Sure, it would’ve meant a lot of flights back and forth, but I should’ve done that instead of?—
Should’ve, should’ve, should’ve.
It doesn’t matter anymore. No matter how much I wish I could change things, I can’t.
Now I need to find a solution—and Iwill.
There has to be something, some kind of loophole or statement Lex can make, hell, someone I can fucking hack to?—
The alarm blaring on my speakers as loud as they can go freezes the blood in my veins. I stand on autopilot and hit the button for the intercom to Austin’s room.
While I wait for him to get to it, I shut everything down, grab my tablet, my secure hotspot, connect it all to the charging backpack I have for emergencies just like this one, and then run back just as Austin’s voice comes through.
“Eli, what’s?—”
“Need you to take me to the office,” I tell him, the urgency coming through loud and clear in my voice.
“One minute,” he says, and I can tell he’s as ready for action as I am.
Exactly one minute later he snaps at me to put my seatbelt on while he’s already merging onto the road. It’s gonna take us less than ten minutes to get to the office at this hour, with no one around and Austin knowing that when there’s an emergency he has everyone’s permission to break as many speeding laws as he wants.
He doesn’t ask for specifics, doesn’t need them, because he knows that when it comes to my business, I can’t and won’t tell him anything. But he has to understand enough.
On the way there I hit answer when my phone vibrates without looking away from the counterattack I’m putting together to launch the second I connect to the office’s network—it’ll not only slow down whoever is trying to come at me,me, but it will also launch a hidden bug that will probably follow them all the way back to their IP.
Carla’s voice comes through my phone speaker. She’s my head programmer.
“Eli, sorry to wake you, but we’ve got a problem.”
“Wasn’t asleep and I’m already on my way,” I tell her simply, while my fingers keep moving as fast as I can stand.
“Wha—how?”
“I have an alert for the first hidden trigger in our firewall,” I say. “I’m already coding a counterattack, so just slow them down as much as you can. I’ll be there in—” I pause, look up.
“Two minutes,” Austin says without me having to ask.
“Two minutes,” I repeat. “If you’re the only one there, no worries, but if anyone else is there, then?—”
“Franco’s here, he’ll open the door for you.”
“Thank you.” The call disconnects, but I do file away the news that my head of sales is hanging out with my head programmer during her weekly night shift.
That’s something to worry about at literally any other moment.
“Go get coffee for yourself and us, please. Maybe some food,” I tell Austin when he slows the car, then I rush through the building’s lobby and head to the hidden door that leads to the basement.
I spare a thankful look for Franco when he meets me at the bottom of the stairs with the door that normally requires a handprint, retina scanner, and code already open, but then I’m focused back on the screen of my tablet. As soon as I get to the pit—what we call the desks with the monitors connected to the main system of ECS—I sit and connect everything, but keep using my own hotspot, thinking maybe that will confuse the hacker enough to slow them down.
My malware will still come from our main computer, and travel through their own code to their IP—at least that’s the hope—so for now, I have a full conversation with Carla through mostly one-syllable words, and we get to work.
After ten minutes where we successfully slowed it down, I finally ask her what she knows.
The pause before she speaks is deliberate, and every muscle in my body coils impossibly tighter as I get ready for worse news.
“Whoever this is, they seem to know the servers aren’t actually connected to the mainframe, that they’re not accessible automatically. The first thing they did was try to control the mainframe to connect them.”
That is something we only do when our clients come in with a data dump. That’s my brilliant plan to have information be completely secure—it’s actually never connected to something you can hack. Of course, I also built the firewall this asshole gotthrough... though we can’t know how long it took them. I’m going to be mad about that later.
