Zander #3
A muscle ticks in Hayes’s jaw as I mention his old friend-turned-rival who was instrumental in helping us ferret out the nasty group that started this crusade against our company.
“You know what he wants. If we call him in now, we’re giving him way more than we’ll get from the help.
We already let him cash in his favor by vouching for him when the FBI was investigating.
He got six months of house arrest instead of prison, and he didn’t lose his company. That’s plenty of repayment.”
Octavius Rex, founder and CEO of Rex Omnia, took a huge risk to make sure we had all the documentation he had been collecting on his shady business partners—the bitter losers we took Gage Geological, Kilowen Industries, and Donner Investments from.
We’ve stayed out of contact with him for a year to ensure he wasn’t connected to us as the leak that took down the group as they planned a second mine collapse, right here in Georgia, this time.
In return for his help, Rex asked for a seat on the Board of Directors for Olympus International.
Bringing in an outsider, a business rival, at that, would be akin to putting an enemy in our house to run rampant.
He would know every major play before it happened publicly, be able to influence the path that Olympus takes in all future expansion, know the inner workings of our organization, and block us if he saw fit.
Granted, my brothers and I are also on the board, so there is still plenty of sway we could use to supersede his vote, but it’s the principle of the matter that gets under Hayes’s skin.
He doesn't want an outsider weighing in on our company’s future.
Especially one we stole a legacy from who may still have plans for his own form of vengeance played out in a long game format.
“I don’t think we have much choice, here, Hater,” I say, getting under his skin further by using an old nickname he despises.
“Call Rex in and see if we can get to the bottom of this before we lose our asses in the market when news of this attack reaches investors for our publicly traded subsidiaries.”
“Or worse, they manage to get in and put ransomware in our system so we can’t access anything while they plunder and pilfer anything they want.
We can’t run our business without company email, databases, and financial systems. It would mean the end of any in-progress acquisitions.
Do you want to lose out on billions? Because that’s what this is looking like it’s set to be,” Payton says, rejoining us.
“Fuck,” Hayes says, admitting defeat as he pulls out his cell and dials a number.
He rolls his eyes when the call connects.
“I’m not calling to catch up, Rex,” he grits out.
“Your old friends are back at it. We’re fending off a cyber attack on our servers and systems right now. Know anything about that?”
I turn to Payton while Hayes continues his conversation with Rex.
“Do you think it’s an inevitability that the attack will be successful?”
Payton turns toward me, assessing. “It’s brute force for a cyber attack, but there’s a calculation to each attempt, as numerous as they’ve been. I think whoever is behind this wants us to know we’re sitting ducks and they’re playing with us. This took a lot of resources—”
“And there are plenty of people who hate us that have the resources to fund something like this,” I finish for him. “So why now? What do they stand to gain other than inconveniencing us if it doesn’t work, and mining our data and fucking with everything if it does?”
“If I were on the other side of this, I would want access to all of the deals in the pipeline, see who we have our eyes on, what we stand to gain from our ventures, and also where our money is right now that would be easy to pick off.”
An ominous groan follows Payton’s last words, and we both turn to the table full of IT employees, frantically tapping away on their keyboards.
“They got into Pegasus,” Luca says without looking up from his laptop. “The rest of the attempts have stopped now that they’re in, so I think this was their main goal and the rest was a distraction.”
Payton rushes over to Luca’s computer and they confer quietly as Luca continues to type.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I say, running a hand through my hair and pulling.
Pegasus is my project under the Olympus umbrella.
It’s the name of the company creating clean energy engines I’m planning to use on a fleet of charter jets, and was set to go to market in the new year.
Proprietary information, design schematics, years of development, marketing plans, and pending contracts were just exposed to a hostile force.
Our patents haven’t been finalized and filed.
If this information hits the open market, or worse, the dark web, our competitors will be clamoring to get their hands on the information and get it to market before we can.
“We’ve managed to boot them from the system and stabilized the network, but there’s no telling how much they got, even in that amount of time.” Payton’s voice is full of dire warning.
We’re fucked.