Chapter 28 #2
He grins. “Let’s loop back to why confinement doesn’t work for you as a punishment.”
Him and his interminable interrogations. “Let’s not. I’m coding. I need to concentrate.”
De Leon sniggers. “Want a hot pocket?”
“Fuck off.” I pull out my headphones, make a show out of clapping them over my ears, and sink into the code.
De Leon trails me to class, where I introduce him to Lindy as an exchange student from England. Lindy crosses his eyes at me and I know I’ll owe him an explanation later, but he doesn’t object as De Leon slumps into the seat beside me.
Lindy lectures today, standing slouched at the podium with his hands dug into his jeans pocket. He makes eye contact with me every few minutes as he talks. Then his eyes drift past me to De Leon. Who looks back.
After twenty minutes of this, it finally pings. I got no little vibes off Lindy at all, but could he be submissive?
I yank my attention away from their flirtation and focus on the lecture. Lindy’s modeled three different ransomware attacks. I can tell the homework assignment’s going to be how we’d have stopped them. I tap notes into my laptop as I listen to him answer a question about the second model.
Beside me, De Leon shifts and I can see his laptop screen. He’s got Lindy’s page on the NYU faculty website showing. That terrible picture of him where he looks like he’s in mid-transformation to rat-man. I drag my eyes away from his bugging eyes to the lines of code on the whiteboard behind him.
Something clicks in the back of my head.
That’s my code. The code I gave to Ness to buy my way out.
Whatever expression crosses my face causes Lindy to frown on his next pass around the room. I force a burp, cover it with a cough. Lindy rolls his eyes at me before moving on to lock gazes with De Leon.
I slide the phone that De Leon gave me and never took back out of my bag, tuck it between my laptop and my stomach, and text him.
How do you feel about flirtation for a good cause?
I don’t see him take out a phone so his messages must be connected to the laptop he has open in front of him, on which he’s barely taken a single note, because his response pops up a second later.
De Leon: Fine by me. What good cause?
Sixth sense twitching. Invite Lindy out for nachos after class and flirt with him. I’m going to ask him some questions while you have him distracted.
De Leon: Is the nacho place defensible?
I think through the schematic for a moment, then nod.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see De Leon nod back.
I ping Logan, Manny, and Squid the change of plans so they don’t freak when my tracker doesn’t return home after class.
Lindy’s an engaging lecturer and I usually don’t have any trouble staying focused in his class, but after realizing he put my fucking hack up on a public site, I’m lost. I give up taking notes and write out a list of questions, starting with the vague and general and becoming increasingly specific.
De Leon reads my screen over my shoulder and grunts.
As Lindy wraps up the lecture, I delete my list of questions. De Leon’s seen them and knows where I want the interrogation to go. I don’t want anyone else looking over my shoulder. Not that the questions would make any sense to them.
De Leon waits for me to pack up and trails me up to the podium. Two students linger, but as soon as Lindy sees us walk up, he shoo-es them off, telling them to come to his office hours.
I introduce De Leon again when Lindy turns his attention to us.
De Leon’s got all the right moves, I’ll give him that.
He holds Lindy’s hand a little too long after they shake.
In all the time we were in England, he never made eye contact with me the way he does with Lindy, complimenting everything from his baggy jeans to his skills as a lecturer.
De Leon’s deep voice lifts to the perfect, half-shy, half-hopeful note as he asks if Lindy has time to join us for a bite to eat.
Lindy takes the bait so fast, I don’t even have to offer to pay.
You wouldn’t know De Leon’s my body man as he makes small talk with Lindy on the way to the nacho bar.
He seems relaxed, walking along with his shoulders slightly hunched, his body angled toward Lindy’s.
But I notice the way he keeps himself between me and everything else, including the street and Lindy.
He asks for a booth and nods me into the corner, positioning himself again between me and the room.
Sitting across from Lindy, De Leon keeps up the eye contact and adds small touches.
He teases Lindy gently about his vegan queso, but listens with apparent earnestness to Lindy’s rant about veganism and the dairy and meat industries destroying the planet.
By the time our nachos arrive, I swear they’re playing footsie under the table.
De Leon knows what I want to get out of Lindy and opens opportunities for me to ask my questions without them coming out of the blue. Fuck, he’s a good interrogator. Lindy answers my questions without breaking eye-contact with De Leon. Every answer is another nail in the coffin.
We’re lingering over Coronas when I get to my last few questions. “Tell Myles about your company’s AUTON program. Made a fucking splash with that one.”
Lindy grins and launches into a technical explanation of the algorithm behind the self-drive program that made Lindy’s former employer famous.
Myles swings his head back and forth like he’s impressed. “How’d I never hear of it?”
I lean in like I’m telling him a secret. “Defense department snapped it up as soon as they realized the ramifications for personal safety systems.”
And they gave Lindy’s company a billion-dollar contract to create a program called WEDGE.
“Ah,” Myles says.
I wink at Lindy. “Didn’t stay dark, though, did it? Hard to keep something that sexy out of the right hands.”
Lindy chuckles. “I know you don’t believe any code is sacred, Max, but there weren’t any leaks for three years. That’s eons in tech time.”
To be fair, it is.
“Any idea how widespread it is now?” I ask.
Lindy shrugs. “Thirty countries. Thousands of end-users.”
“And it’s never been cracked,” I say.
“Well,” Lindy says. “There are rumors. Nothing substantiated. I didn’t work on the final program, but I hear the coding’s tight.”
“Until you released my hack.”
Lindy blinks at me. “What?”
“Your picture on the university website. The lines of code on the whiteboard behind you? They’re part of my hack. Fuck, I knew I recognized that coding. I just couldn’t put it together, Ness.”
Lindy’s smile turns cold.
De Leon shifts and Lindy flinches. I’m not sure what he’s done under the table, but I don’t think Lindy’s going anywhere until this conversation is over.
“Why?” I ask.
“Why burn my former employer? I think you know the answer to that.”
“Because they fired you for sleeping with your married boss? Fuck’s sake, man. There are thousands of people who believe they’re safe when they really have nothing between them and a gun. How many fucking angry NYU undergrads have taken a swipe at WEDGE after looking at your damn faculty profile?”
Lindy shrugs. “Not enough. They’re patching faster than we’re hacking. That’s why we need you back, Max. You made it work.”
“I made it work because you told me we were supporting our boys over there. That’s not what you’re doing. You’re waving a big, red fuck you at the people who screwed you without giving a shit about the people who are hurt in the process. People died. Three little kids died—”
Lindy slashes his hand through the air to cut me off. “That was a mistake. Won’t happen again. I’ve got clean targets this time. Good targets. They’ll make headlines. Orelo will have hundreds of unhappy customers screaming down their door. They’ll go bust. Then the job’s done. You’re out, Max.”
“I’m out now.”
Lindy chuckles. Given how evil overlord he’s gone on me, it should be a high-pitched cackle, but it’s not. It’s just a chuckle: a warm exhalation from a guy I thought I knew but was so, so fucking wrong about.
“Don’t be like that. You’ve been sticking your middle finger up at the man for years. This is it. The ultimate hack. Show everyone the truth. There is no safety. There is no security. Not in this world. Not on this planet. Nothing is safe.”
I shake my head at the glitter in his eyes.
I know nothing is safe. I know security is an illusion.
But it’s an important illusion. It’s an illusion that lets several billion people sleep at night.
It’s an illusion I’ve never aspired to shatter.
I’ve bolstered it with shit like the security forum tips.
I’ve made every hack as clean and quiet as possible.
I’ve never been in this to make noise. I’ve just been trying to keep the few people I care about safe. To do what Uncle Max told me to do.
That’s all I can do.
“One last hack,” I say.
De Leon twitches but stays focused on Lindy.
“Two clean targets. You take one. I’ll take the other. We do them together.”
Lindy grins. “So we’re equally implicated? I burn you; you burn me?”
“Too fucking right. We do it my way. No way to trace it. I’ll provide the proxies. You provide the meatspace. Fifty-fifty.”
“I’m good with that. I have a place. It’s out of the way, but hell, you have a plane, right?”
He aims a cold glance at De Leon, who shrugs.
“Give me the coordinates and I’ll find the nearest airfield,” De Leon says.
Lindy holds out his hand, waggling his fingers. “Gimme your phone.”
“Do not,” I hiss. “Give that man your phone.”
“Aww, Max, where’s the trust?”
“You burned it six months ago when you let those kids die,” I say, staring into the eyes of a man I thought I knew. “Why me? Was this all a set up? You moving to New York? Teaching my class?”
He shakes his head. “Not all of it. I’ve been watching you for a while.
I’ve been watching everyone Navy Intelligence taught to break my program, but you’re the only one who came out and kept hacking.
Other guys got desk jobs and started families.
You’re the only one still swinging his dick all over the net.
The only one willing to take the risks I needed to bring Orelo to its knees.
When you enrolled at NYU, I saw a way in.
I called a friend of a friend and poof, a part-time professorship. Everything was easy after that.”
“I thought I was hiding from Ness, but you knew where I was all along. Fuck, I even gave you a free pass at my system.”
Lindy’s grin has too many teeth in it. “Thing of beauty, your system. Poking around at your firewalls was what convinced me to try a meatspace grab. I was never going to break your security. Fuck’s sake, Maxie, how often do you change your passwords?”
“Every. Fucking. Day,” I grit. “And don’t call me Maxie. We are not friends.”
He clutches at his heart dramatically. “You wound me. We are friends. Other than those assholes from the Navy that you hang with, I’m your oldest fucking friend.
And I’m the only one who speaks your language, Max.
Get past your bullshit morals, and embrace the truth.
We’re the same, you and me. Two sides of the same coin. ”
I shake my head at him. I’m not going to argue with him anymore. “Text me those coordinates. We need to go. I have things to set up.”
“How do I know you won’t run off to that plane and disappear like you did to England?
That made me really mad. Bad dog, no bone.
You’ve got no idea how expensive it was to track a private plane and hire a crew in a completely different country.
And they couldn’t even get the job done.
Your little British holiday cost me a hundred thou, Maxie. I’m not eager for a repeat.”
Giving him De Leon as collateral is so fucking tempting.
“I’m not going anywhere because I have a fucking life. I’m meeting my girl’s family Thursday night. I’m going to my best friend’s engagement party over the weekend. I’m not running because I’m not giving any of that up. But I bet you know that already.”
Lindy shrugs. “I know about grandma’s gala.
What makes a party a fucking gala anyway?
” When I don’t answer, he continues, “Drone caught you and your girl talking about it. Lip-reading tech’s expensive, but it’s getting fucking good.
I thought about wangling an invite, but the only thing more boring than hanging with undergrads is hanging with a bunch of people who model diseases.
” He gives an exaggerated yawn. “Snooze fest.”
“Boring or not, I’m going,” I tell him. “I wouldn’t miss it. So, you can be confident I’m not running. Be ready Friday at ten A.M. You have me for twenty-four hours. Saturday morning, I’m getting on a train.”
Lindy rubs his chin. “Might not be long enough. That safe meatspace? It’s the ass end of nowhere.”
“Tough. Make it work.”
Lindy flicks his pale tongue at me. “Fine. Friday, ten A.M. Tab’s yours.”
“No,” De Leon says, deep and low. “Tab’s yours. And I’ve been keeping track. Don’t think I’m letting you off a fucking thing.”
Lindy’s eyes slide to him and narrow. “What’s that mean?”
De Leon leans back in his seat and slaps his hand on his thigh. “You know. As soon as Max is back in New York, you and I are going to have a reckoning.”
Color floods up into Lindy’s cheeks. “Whatever.”
De Leon holds Lindy’s eyes as he pushes me up out of our seats and towards the door.
I wait until we’re out on the street to explode. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
De Leon tips his head to slant me a glance under the bill of his cap. “What?”
“You’re going to, what, punish him?”
“Yes. He’s been a bad boy.”
I gape at him, unable to come up with any response other than outrage.
“Throttle back, Max. I know what you’re thinking.
He’s a bad guy. So am I. You’re all worried about unleashing me on some sweet little because I might fuck them up.
I can’t fuck up your friend Lindy much worse than he already is, can I?
And maybe I can do him some good. At the very least, it’s practice on someone you won’t worry about. ”
“Bu-but are you—why are you—do you actually like him?”
“Enough to tie him up and punish him and fuck his brains out? Sure. He’s an interesting guy, if a little nerdy.”
“I thought you were just flirting with him as part of the interrogation.”
“No, I was interrogating him while I was flirting with him. The two are not mutually exclusive, Max. You really would not make a good covert operator.”
I rub my hands over my face as De Leon steers me to a taxi. “This feels like it’s crossing all sorts of lines. James Bond doesn’t foil Goldfinger by spanking him.”
De Leon shrugs and holds the car door open as I climb in. “Maybe he should have.”