Page 53 of Mr. Match

And I have to give him props for not asking for more details. I guess he’s done with the details too. “I was away from the house that night because Allen hired me. Somehow he fucking knew I was running this thing from a storage facility one block off-campus. He followed me there that afternoon, kinda backed me into a corner with a few choice threats, and then said he needed an invitation to our… marketplace.”

“What was he looking to buy?” Pax asks.

“That’s the thing,” I say. “He didn’t want data. He just wanted in.” This isn’t a lie, either. He did want in. And boy, did he ever get in.

“In?” West says, pulling out a chair in front of a computer and taking a seat. “In what?”

“Into our operation.”

“Why the fuck would he want that?” Mac asks.

“Well,” Pax says with a small laugh. “Obviously we know now. He was Silver Society. He wanted a place to do business.”

“That’s what I think too,” I say. “But he never had a had a chance to tell me because he got a phone call and left. I’m just figuring this out, you guys. So I don’t really understand it yet.”

Because I’m making it up as I go, I don’t add.

“So why did you cover for him that night?” Nolan asks.

I walk over to the computer and ask West to move. He gets up and I sit down, then power the laptop up. I type in my password, the software pops open, and I navigate my way through the forum I set up earlier today until I get to the thread and open it.

“See for yourself,” I say, standing back up.

Pax pushes Weston out of his way and takes a seat. “What the fuck is this?”

“What does it look like?” I ask, hoping he won’t ask too many questions.

“It looks like…” He hesitates as he tries to make sense of it. Then starts clicking the back button to the main forum. “It looks like you’ve a whole bunch of people here looking to hire hitmen.”

“It looks that way because that’s what it is.”

“You run hitmen?” Nolan asks.

“No, you dick. They run hitmen. They got into our servers and started this forum. You see?” I say, opening up a command prompt so they can see the code. I scroll my way through lines and lines of it and finally come to the hidden message about Allen. Cover for him or we turn you in for setting up contract killers.

Everyone just sits there in silence for a while and stares at the screen. It’s a decent excuse for one afternoon’s worth of work. At least I tell myself that until Pax takes control of the mousepad and scrolls back up to some code at the top. “It’s dated the night that shit went down back in college,” Pax says. “Why the fuck didn’t you delete this shit from your site?”

“I can’t,” I say. “I can’t delete it. It’s malware, you guys. We have it contained in this quarantine area so it’s inert. This is not the real code, it’s the one we use to run tests. We cannot delete it without deleting the whole fucking site. We’ve tried. They have a built-in cascade that will wipe everything if we try to shut it down or disconnect it from the server bank. We don’t even maintain that server anymore. Someone took it over about eight years ago. We have full access, but no control.”

“What the fuck?” Mac says.

“And he’s been holding this over your head the whole time?” Nolan asks.

“Yeah. We’ve tried everything. Five has been working on it for years. We can’t migrate the servers without wiping all our databases. We can’t delete it. All we can do is live with it.”

“It’s pretty risky,” West says.

“Ya think?” I roll my eyes at him.

“I’m just saying,” West continues. “If it were me, I’d nuke the whole thing and be done with it.”

“My whole family is in danger,” I say. “I have gotten enough threats over the past decade to have no desire to start fucking with them.”

“Your parents don’t seem the type to roll over. They certainly aren’t helpless.”

“Feel free to risk your parents, West. Oh, I forgot. You don’t have any.”

“Fuck you.”