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Her stomach churned, primarily because it was now nearly midnight and she’d been eating nothing but junk food and the coffee she’d brewed in the hotel coffee machine. She looked at the clock. Room service wouldn’t be available for a few more hours, so she’d just have to wait.
Shoving aside the nausea she felt, she read through post after post by PriorOfTheOri in chat rooms. The guy was in his mid-twenties, but he had the demeanor and sense of humor of a teenager. He came across as being seventeen, not twenty-seven.
She would need to get his hard drive and fast copy a clone of it. That was the thing about most black hats. They took their online security seriously, but they didn’t take physical security into account enough. If she had to bet, she would put her money on his laptop simply floating around his hotel room somewhere. Sam knew just who to call to help her get ahold of it.
The phone rang a few times before one of the twins answered. They weren’t really twins. Ember and Evie were geeky gamers who had made a ton of money with software designs a couple of years back. They’d taken their earnings and gotten plastic surgery. A lot of it. They now looked similar enough to one another to be dubbed “the twins.” And, twins that could grace the cover of a men’s magazine, at that.
They still liked gaming, but they also liked to party. Sam knew they once partied with PriorOfTheOri. She remembered the stories that had come out of that night and cringed.
“Ember?” There was music in the background and the noise of a lot of people talking over it. She could almost picture the mind-scrambling flashing lights and mob of people that would accompany that music. She should have texted. She hung up and sent a text.Call me. 911.
The phone rang within minutes and the background was a little more muffled, like they’d found a hallway or bathroom.
“Sam? Is that you?” Giggling. Lots of giggling.
“Let me talk to her,” Sam heard and then recognized Evie’s voice.
“Hey, girl, you coming out tonight?”
Sam laughed. She didn’t party with the twins very often. It wasn’t her style. But every once in a while they convinced her to go out with them. She usually regretted it when she was hung over in the morning.
“Can’t tonight. I’ve got an emergency. Can you guys help?”
“Always,” came the simple answer. Sam had been friends with the twins long before they’d become the pretty women everyone wanted to know. They bonded back when they had only personalities to go on, not looks, before Sam had made her money with Tangled Legacy and they made their money with their apps.
“You guys remember PriorOfTheOri? You partied with him in California once?”
“Ugh, don’t remind me. Thinks he’s God’s gift and all that. Really, the guy’s a sleaze,” said Evie.
“He did nothing but grope me all night and he’s not grope-worthy,” Ember called into the phone.
Sam cringed. “Um, any chance you can go party with him tonight? I need you to reach out, find out where he is and then fast copy his hard drive for me.”
To their credit, the girls didn’t even question her. They agreed and went trolling for PriorOfTheOri right away.
Sam waited, pacing, the whole time. Ember texted updates, but that didn’t make the hour and a half it took to find him in a chat room and reach out go any faster. A little longer to get an invite to his hotel room and the twins were in.
Sam itched to get in there herself, but that wouldn’t work. She had to assume PriorOfTheOri knew what she looked like. She had to be content with the texts back and forth with Ember that included vomiting gestures and emoticons of shooting a gun at one’s head, as the girls worked at getting PriorOfTheOri drunk enough to pass out.
Sam didn’t want to know if they helped him along with any drugs or what they might be doing to convince him to keep doing shots. She’d prefer to stay in the dark about some of it. By 3 a.m., she received a final text.Got it. On r way.
The blonde twins grinned when Sam opened the door to her hotel room.
“That was too easy,” Ember said, seemingly sober.
Evie dropped down on the bed. “Speak for yourself. You didn’t have to drink with him.” She slurred her words and shut her blue eyes, rolling onto her side with a groan. “I had to let him feel me up four times before he passed out. Tequila doesn’t work nearly as fast on his scrawny ass as it should.”
Sam grimaced. “I’m sorry, Evie. I owe you.” Evie waved her arm in dismissal, but kept her eyes shut.
“She kept the idiot busy while I pulled his hard drive, fast copied it, and put it back. Talk about wham, bam thank you ma’am. Or, mister,” said Ember with a grin. “What now, girl?”
“Now,” Sam said with a grin of her own, “we get to work.”
She opened her own laptop and pulled up the notepad function on her screen, ready to write code. Ember dropped down beside her on the couch and opened the laptop they’d brought in with the copy of PriorOfTheOri’s hard drive and both women went to work.
Sam gave her a quick explanation of what they were looking for and then they were silent as they worked in tandem. They had hacked together many times in the past and they quickly sank into a rhythm that had them working quickly and efficiently. It wouldn’t be long now.
* * *
