Chapter Twenty-Three - OLIVER
Some time later—hours, probably—I hear footsteps on the stairs. And when I look up from my work they are all there.
Perfect, Romantic, Corporate, and Mysterious.
“What’s up?” I ask, looking back at my computer. There were two servers down this morning but they went back up without any interference from me. So I’ve been half-heartedly working on another delete file, while doing my best to come up with a plausible story to tell the Misters—because let’s face it, the one I told was pretty bad. And also compulsively checking Katya’s Hook-Me-Up profile for another video.
No luck, as usual.
“I think you know what’s up,” Nolan says.
“No, Nolan,” I say, exiting out of the admin page of Hook-Me-Up. “I really don’t.”
Mac comes and takes a seat in one of the chairs in front of my desk. West takes the other one. Nolan stands behind them and Pax goes to the window, looking down on the city below like the suspicious motherfucker he is.
He steps back, untucks the curtains out of their holdbacks, and then pulls them across the window, the metal rings clanking across the rod.
“How the fuck can you do business without a door?” Pax asks, nodding towards the stairs.
“I don’t usually need so much privacy up here.”
“Well, you’re gonna need it today,” Nolan says. “We should probably go somewhere else.”
I stand up and shrug. “Follow me then.” I couldn’t have asked for a better invitation to explain more of what’s happening here.
I walk over to a door on the other side of the stairs, open it to reveal another door, then dial the combination.
“What is this?” Pax asks, knocking on the metal door with his knuckles.
“SCIF,” I say, like this is normal.
“Nice,” Pax says. “How come I didn’t know you had a SCIF room?”
“Need-to-know basis, my friend.” I look over my shoulder at him and smile. “You never needed to know.”
I open the second door and lead them down a flight of stairs. When we get to the bottom I dial the combination to the third door, open it, and let everyone pass me by as they enter the dark room.
I turn on the lights, jog back up the stairs, close the first door, lock the second door, then hop back down the stairs and lock the third door.
“I think you’re being dramatic,” Nolan says.
“You would. But you’re the dumbass who had a SCIF room in his resort basement and didn’t know it.”
“Do I need to know what a SCIF room is?” Mac asks, leaning against a wall.
“Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility,” I say.
“Got it.” Say what you want about Mr. Perfect. He’s a big-picture guy and I appreciate that sometimes.
“Are you going to tell us what’s going on?” West asks.
“Look,” I say, “I didn’t lie back there at Ariel’s house, OK?” I look at Paxton. “I just didn’t—couldn’t—tell the truth in front of Cindy.”
“Explain,” Pax says.
“I did see my sister Rory that day. It completely fucked with my head since, ya know, she’s supposed to be dead. But that’s not why I covered for Allen that night.”
“Then what is it?” Mac asks. “Because I know Allen was home that night.”
“He was standing outside with me,” West says. “Tori saw him too. He definitely had contact with that girl.”
“He didn’t do it though,” I say.
“Of course he didn’t. But neither did you,” Pax says. “Because you weren’t even there.”
“Like I said, he had something on me. But it wasn’t Rory. It was…” I laugh a little. “This.” My arms go wide as if this room explains everything.
“What is this?” Nolan asks.
“This is what he really does,” Pax answers. “Black ops.”
“It’s not black ops, you dick. It’s just… dark web. We—Ariel and I—we run a marketplace for illegal data.”
“What’s that got to do with Allen?” Nolan asks.
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.”
“Well,” Mac says with a slight laugh. “I guess you’re part of them too now, Shrike. Because like it or not, you’ve been doing their dirty work for a decade. Your fingerprints are all over this bullshit. And how much do you want to bet that they’re setting you up for a real big fall right now?”
I don’t take that bet. Just nod my head and agree. “So tell me what to do about it. Because if I go down, you go down too.”
They all look at me like I just threatened them. Even Pax, which kinda hurts since he is my best fucking friend.
“You can’t possibly believe this is about me,” I say. “It’s about us. So you guys had better come up with a plan real fast, or we’re all going to prison. Because they’ve had ten years to set us up. Ten years to plan their end game. And Five isn’t coming to save us this time. This time… we’re on our own.”