5. Five
“Please tell me about Harlowe, I’m begging you,” Javi pleads.
I give him a measured look across the booth we are ensconced in with Luca and Diego at Dionysus, where we gathered after work for drinks. It’s an upscale place with an impressive liquor list and discreet employees, close enough to walk from Olympus Tower that it’s a frequent haunt for us. I sip my Underworld Spirits bourbon on the rocks before lowering my glass as my mood cools.
“There’s nothing to tell.” I don’t want to share any of her with anyone. Every part of her that was mine stays that way. And it’s safely locked in the vault.
“Why are you so interested, Javi? Other than your absolutely childish crush on her,” Luca says, tracing a bead of condensation from his own glass and eyeing Javi with glacial indifference. Luca’s icy persona thaws a bit when Payton’s warm, golden retriever personality is around to temper him. Neither of my brothers joined us tonight, so we get the frosty version that matches his cool-blond hair and arctic blue eyes.
Hayes, of course, wanted to go home to Paige, who owns the distillery that makes this incredible bourbon. Payton said he had more work to do. He’s been putting in extra hours the last year as we recover from the industrial mining accident that was part of a corporate sabotage plan intended to take our company down a year ago. We managed to bring the responsible parties to justice, but not before our company image had taken a beating, which has lasted, and we lost a newly acquired property, along with the lives of twenty-four of the mine employees.
While we were able to turn over information on the group who orchestrated the fiasco and get the main people arrested, Payton has been expecting more subterfuge. The shadowy network of disgruntled former business owners set on seeing the demise of Olympus International is large. Partly due to our penchant for hostile takeovers and ruthless business acquisitions, and partly because we have what others want—power. There’s always the possibility of another fucker out for revenge looking to take us down.
“He probably wants to relive a special time in his life,” Diego quips, smirking over the rim of his drink at Javi. “Lord knows he hasn’t had many dates in the last five years to distract him from his Sports Illustrated subscription.”
“Y’all are no fun. Haven’t you ever had a list?” Javi asks, gesturing at us with his tumbler.
“A list?” Luca asks, disdain dripping from his clipped words. He cocks his head to the side as he narrows those unnervingly light eyes at Javi. He looks like a fucking Husky. Shrewd and wolf-like. Ready to howl or hunt. A little psycho. Don”t leave him alone or your furniture will end up shredded.
“Yeah, a list of celebrities you would do anything to get with if the opportunity presented itself. Models, actresses, singers, that kind of thing.” He looks around at all of our faces, my own kept carefully neutral. “Oh, come on, you have to know what I’m talking about!” he says to our silence. Javi would definitely be a chocolate Lab. Something loveable and loyal. Maybe a little dumb, but intelligent when it counts.
I bark out a laugh, freeing him from his embarrassment. “Of course we know what you’re talking about. We just usually clear the list and are left with conquests instead.”
Luca and Diego nod in agreement, to Javi’s obvious shock.
“You clear the list? How?!” Javi asks, perplexed. He looks to Luca and Diego next. “I know Zander clears it just by fucking everything that bats an eyelash at him, but what about you two? You’re not fuckboy billionaires.”
“But we’re hot as shit millionaires. And it’s all about who you know,” Luca answers, sitting back with a satisfied grin. “I’m in PR. I have the contact details for pretty much anyone who is connected in some way to a woman I may want to cross off the list. How do you think I met Keira Jansen?” His mention of the model half-sister of the Kartwright sisters, a notoriously media-friendly family with a reality show, is a good start to the conversation.
“Or you go to galas and fundraisers and get introduced by mutual acquaintances, which is how I found myself in the bed of none other than Samantha Jeffries,” Diego adds, mentioning one of the hottest up-and-coming young politicians Georgia has seen in years.
“You’re telling me I could have been clearing the list rather than fantasizing about them this whole time? Fuck!” Javi says, dropping his head in defeat.
I chuckle at his abject despondency for all the pussy he has missed out on when it could have been handed to him on a silver platter due to his employment at Olympus. Money and power can indeed get you a whole lot in this world if you want it.
“Cheer up, man. At least now you’ve met Harlowe and can cross her off your list and start working on the others.” I don’t want him fantasizing about how he could get with Harlowe now. She’s off-limits to everyone.
Except for that huge Condors tight end, an insidious voice reminds me. The smile slides off my face with that truth. Harlowe is dating fucking Knox Contraire, and that means he’s had his hands all over her. My stomach sours and I set my bourbon down. The Atlanta Haute List says they have been linked for the last few months, which means he’s already surpassed my ability to stick around, making him a much better choice for her, realistically. But a feral part of me doesn’t subscribe to reality and wants to make a call to an associate, one who doesn’t mind cracking kneecaps, and have him take care of Knox, so he’s no longer a rival.
What the fuck am I even thinking?I’m not looking to get back with Harlowe, so I don’t have any rivals that I should be considering taking out, hypothetically or not.
My phone vibrates in my pocket and saves me from the back-and-forth struggle in my brain where Harlowe is concerned. “Wishing you joined us, after all?” I say when I see Payton’s name on the screen.
“I could use you guys back at Olympus,” he says, a note of urgency lacing his tone.
A wave of dread passes through me and I press the phone tighter to my ear to block out some of the bar noise. “What happened?”
“Olympus is under a cyber attack. We’ve had over fifty attempts to breach our servers in the last half hour, and our team is scrambling to keep our firewalls and protections in place. I already called Hayes. He’s on his way back to the office now. We need a plan for if they succeed. The team here has started moving assets around so they’re not in danger if the hackers get in, but it’s tight.”
“We’re leaving now. Give us five and we’ll be there.” I hang up and turn to the guys. “Sorry to disappoint, but we have to go back to work.”
I throw some bills down on the table and stand as they gather their jackets without argument. We’re all attuned to the needs of the business. If even one of them had made a disparaging remark about the time of night or the shittiness of being called back in, they wouldn’t be senior vice presidents.
“Payton says our servers are under attack,” Luca says, reading a text on his phone and filling in Javi and Diego as to why we’re on our way out of the bar and back to work at eight in the evening.
“Do you think it’s the same group that targeted Olympus last year with the South Africa mines?” Diego asks.
“Didn’t they all go to jail? Who would be left to fuck with us now?” Javi answers.
“You think three people organized and executed that level of destruction?” I pose to the three of them.
We shoulder through the doors and out onto the sidewalk. My long stride takes me away from the bar as I look up at the glass and steel skyscraper that houses Olympus International a few blocks over. A feeling of foreboding looms larger than the building itself.
“Gage Geological alone had over a thousand employees unceremoniously let go. Kilowen Industries was torn apart and filtered into our own conglomerate without sparing a single thought for the generations that had created and nurtured it. Don’t even get me started on Donner Investments. We took their portfolio, but dismantled the whole organization within months of acquisition.”
“I hear what you’re saying. We have plenty of enemies from those three acquisitions that could be continuing the work of those who headed it up.” Javi’s voice carries a note of anger, and I look over at him. “It’s just business. They didn’t have to take it so personally.”
Luca laughs, the sound ringing coldly around us as we enter the tower lobby. “I think they showed us just how personally they took it last year when they collapsed a mine and killed twenty-four workers. They don’t fucking care who suffers in their attempt to take down Olympus.”
When we enter the boardroom, we find Payton waiting with a group of whoever was left at work when the attack started, and more are filtering in behind us. My brother is intently watching a screen of code flow by which means nothing to me, but Luca stiffens. He abruptly turns and rushes out of the room only to return a moment later with his laptop. Luca sits at the table and begins typing furiously, along with the others from our tech department.
Luca and Payton met at MIT and share a tech background, along with their unusual affinity for marketing and PR that typically wouldn’t mesh so well with their computer science backgrounds. Fucking weird as shit combination, if you ask me, but at least they’re on our side with it.
“Want to fill me in on what you’re watching, since this isn’t my area of expertise,” I say as I come to stand next to Payton.
“I built the system to alert me even at a first breach attempt and it’s the only reason we know this is happening at all instead of it being something covert or insidious that we find out about later. I had the best white hat hackers work to find weaknesses and shore up our systems for just this type of attack, so it’s holding right now. Our tech department is working on finding breach points and rebuff attacks, but we’ve never encountered something of this magnitude. It’s hard to tell if it will continue until they find some weak spot we are unaware of, or if they will change their tactics to target something else. Right now, it’s just a full-frontal attack on every access point, and if it continues, there is bound to be some sort of faltering.”
If this weren’t such a serious situation, I would make a joke about his phrasing. “It’s the same group from last year. Their retribution was stalled, but they’re back on their mission, and they’re getting more creative.” There’s no question to my statement, and Payton nods in agreement.
My intuition tells me this is just the beginning. We’re quiet for several long minutes as Payton keeps his eyes trained on the screen and I survey the room. The feel of stress and panic in the air is palpable, thick enough to push through and slow down time so each minute feels like an eternity. I walk around the room feeling uneasy. Any skills I have are useless in this context, and my understanding of cyber attacks is so limited I feel like a child. I don”t like feeling purposeless. I prowl back to Payton’s side, angrier and more restless than I ever remember.
“I fucking hate this. What does this mean, and why now?”
“War has arrived at our doorstep. Now we figure out how we respond.” Payton maintains a low volume, but his words burn with an uncharacteristic anger that is better suited to Hayes or myself.
“We respond with brutal force. We end this as soon as we can,” Hayes says, coming to stand on the other side of Payton.
Think of the devil and he appears.He must have broken every traffic law to have arrived not long after I did, despite Payton having called him first. His Buckhead mansion is far enough from downtown to have made the trek harrowing for anyone else on the road with him.
“Cyber attacks take a little more finesse than force,” Payton says. He drops his arms from their crossed position and stalks toward the screen on the wall he’s been staring at. “There. That’s the hacker’s signature,” he says, pointing at a block of code as it travels up the screen. He turns back to the table and addresses the IT personnel. “Route that through our database and find who is behind this attack. It’s likely more than just one person, or they’re running some sophisticated programs that are unheard of to get this quantity of attempts. Find them.” The people he is commanding nod and their fingers fly over their own keyboards.
It really fucking scares me sometimes how much Payton knows. He likes to pretend he’s just this creative communications expert—which he is—when in reality he’s an evil genius with an eidetic memory and the ability to pick up any skill he tries.
He was taking electronics apart before he was seven, scaring the shit out of our mom, and even electrocuting me once when I was six. I learned to stay the fuck away from his projects really quickly after that. He knew three programming languages by twelve. He crashed our home security system at thirteen just fucking around and rewiring it to play music when set off. He became more nefarious at fifteen when he discovered hacking and started targeting anyone who pissed him off and creatively embarrassed them. At seventeen, he hacked Dad’s online money market accounts and managed to siphon off thousands of dollars into offshore accounts before Dad even knew something was missing, just to prove that he could. He finally put his skills to use for good rather than evil and was top of his class at MIT. He built most of the infrastructure our organization is built on and quietly heads up the entire technology sector, as well as our operations, now. We don’t even have an official CTO because Payton is happy to tuck that under his portion of the business as the COO. It’s unusual, but that’s what he likes, and he’s not getting any pushback from Hayes or me on that topic.
“I really wish this were anything but a cyber attack,” Hayes snarls. “It’s much easier to take out a person or entity when they have a physical presence and I can hunt them down like the rats they are.” His deep green eyes are narrowed and carry a gleam of malice that would frighten me if this were the first time I’d caught the look on him. But for once, I’m in complete agreement with him.
I turn to Hayes and level him with my own malicious stare. “I think they learned last year that taking out our physical infrastructure was too high stakes and left them vulnerable to discovery. This is something more insidious and lends itself to an enemy that decided we should really be the targets, not mine workers. You need to call Rex.”
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.