.
He’d lost his apartment and had moved in with Baylor.
He definitely had a log on his shoulder toward FI because he thought we’d blackballed him.
Doug’s observation was spot on: Hugo insisted that everything that had ever happened to him was everyone else’s fault, and why couldn’t people see that he was an expert.
Greg Webster and Lee Milligan worked for Tri-O-Tech—the connection and the grudge.
Doug explained that when I mentioned Emma, everything came together, and he knew it was only a matter of time.
Greg made sure they all knew that Emma was the daughter of the guy that owned some big tech firm, Palmer Logistics or Technology or something, and she’d either slept her way up or daddy had somehow smoothed the way.
Now Greg and Emma were up for the same promotion.
Greg went ballistic when Emma was assigned to the project.
“I knew Tri-O-Tech was handling the expansion and streamlining, but I didn’t make the connection until you asked if I knew her.”
The plan was Hugo’s idea. The malware was ransomware hidden in ghostware.
Hugo stored it in plain sight. He would send Doug the trigger from a burner phone to a dummy FI email after Hugo duplicated the R I swear, and then Craig told me you wanted to see me.
I was sure it was because you found out. ”
Ben spoke for both of us. Doug seemed like he had his life together. “Why did you get involved in this? You’re the last person I would’ve thought would have anything to do with something like this.”
Doug scoffed on a bitter laugh. “The person you see today isn’t the person I was as a kid.
When I was fourteen, I stole a car. It belonged to a guy who lived at the other end of our street.
Ever seen that movie about the old guy who restored an old car?
He hated anyone that came around his place.
They must’ve used old man Griffith as the inspiration.
It was a black Vette. I got caught, charged with grand theft.
If it hadn’t been for old man Griffith, they probably would’ve put me in juvie until I was eighteen.
The DA wanted at least three years. Mr. G tried to get them to drop the charges, but that wasn’t happening, so Mr. G talked the DA into one year and got the record sealed.
Hugo found it. Said if I didn’t help get them in, he’d send the record to HR.
“I fucked up again and here we are.”