Read Encrypted Online

Authors: Carolyn McCray

Tags: #Fantasy, #General Fiction, #Science Fiction, #Suspense, #Thriller

Encrypted (3 page)

BOOK: Encrypted
8.02Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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“Damn it, people,” she muttered. “I’m a little busy here
.
Could you spam me later?”

Each
stroke of the brilliant script was crafted
in
a masterful flourish
.
Calligraphy
.
While the illuminated writing might possibly have
been the most beautiful art Ronnie
had
ever seen, the symbols blocked
her from making the third largest unauthorized
-
funds transfer in history
.

Others might call her task
thievery
.
Ronnie liked to think of it as

wealth redistribution in action.

With
minimal
keystrokes
,
Ronnie wiped
the symbols from the screen
.
T
he insurance records were back, front and center,
and
ripe for the picking
.
Four thousand dollars a year for car insurance
?
Please
.
The company might scam their money legally, but she had just found a way to
take
it more creatively.

Crap
.
T
he IM window
appeared
again, flashing those gilded letters
.
Ronnie closed the
pop-up
.
She blocked the
pop-up
.
She deleted the
pop-up
.
She deleted the program that created the
pop-up
.
But still
,
the
unintelligible
lettering scrolled down her screen
.
Obviously
,
fatigue was setting in
.
She had already been at this hack for over three hours
.
Slowly
,
and ever so carefully
,
she had insinuated herself into the insurance company’s mainframe
.
But at this point
,
how could she truly be

one

with her
computer if her joints were complaining?

Ronnie straightened up
right until her back rested
against her wooden chair
.
Sometimes
,
pure genius
could not be rushed
.
Raising her hands above her head, she purposefully relaxed her muscles and began a measured set of stretches to loosen the knot in her neck.

Normally
,
when she hacked, she did it in style.
A leather, heated, massage-controlled, ergonomic masterpiece of a chair
.
But when delivering the deathblow, Ronnie liked to go medieval on their
asses
.
And maybe even a little ninja
.
Though there was
absolutely no reason to, on a monumental night
such as
tonight, she always dressed in sleek black
.
Ronnie had pulled her
dark blonde hair
into a tight bun
.
The ribbed turtleneck clung to her every curve and rubbed most agreeably against her skin as she worked the kinks out
.
Two
-
inch heeled boots added
more
height to her already tall frame.

Damn
,
but she looked good tonight
.
Too bad
that
nobody
was
around to see it
.
But given her vocation
,
how could there be?

As she flexed her head to the far left
,
she found only bare wall
.
To the right
, she noticed
only torn wallpaper
.
There wasn’t even a light fixture on the ceiling
.
Absolutely nothing
distract
ed
her
.
What other luxuries did she need when she had a rickety chair and
a
table for her wireless
,
W
eb-enabled
, two-
TB,
and
56G RAM laptop
?
She needed nothing else
.
Except maybe a massage.

Outside the window, fireworks exploded, washing the stark room with yellows, greens, and reds
.
With each
boom
, the crowd
s
in the streets cheered
.
Ronnie liked to think
that
the revelry was for her financial remodeling initiative, but she knew it was May
Fifth
.

Cinco
de Mayo
.
And boy
,
did these Latinos take their partying seriously.

As seriously as her secret admirer was about IM

ing her
.
The symbols scrolled and flashed and scrolled some more, obscuring the company’s financial slush fund
—a
healthy two billion dollars
.
Two billion dollars
that
she
wanted

but couldn’t get to

because some freaking overexuberant fan was trying to impress her
.
Ronnie stretched one last time,
and
then cracked each knuckle.

“Exactly how much did this firewall cost me?” she asked into her subvocal microphone as her fingers flew over the keyboard again.

“Four point seven million,” Quirk
s
aid
.
His
voice sounde
d slightly effeminate as it
relayed through her intra-molar receiver
.
Plus
,
the young hacker sounded distracted
.
Too distracted
,
given
that
his cut was a good
13
percent of their take
-
home fee
of
seven million
.

Flicking
her thumb
,
she brought up a webcam view of their cold room
.
Four perfectly white walls, not eggshell white, not Navajo, not light vanilla, but
pure
-
white walls
.
Not because they
had
to be that color for the computer hubs, but because Quirk insisted
that
the room contrast
with
his hair
.
If he
went
to the expense of
dyeing
his hair twice, once with pitch black, then dark-lighted
with midnight blue, the
young man wanted to stand out
.
Not that anyone else was ever going to set eyes on him either, but Quirk could really be a queen when he wanted to
.
S
o
,
white
the walls were
—no big deal
.

Ronnie’s eyes flickered to the thermometer on the cold room’s wall
,
showing a stable fifty-two degrees
.
That
was
for the computer hubs
.
Air
-
conditioning blew down from four
evenly
distributed vents, keeping the CPU towers running smoothly
.
Ronnie readjusted the
webcam’s a
ngle to see what in the hell was keeping Quirk so distracted
.
H
er assistant
was
look
ing at
the far wall
,
with its
dozens of
computer monitors
.

The
two
center
screens
showed the activity on
Ronnie’s
computer, but the others were wildly divergent
—r
adar views, real-time satellite images, and
websites
upon
websites.
But the screen that held her assistant’s attention was a television report
.

“Is the plague making a comeback?” The subject
was
not all that surprising
,
given her assi
stant’s inclination toward mild-to-
moderate hypochondria.

“Quirk,” she threatened.

Ronnie watched the
über
-
hacker shrug as he answered, still staring at the news report
.
“Give or take a couple of hours of overtime.”

Symbols suddenly blocked her entire screen
.

Ronnie was done
.

“Then why in the
fu

” She was so busy trying to extinguish the screen overlay that she couldn’t even curse properly
.
These were the never-ending
symbols
.
“How in the hell is someone hacking
me
?”

Her tone must have clued Quirk in
to the fact that a pay
cut was on the horizon
.
H
e turned off the plague report and typed a few commands into his network of twenty
-odd
computers
.

“They’re not
hacking
you
.
They’re riding a carrier signal from an ISPN that you’ve given direct, mainline access to.”

“No way
!
I haven’t


Quirk swung around
to stare straight
into the
webcam
.
His color contacts
-
assisted glacial blue eyes sparked with annoyance
.
“Maybe you shouldn’t be banging Napster while going up against a Fortune
Ten
company.”

Ronnie was glad
that
she didn’t have a camera on
her
.
O
therwise
,
Quirk would have seen her cheeks flush red as she
found the
offending window
.
Sure enough
,
she was trying to download P
anic
!
A
t
T
he Disco’s
live bootleg
.
A
track
she had been
hunting down
for over a week.
Downloading at 325 bytes/sec, better than CD quality
.

“But I’m so close,” she whined as she continued to hack into the insurance company’s multilayered firewall.

“You’ve
got
to cut the flow
,

he directed.
Quirk could sound straight and even forceful when he wanted to.

“Do you have any idea how hard it is
to find this quality bootleg

?

Quirk
cut her
rant
short
by
announc
ing,
“You’ve just tripped an embedded alarm.”

Okay, that
wasn’t
supposed to happen
.
She held her breath as Quirk ran the
cross-checks
to see how bad it was
.
By the furrow of his
brow and the bulging vein in his
ever-so-pale forehead, she had tripped a
doozy
of an alarm
.

“The
FBI
has been alerted to your extracurricular activities.”

“Al
l
right, al
l
right,” Ronnie conceded as she aborted the music download
.
Still
,
the symbols trickled d
own the left side of her screen
, and
then finally stopped
.
A single
,
gilded letter hovered in the corner
.
She was about to swipe it away as well, but she found
that
her fingers hesitated
.
Something about the symbol stopped her
.
It was too pretty to just throw in the virtual
trash
can
.
With fingers flying, Ronnie took a screenshot of the symbol,
and
then terminated the
IM.

BOOK: Encrypted
8.02Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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