Chapter 20 #3
“I was catching Aleks up to speed but before I do, how are you feeling?”
“Much better.” I gesture to the empty tray. “See? It must’ve been that food we ordered.”
Mikhail scowls, unconvinced.
“What did you order?” Aleks asks Mikhail, not looking at me, of course, but at him.
“Moscow Morsels,” he mutters.
“I’m telling you, those blinis were terrible. I swear they cook them from frozen,” I chime in.
Aleks shakes his head. “They’re the worst there.” We suddenly realize we’re agreeing on something.
I turn away. Hmph.
Still, a part of me remembers what Polina said about testing for pregnancy…
“Have you made any progress?”
I snort. “Have I made any progress? You bet your ass I have.”
Mikhail gives me “the look” with a hint of a smirk. A warning. Not exactly a curse but I’m close.
I look at him with wide-eyed innocence. “I mean yes, sir, of course I have.”
Aleks seems to forgive me momentarily. “Fill us in?”
I quickly tell them the progress I’ve made.
“It would be a lot easier if only I could hear what they were saying. I’m right there, right on the cusp of getting your shipment expedited but it’s a bit tricky.”
Aleks’s eyes gleam. “I know exactly how we can hear inside.”
Hmm. I’m not jealous at all. I narrow my eyes at him. “Yeah? Tell me.”
“May I?” He gestures toward my laptop.
“No one touches my laptop.” I glare at him. “Tell me.”
Mikhail nods, so Aleks tells me, even though he’s obviously not too pleased about it. “Voice over Internet Protocol. We intercept VoIP traffic and —”
“I thought of that,” I interrupt impatiently. “We don’t have time for that.”
His lips thin. “Have you found any vulnerable devices? Security camera with a microphone, unsecured smart phones?”
He has a fair point. “Maybe not fully,” I admit. Maybe not at all?
“I’d start there.”
I’m already on it. In seconds, I’ve located Jim’s iPhone, wide open for all to see. I quickly enable the audio function and hit the speaker volume on my laptop. I can hear them as well as if I were standing in the room next to them.
Point one for Aleks, but I won’t admit it.
“Something’s not right here,” one of the voices says. “We should be able to access all video footage, and it seems…”
Their voices get jumbled for a moment.
“Our ten o’clock hasn’t arrived.”
I put my hand over the speaker. “Their ten o’clock hasn’t arrived because I hacked their texting system and gave him the day off.”
Aleks looks impressed. Mikhail, however, gives me a wary look and pulls out his phone.
“Relax,” Aleks says, waving off Mikhail. “I have a firewall and MFA installed so no one can access our lines.”
“MFA?” Mikhail shakes his head.
“Multi-factor authentication,” Aleks and I say in unison. He glares. I narrow my eyes at him. Not sure if now’s the time to demonstrate I can totally get by his firewall and MFA?
“You should conduct more frequent penetration testing,” I tell him.
“Oh for fuck’s sake, the network segmentation covers that,” Aleks says with a near-growl.
“Hmm,” I say, stroking my chin. I lift my phone. “Are you sure about that?”
Mikhail looks from me to him. “I can’t tell if you two are getting along or fighting.”
“Neither,” we say, again in unison.
Aleks crosses his arms across his chest. “What’s your favorite scripting language for penetration testing?”
“Can you stop saying penetration?” Mikhail mutters but I’m already thinking.
“God, that’s a hard one. Ruby’s a fave, but Python…”
“Infinitely more readable minus the simplicity of Ruby,” he supplies.
“Mmm.” I’m starting to warm up to him, but he can answer a question of mine now. “Best way to handle the aftermath of a data breach and compromised system?”
“Murder and bloodshed, obviously,” he says with a shrug of his shoulders.
I laugh out loud. “You are so brothers. Okay, so murder and bloodshed aren’t my methods, but of course they would be yours, after you lock down encrypted data and issue an alert. Real question. Protocol for if and when you encounter a WAF and have you ever successfully bypassed it?”
“Web Application Firewall,” he says to Mikhail. “And yes, of course I have. My methods have, in the past, involved evasion through encoding and protocol tunneling, but there’s no goddamn way I’m going to give you details on anything else.”
“Hmm. Touché.”
Apparently Aleks doesn’t get in trouble for swearing. That is so unfair.
Mikhail crosses his arms on his chest so they now very much look exactly like brothers.
My computer dings. I pump the air.
“Your shipment is on the way via expedited shipping and will arrive on time. Your name is Gladys Anderson and you’re a multi-billionaire old lady, if anyone asks.”
Aleks snorts. “She got one right.”
Mikhail reaches for my chin and cups it. “Well done, little hacker,” he says. My chest warms at his praise even as my mind does a somersault.
Multi-billionaire?
God.
Mikhail’s phone rings. Silencing it, he starts to shove it into his pocket when it rings again. He exchanges a look with Aleks.
What’s going on?
Mikhail blows out a breath and answers the phone. “What?” He listens, his eyes darkening. “I’ll handle it.”
He’ll handle…what?