“Left!” Warp yelled, as lights flashed ahead at a train crossing.
Braking, Zach spun the wheel to the left, found a hole between oncoming traffic, and sped down a side street. Buildings with their red and green decorations flashed by. He felt a bit guilty for a moment, imagining his mother and fiancée waiting dinner for him. Not very patiently.
Maybe Ellard was right. Maybe Zach should go all-in again. Go to DC and see how far up the ladder he could go. His mom was healthy. He’d done his duty. Plus, moving to DC would make Julia happy. He would get far more a dose of culture than he would like, but during the day he would be working on cases far more intricate than check fraud or jaywalking.
“I’m in!” Warp exclaimed.
“And?” Zach asked, the thought of dinner slipping away.
“Nothing yet, but I am going to see if I can’t re-task a border satellite to El Paso for a more detailed picture of the area.”
Zach wished he had a dozen agents at his back, but that wasn’t going to happen. And maybe it was just as well. Because bringing in the Robin Hood hacker with only Warp would feel pretty damned good.
* * *
Ronnie backed out the last of the screws that held the penthouse access door in place. Before she finished the job, Ronnie made sure to attach one of the magnets to the panel, preventing it from falling and clattering down the elevator shaft.
Moving the door out of the way, Ronnie looked down the shaft. That was a drop. She didn’t mind heights. She just wasn’t all that fond of the fall.
Luckily, she had a secret weapon. Pulling two other magnets out of her bag, Ronnie got ready to make her journey around the periphery of the shaft. The magnets in her hands weren’t just “hold them tight” magnets. Oh no. These were more of Quirk’s prototypes.
“You’re sure this is going to work?”
“I’m sure if you don’t use them there is a greater than thirty percent chance you are going to fall down that shaft,” Quirk answered.
Not exactly reassuring.
In theory, these were traveling magnets. Not the kind you got for your fridge, but magnets that actually moved. Ronnie grabbed each by the handle and pressed them against the metal wall. Due to simple magnetic attraction, they stuck there. Now came the fun part.
She pulled up, clicking the handle out of its locked position, then turned it to the left. A small charge alternated the magnetic field. Through microscopic cycling of the repulsion and attraction, with the leading edge rotating through the positive cycling more frequently, the magnet moved to the left, while still maintaining enough grip on the wall to keep Ronnie safe.
In theory.
The metal beam she stood on barely supported half her foot. And as was well documented, her sense of balance was not the greatest. Without the magnets, well, Quirk’s estimates about a potential plummet were not far off.
Slowly, she allowed the magnets to do their work as they practically dragged her across the beam. Imagine that. A Quirk prototype that actually worked. Then one of the handles went wobbly, spinning around under her hand. Suddenly, one magnet was going left, while the other right and up.
“Quirk, your magnets are going rogue,” she growled.
“Don’t blame them. You must have done something.”
What did it say about their relationship that Quirk always sided with his toys?
As her foot lifted off the beam, Ronnie needed to do something or let the magnet go before it carried her up and off the beam. And what usually worked was hitting something. She lifted up her hand, pulled the magnet off the wall and slammed it back down again.
“Inanimate object abuse!” Quirk yelled in her ear.
“However, it worked,” Ronnie answered, guiding the magnet back to its rightful place.
After the little rebellion, Ronnie swiftly made her way around to the elevator doors. She paused, turning off the magnets before forcing the doors open. “Are the penthouse’s pressure sensors down?” Ronnie asked.
“Modified,” Quirk corrected her. “I reset their sensitivity so that they still show functional on the control panel in the security office, but will only trigger if, say, a horse steps onto the penthouse. Or, you know, a hacker who hasn’t exactly been faithful to her diet.”
Ronnie didn’t bother to take the bait. “Motion detectors?”
Quirk sighed. “Yes, Miss Micromanager. All the security features of the penthouse are under our control.”
With a deep breath, Ronnie placed a small hydraulic expander into the seam between the doors. With a single flip of the switch, the doors were parted and held open by the device.
“Quirk, you really are a genius.”
“I know.”
Ronnie smiled. The two had originally bonded over their mutual self-assurance during a game of Gauntlet. There really should be more cooperative video games. Nothing brought kindred spirits together like killing ogres.
Stepping out into the office, Ronnie lingered, making sure no alarms sounded. Once she was sure that Quirk really was as good as he said, she removed the device from the doors and allowed the elevator to close behind her.
Lacing her fingers together, Ronnie cracked her knuckles. Time to move onto some actual hacking. She did need to live up to her reputation. Ronnie slid into the CEO’s leather chair. She couldn’t help but spin around in it once. The thing wasn’t a chair, it was a work of art. But she hadn’t come here to appreciate the extravagance. She was here to extract some cash and give it to the charities the company should have been donating to.
Booting up the computer, Ronnie rolled out a gel keyboard onto the mahogany desk. The thing was state of the art, using subtle fluid movement to track her keystrokes, but it still wasn’t what she really wanted.
“Wouldn’t it be cool if I didn’t even need a keyboard,” Ronnie asked.
“Oh. My. God,” Quirk exclaimed. “Get over it. We are not implanting a keyboard in your brain.”
“Maybe not,” Ronnie said as the computer screen came to life. “But wouldn’t it be cool?”
“Of course,” Quirk answered. “Duh.”
Ah, they truly were two peas in a pod.
Rapidly, Ronnie entered the security code into the pop-up window. They’d figured that out weeks ago, then pinged the system again this morning, pretending to be the company’s backup server. It worked like a charm. Once the correct code was entered, a panel slid open behind her, revealing a wall of highly secured servers. The sleek black cases with their blue indicator lights flashing made her feel right at home. This was her playground.
Getting to the DOS prompt, Ronnie threw down some angle brackets and started with her first arg. She found a nice wormhole and took it as far into the code as it would allow.
Running up against the first firewall she couldn’t skirt, Ronnie raised her shoulders up and down, preparing for the hours it could take her to dig into the company’s financials.
“Um…” Quirk said in her ear.
Ronnie didn’t like “ums.” Not when they were so close. “You wanted to say something, Quirk?”
“Hold on, checking another traffic cam…”
While Ronnie didn’t stop the hack—she was in the middle of parsing out a patch—she did frown. What in the hell could Quirk need with traffic cam footage?
“Yeah, this is real,” he said.
“What is real?”
“We’ve got an FBI car hauling ass in your direction.”
“What?” Ronnie pressed. “Did you trip an alarm?”
“No! Did you?”
“No,” Ronnie shot back. “Of course not.”
“Well, I didn’t either,” Quirk sniped.
Distracted, Ronnie almost zeroed out some important files. “Are you sure the agent is coming here?”
“That would kind of be the reason we are monitoring all law enforcement vehicle’s GPS signals. And I am not sure where else an FBI car would be traveling over sixty mile an hour to in this part of town. There’s nothing else on the police scanner.”
Damn it. Was the guy just late for Christmas dinner, or had something in their approach to the hack tip off the FBI? They had been so freaking careful.
“Wait,” Ronnie said. “You said one car?”
“Yes. And now it is going seventy miles an hour.”
“If the guys in DC had figured us out, wouldn’t they have sent a fleet of black SUVs?”
Quirk paused. Ronnie kept typing. Even though she loved the feel and give of the gel keyboard, she kind of missed the clicking. It would normally soothe her in moments like this.
“I’m double-checking,” Quirk said. “Wherever he’s going, he doesn’t have any backup. It is just the one car. No new alerts beyond that lame all-points bulletin fax that went out earlier today.”
“Okay, so this may have nothing to do with us,” Ronnie said, relaxing, getting more into the moby of the hack.
“Except for the fact that he just pulled into the oil company’s parking lot.”
CHAPTER 3
Zach jumped out of the car and rushed to the building’s main door. Two security guards sat behind a large granite desk. Zach put his badge up against the window.
“FBI.”
The guards looked to one another, then shook their heads. Who the hell shook their heads at a federal officer?
“Let me in!” Zach shouted through the glass. “Now.”
One of the guards cautiously came around the corner of the large desk and stepped out onto the checker board pattern floor. The guy wasn’t exactly steady on his feet. Zach waved for him to hurry up.
“What do you want?” the guard asked when he finally arrived at the door.
“Open the door.” The guy was wary, though, squinting his eyes, body angled away from Zach. “Look, I don’t care that you are wasted on the job. I just need in.”
“Why?”
“There is a high probability that you are being hacked as we speak,” Zach answered, trying really hard not to threaten the guy with his gun or start talking about how obstruction of justice was a felony.
The guard looked back to his partner. They exchanged a few words—Zach couldn’t tell through the glass what they were—but both men shook their head.
“Controls are showing green lights,” the guard responded.
“Of course they are. It is the Robin Hood Hacker.” That got the guy’s attention. So Zach pressed on. “You won’t know Robin Hood was here until the billions are missing from your boss’s back account.”
Gulping, the guard got out his key and opened the door.
Zach charged through the door as he checked in with Warp. “Where do I need to go?”
“The penthouse would be the most likely point of entry, since the main servers are located up in the CEO’s office,” the tech answered.
Zach turned to the guard. “I need to get into the Penthouse.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” the guard said, backing away from Zach. Even the other guard came out from behind the desk. “No one goes up there.”
“Don’t you make security rounds?”
“We’re not allowed up there, not even for rounds. There’s a double key system that has to be triggered to even get the elevator to go up that far.”
“There’s got to be another way,” Zach insisted.
The guards shook their heads. “Not without authorization from the top.”
Zach turned away from the men, moving out of earshot. “Warp, I need clearance.”
“I’m trying,” Warp said. “But it’s Christmas. I can’t get ahold of anyone with the authority to grant you access. I think they are in St. Barts…But…”
“But what?” Zach asked.
“I could fake the—”
“No,” Zach answered, interrupting Warp.
“I know you are the straightest of the straight arrows, but, Agent Hunt, if we were able to ask the owner of this company if we could go up to stop billions from being stolen from him, what do you think his answer would be?”
Zach shook his head. “Doesn’t matter until we actually get his permission.”
“Or I could just…”
“No.” The law was the law. “Besides, I thought you were a cracker?”
Warp must have heard that in his voice, because the tech backed down. “You’re the boss.”
Although Zach certainly didn’t feel like one right now. He wasn’t going to let that slow him down any, though. “Be sure to check with secretaries, janitorial staff. Someone besides the board of directors has got to have a way up there.”
“I’ll try,” Warp answered, not sounding all that hopeful.
Zach didn’t blame him. How could he, while standing in the lobby of the company that Robin Hood was about to hack and not being able to do anything about it?
Hold on. Maybe there was something he could do.
Force the hacker into an error.
He turned and found the closest security camera in the lobby. Zach walked up to it and stared straight at the camera.
“I’m coming.”
* * *
“OMG, he is hot,” Quirk said.
Yes, this agent— Zachary Hunt, if Quirk was correct in his identification— was easy on the eyes, okay, he was extremely easy on the eyes, however he was still a FBI agent in the lobby of this building.
“Options?” Ronnie asked, as she rooted under yet another firewall.
“What options?” Quirk asked. “We’ve got to abort.”
But that wasn’t an option to Ronnie. They had worked too long and too hard on this hack to quit now. It would take months before they could strike again. She couldn’t let a G-man, no matter how hot, stop her.
“There’s another option,” Ronnie stated.
“What do you mean?” Quirk said, then hurried on. “No. Ronnie. No.”
Ronnie pressed on, though. “The only reason this hack is taking so long is that fact I am staying under the radar. That I am tediously avoiding sounding any alarms.”
“No,” Quirk said. “Means no, Ronnie.”
“The FBI is already here,” she reminded Quirk. “I might as well bring the house down and extract the money.”
Quirk tsked in her ear. “I think you just want an excuse to meet the hunk.”
She ignored her assistant’s barb. She wasn’t interested in meeting anyone, especially not an FBI agent. That pairing would make Romeo and Juliet look like a John Hughes high school romantic comedy. Pretty in Cuffs is what hers would be called.
“I am doing it,” Ronnie said.
“Wait!” Quirk yelled in her ear. “At least let me get the secondary protocols in place.”
While she waited, Ronnie watched the video feed of the lobby. Special Agent Zachary Hunt paced across the black and white floor. He looked like he was arguing with himself—however, she could guess he had a geeky tech in his ear, as well. But no one was as good as Quirk. Which is why he worked with her.
Even so, could the world’s best two hackers steal over ten billion dollars with the FBI in the house?
Ronnie cracked her fingers again. It certainly was going to be fun to find out.
* * *
Zach strode the length of the glassed-in lobby. Clearly, the hacker hadn’t taken his bait. Everything still seemed hunky-dory at the company. Which meant they had to wait to get permission to get up to the penthouse.
What was taking the tech so damn long? “Warp, have you made any headway?”
“Like we said. It’s Christmas and there isn’t a Buddhist in the bunch.”
Zach had never been pissed off at Santa Claus before, but this was getting ridiculous. Just thinking about Robin Hood sitting over his keyboard, looking out over El Paso from the Penthouse window, thinking he was above the law, stuck in Zach’s craw. But it still wasn’t enough to get him to break the laws he swore to protect. Although Quirk’s offer to lie their way into the penthouse was looking more and more attractive. It was a siren song that Zach had to resist.
Alarms went off all around. Zach spun on his heel, p
ulling his gun in the same motion. “What’s going on?” When Warp didn’t answer, Zach yelled louder, “Is this you?”
“No!” Warp yelled shouted back. “The Robin Hood Hacker is inside the company’s mainframe.”
Maybe this was his Christmas present after all. He owed St. Nick a few apologies, but they would have to wait. Charging past the desk, Zach hit the button for the elevator. Nothing lit up.
“It looks like Robin Hood has overridden the elevators.”
“You know what?” Zach said, jerking open the door to the stairwell. “I think I like the stairs better anyway.” The sound of his boots pounding against the concrete steps filled the stairwell, making it hard to hear Warp. “Come again?”
“The stairs don’t go all the way to the penthouse. They stop at the floor below.”
“No worries,” Zach answered, passing the second floor. That gung ho attitude got him up to the sixth floor. After that, he started to feel the strain in his thighs. He really needed to install that stationary bike in his basement.
“Any progress on the hack?” Zach asked, sounding a little more winded than he’d like.
“The crack is going pretty well. I think Robin Hood is a little flustered. He didn’t close several backdoors. I think I can stop the flow of funds.”
“Good,” Zach commented, passing the eleventh-floor landing. One more to go. Twenty-six more steps. Twenty-five. Twenty-four. Damn, these last few burned.
Finally he made it to the twelfth floor’s door. Aiming his gun, he pulled open the door and swept into the hallway, checking his corners. There wasn’t a sound. Nor should there be. He raced over to the elevator and pried open the doors.
Flipping on his flashlight, Zach surveyed the elevator shaft. “Looks like he came up the access shaft, then breached through the penthouse’s elevator doors.”
“That would be the route least likely to trip the alarms.”
Holstering his gun, Zach braced the doors open, then leaped to the cabling. Catching it, he wrapped his legs around the bundle. His suit was trashed from the grease and soot, but that was a small price to pay for being hot on the Robin Hood Hacker’s trail.
Hand over hand, Zach climbed the cabling. Now it was his arms’ turn to ache.
Hacked Page 3