“You’renot scared,” I said. Either the prospect of being blown up didn’t frighten him or he had a world-class poker face.
“It’s not the first bomb threat I’ve dealt with.”
“It’snot?”
The corner of his mouth curved upward in an enigmatic half smile.
There were times I wondered about his life before he’d become a wraith handler. I’d heard enough office gossip to know Prefect had joined ISD only five years before I had. But anytime I tried to look him up, either with web searches or a facial recognition scan, all I got was one big blank.
We returned to the kitchen. Prefect had set up a flashlight as a makeshift lamp within, shining the beam on the espresso machine. The spotlight cast an eerie shadow across the wall. “Okay,” I said, holding up Prefect’s phone. “We still have Wi-Fi, thankfully.”
“I believe all Wi-Fi is routed through the first floor,” said Prefect. “It wouldn’t be affected by the fifth story being locked down.”
I nodded. “Okay, I’m going to scan that QR code.”
“You think it’ll download malware?”
I shrugged. “Not sure. Quick response codes are like… the technology equivalent of unprotected sex. Some are safe, others aren’t. You have no way to tell.And you never know what you’re going to be infected with.”
His nose wrinkled. “Could you use a cruder metaphor?”
“Oh, I could,” I said cheerfully, “but we just had that harassment seminar.”
I turned on the camera and aimed it at the QR code. At once, the phone scanned the barcode and the screen flashed away from the camera. I waited for something to happen—a malware warning to appear on the phone or a sketchy website to pop up.
Instead, all that flashed onto the screen was the app store. The familiar logo of the espresso machine popped up. “Brewtiful Day,” I read aloud.
“I hate this app already,” said Prefect.
“It looks legit,” I said. I downloaded the app and in a minute, it had loaded onto the phone. It paired easily with the espresso machine, and several options appeared. Sure enough, it looked as though I could have the espresso machine make whatever coffee I wanted with the phone.
I frowned. “Okay, so an actual app. Not malware, then. Although I’d have to dig into the app’s code to be sure, it doesn’t look malicious. And the privacy settings are normal. It’s not trying to access your microphone or camera.” I flicked through the phone.
Prefect snapped his fingers. “Wait, this thing has an app.”
I dragged my gaze from the phone and up to hisface. Then I shone the phone’s flashlight into his eyes. He jerked back.
“Just checking to see if you had a stroke,” I said.
He gave me a withering look. “I mean, in order for the communication to go between that phone and the espresso machine… it needs to pass through the internet. Which means this machine has Wi-Fi capability.”
I saw where he was going with this. “Oh,” I said. “Oh, crap. You think someone’s hacking our Wi-Fi using thecoffee maker?”
It made sense. Many household items were connected to the internet. And most of the companies that produce them didn’t have the most robust security. There were accounts of hackers using smart vacuums, fridges, or even toilets to sneak into a home’s private Wi-Fi.
“I think,” said Prefect grimly, “that getting past our firewalls and stealing our encrypted files would prove very, very valuable. That’s why all our devices aren’t smart. Why we use janitors instead of robo-cleaners. Only our computers and phones can connect to the internet, and we keep stealing NSA cybersecurity experts to make sure those devices are as secure as possible. This machine couldn’t have had a Wi-Fi signal when security scanned it or it would’ve been rejected outright.”
An espresso machine was the perfect Trojan horse for an office of caffeine addicts. But for all ourflaws—and there were many—ISD wasn’t stupid. Every day we walked through scanners that checked for bugs, for bombs, for computer viruses on any of our tech. There were tattoo scanners at every door, in every elevator.
My mind raced. “So someone activated the Wi-Fi capability on the espresso machine,” I said. “They had to physically be here to turn it on. And once it was connected to the network…”
“The hacker got access,” said Prefect grimly. “Which means we have a traitor.”
THIRTY-ONE MINUTES REMAINING
We had four suspects.
First, there was Centurion: a man of late middle age who had been working for ISD since its inception. From what I knew of him, he mostly focused on identity theft that involved human trafficking.
