Lear took on staffing and reconnaissance while I retreated to my apartment above La Mesa to smother myself with numbers, maps, and dossiers. After a week of not leaving my apartment, U.H. coaxed me out with an offer to show me how to ride the motorcycle. It helped that Lear was attending a benefit lunch that day in the hopes of learning what app Godoy would take donations through, something I’d been asking about at least once a day.
U.H. loaned me a helmet, then we moved the bike to the brewery’s front parking lot. Climbing astride the black bike, I adjusted my romper’s short shorts.
“You’re gonna burn your legs off, D.”
“You didn’t tell me there was a dress code.”
“Do you know how to drive stick?”
“No.”
“Sick, this is gonna be so hard for you.” U.H. giggled.
U.H. showed me the important parts of the bike: clutch, throttle, shifter, key-and-thumb ignition. I was jolting across the lot’s 6 parking spaces when Lear returned from the benefit lunch, dressed in a camel power-suit straight from the 80s. U.H. wolf-whistled at him, beat-boxed a slow son clave. Lear swung his hips to it, rumba-ing his way over to us.
“You must be so disappointed you were an only child,” I joked, holding back a smile while climbing off the motorcycle. “Did you figure out what intake app they’re using?”
Lear preened, tipping his straw hat. “I wrote it down this time, like you told me,” he said, proudly producing a scribbled scrap of paper from his jacket. I only needed to see the D and W in Lear’s ball-point script to confirm my worst fears.
“Can’t be done,” I said flatly.
“Can’t be done?” Lear replied with a far more menacing monotone.
“This,” I said, holding up his note, “says DonationWare.”
“So?”
“So DonationWare runs on SEKTY, the Ek Inc. cybersecurity infrastructure, which is impenetrable.” I would know. I helped make it that way. “A bargain bin IDS would flag all that aberrant financial activity, and SEKTY has the best infiltration detection money can buy.”
“Skill issue,” U.H. said.
“I’m serious, their IDS was developed in-house, Julian oversaw the whole thing. It’s the industry gold-standard.”
“Who’s Julian?” Lear asked.
Oops. “It’s uhm… J-Julian Ek, the CEO.”
“You call a CEO by his first name?”
“H-he’s just… a, uhm, a p-prominent figure in the, uhm, security world. You know? Haha.”
“Don’t hurt yourself, D.” U.H. giggled.
Lear didn’t. “So you can’t get past this thing, is what you’re saying?”
I covered my eyes to think. My first job was about to die in pre-production. “I’ve been working on some polymorphic attack code that might be able to bypass their security, but we don’t know which machine DonationWare is served from. It’ll undoubtedly be managed by a security analyst. People like that? Their whole job is protecting systems from exactly this kind of attack, and Ek’s a total control freak, he hires the best of the best. There’s no way we’ll locate the right server before security realizes what’s going on.”
“So $20 billion’ll move through the wires and yet you, Ms. Mysterio,” Lear said in an icy tone. “Ms. Master Hacker, there’s absolutely nothing you can do?”
I swallowed, throat so dry it felt like there was a penny in there. I grasped at tethers. “I mean, maybe hacking the copy locally so it won’t communicate with the servers? But I’d need access to the hardware.”
“Hardware?”
“The tablet.”
Lear’s demeanor instantly shifted. “Oh!” he crowed. “You had me worried for a minute, D-zero. We’ll just get you the job at the campaign, then you’ll have all kinds of access.”
Oops. That would be the obvious conclusion. It was even 1 less person to split the loot with, except I couldn’t go anywhere near that campaign. If Ek was a big donor, I’d get recognized well before the gala. “The, um… the thing is…” I couldn’t tell Lear my face was probably on a dart board in every Ek Inc. IT department on the planet, or that being involved in this job at all was already a ridiculous risk to take for a revenge plot that the crew had no notion they were even involved in, or that trying to come up with an untrue answer to any question sent my head into a tailspin. “The, um, the thing about that is…” I twisted the ring on my pinky, sorted through a thousand commands trying to find the right one. The more time that passed, the faster I turned it, feeling the gang’s eyes on me.
“Don’t say anything,” U.H. said. “I wanna see how long she can go.”
Lear rubbed his temples. “Forgot about that.”
“Yeah, D can’t lie her way out of a wet paper condom, Boss. She wouldn’t get through the phone interview.”
“So what does that mean?” Lear asked, pressing his wrinkled brow.
My heart dropped into my badass black boots. “It means you need someone else. Someone who has the tech skills and the social engineering skills.”
“Social engineering?” Lear pushed his pale brows together. “You mean an artist, with a c.”
“Most hackers can fake being IT,” I reassured him. Just not me. Taking a grim mental tally of our past conspirators and their current availability, I came to a particularly painful conclusion. “I’ll bet Hanz would do it.”
Lear made a face. “Hanz is a troglodyte. Let's tap Georgio.”
“In jail.”
“Try Brooklyn, then,” U.H. suggested.
“She went dark after the Cedar job,” I said. “Maybe dead.”
“Damn…” Lear said. “Okay, well that still leaves Kalisz.”
“He went straight,” I said.
“Went straight?”
“Yup.”
“Kalisz?”
“Had a son he didn't know about. I told you not to fall back on him too much, he was gonna stumble across the boy eventually. You know how he is about kids.”
“...You're a scary little thing sometimes, you know?” Lear huffed. “Alright. Hanz then, I guess.” He sounded as nonplussed about it as I was.
“I’ll get in touch with him,” I said, woefully. That was not a meeting I was looking forward to, but considering this predicament was all my fault, it was the least I could do.
Hey it’s not Wednesday yet!! but it’s #LesbianVisibilityWeek and I thought it might be fun to a lil marathon! I’ll post a chapter a day this week, so you’ll see plenty of lesbians in your inbox 🧡🤍🩷