AllFreeNovel
Share Us
William, who Letty had met at Poggers, brought his girlfriend, Melody. Sovern came over to greet them, bumped knuckles with William, without enthusiasm on either side. When William and Melody went to settle in, Letty asked, “You guys aren’t great friends?”
“Not really, but he’s a good coder. Clean and fast,” Sovern said.
“What’s the problem?” Baxter asked, looking up from the floor, where he was poking on a laptop.
“I had a little thing with Melody once,” Sovern said.
“Were Melody and William together at the time?” Letty asked.
“Yes.”
“It’s not a hacker combine, it’s a fucking soap opera, with an emphasis on the fucking, except for me, of course,” Baxter said. To Cartwright: “You ought to sleep with William. Or Melody. To round out the drama.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Cartwright said.
“Just sayin’,” Baxter said. He went back to his laptop.
During the afternoon,coders named Justin and Jared, Michele and Catrin, showed up, moving into rooms reserved by Nowak. Justin brought his wife and young daughter, Catrin brought her rescue dog, Spot. Benjamin Able came in, bringing a Stratocaster and a travel amp, with Jan, the bass player. “We need to get your drums out of the truck and into my room,” Able told Letty. “Gonna be a lot of stress to work through.”
Before the coders showed up, Letty had a clichéd idea of whatthe group would look like, but they didn’t look like that: they looked like graduate students or junior faculty, casually dressed, hair longer than corporate but shorter than musician, and Jared and Catrin were obvious jocks who had both run marathons.
The hotel’s eighth floor quickly turned into something that resembled an out-of-town trip by a high school sports team. Justin’s daughter got loose in a hallway and had to be chased down before she got in the elevator. And she screamed, purposefully and apparently experimentally, seeing how high-pitched, and how loud, a scream she could produce. Justin’s wife kept apologizing, and everybody told her it was just a kid, no need to apologize, but as the screams continued through the afternoon, the coders stopped telling her that.
Catrin’s German shepherd got loose more than once, romping up and down the hallway, her barks as loud and cheerful as the young girl’s screams. She was in and out of all the rooms, including the room of a guest not related to the hacking group; at one point, two of the hackers got down on their knees and began howling like wolves. The dog looked at them with interest, and eventually joined in, until others in the room began shouting at them to stop.
In between chases and screams and dog-howling, and the general milling around, the group moved chairs and tables from other suites to the working rooms and set up computers.
When they were satisfied, Sovern got them together and said, “Everybody, this is Charlie and Paul. They need to tell you some things that I already knew but didn’t mention when I called you.”
Able: “Is this gonna be bad?”
“Depends on your perspective, but basically, I’d say no,” Sovern said. “In fact, it could turn out to be an opportunity for people willing to work it.”
Letty stood up and began, “We’re avoiding the FBI. That’s key fact number one. If any of you are informants, please hold up your hand.”
There was a little laughter, but not much. Letty then told them the story they’d told to Sovern. One of them, Michele, asked, “How do we know you’re not the CIA?”
Letty smiled: “There’s no straight answer to that. I mean, we could be, I guess. But I’m not, anyway. We need all of you to stay, because we need your brains and talents, but if somebody wants to walk away, we won’t try to stop you.”
Sovern stepped in to talk about the shooting in the marina: “There’s some risk, but Charlie and Barbara can handle that, I believe. You can walk away, but if the Russians have your names, then your risk is greater than if you stay, because you won’t have Charlie and Barbara protecting you. If it weren’t for them, I’d be dead now.”
Benjamin Able said, “These guys found, got, stole, I dunno, six boxes of 5.5-gig Intel chips. Carl the Dealer gave me a hundred thousand for the box I got, and Charlie and Paul have five more...”
“Which you all can have, if you stay,” Baxter said.
“If Carl the Dealer buys them from you, and if Ben chips in the cash he already got, that’s six hundred K to divide up... if you stay,” Letty said.
“Carl wants them,” Able said. “He’ll pay cash.”
“This whole program is off the books,” Cartwright said. “You get cash, and you can take it anywhere you want. We don’t want the Russians to pinpoint where this problem comes from, who’s involved, or where they are.”
“Don’t they already know?” Jared asked.
“They know some stuff, but we don’t know how much. If theyattempt to interfere with this group, they will be warned off,” Letty said. “Somebody higher up in government will pretend to know nothin’ about nothin’ about Ordinary People, except that Russian spies aren’t allowed to attack loyal Americans on their own soil.”
When Letty, Baxter, and Cartwright were done, Sovern asked them to leave the suite so the coders could discuss what they wanted to do. The three of them went to Letty and Cartwright’s room and sat around until Sovern came in and said, simply, “Done deal. They’re all staying. They want the cash.”
Baxter: “I’m gonna get hurt. I’m gonna get hurt, aren’t I?”
