Page 73 of Hellbent

“Joey.”

She sigh-groaned, sat down, and pulled the laptop over to her. “What’s your password to get online?”

He told her. Waited. Then asked, “What are you doing?”

Her fingers blurred. “Downloading the tools I need.”

“Which are?”

“Look,” she said, “going up against the algorithms could take weeks. We have to figure out the key. Which in all certainty will be composed—at least in part—of words or specific numeric sequences that are familiar to these guys in some way. So I need lists. I’m talking every name in the English language, European names, nicknames, street addresses, phone numbers, combinations of all of the above. Did you know there are only one and a half billion phone numbers in North and South America?”

“I did not.”

But she was barely listening. “There’s this newish thing from Amazon? Called an AMI—an Amazon Machine Image. Basically it runs a snapshot of an operating system. There are hundreds of them, loaded up and ready to run.”

Evan said, “Um.”

“Virtual machines,” she explained, with a not-insubstantial trace of irritation.

“Okay.”

“But the good thing with virtual machines? You hit a button and you have two of them. Or ten thousand. In data centers all over the world. Here—look—I’m replicating them now, requesting that they’re geographically dispersed with guaranteed availability.”

He looked but could not keep up with the speed at which things were happening on the screen. Despite his well-above-average hacking skills, he felt like a beginning skier atop a black-diamond run.

She was still talking. “We upload all the encrypted data from the laptop to the cloud first, right? Like you were explaining poorly and condescendingly to me back at the motel.”

“In hindsight—”

“And we spread the job out among all of them. Get Hashkiller whaling away, throwing all these password combinations at it. Then who cares if we get locked out after three wrong password attempts? We just go to the next virtual machine. And the one after that.”

“How do you have the hardware to handle all that?”

She finally paused, blowing a glossy curl out of her eyes. “That’s what I’m telling you, X. You don’t buy hardware anymore. You rent cycles in the cloud. And the second we’re done, we kill the virtual machines and there’s not a single trace of what we did.” She lifted her hands like a low-rent spiritual guru. “It’s all around and nowhere at the same time.” A sly grin. “Like you.”

“How long will this take?”

“Not sure. I have to oversee the control programs, check results, offer the occasional loving guidance. After all, they are just machines.”

“Okay. I have to get back. Towels in the bathroom. The fridge is stocked with food.”

“Wait—you’re leaving me here?”

He crossed to a cupboard, pulled out a burner cell phone, and fired it up for the first time. “Only call me. You know the number?”

“Yeah, 1-855-2-NOWHERE. One digit too long.”

“Yes.”

“So that’s it?” She looked around at the blank walls, the mustard-colored couch. “This is my life?”

“For now.”

“Is there a TV?”

“Nope.”

“What do I do?”