Page 3 of Triple Threat

Roan was waiting in the walk-through between the kitchen and the solar. When he wasn’t at his terminal in the ‘Bat Cave’ he would be sitting in the glass-walled living room overlooking the Chesapeake, or working out. “Fresh batch of artisanal gin,” he said and offered me a glass. “Some startup in New York, they’re doing stuff with botanicals you would probably approve of.”

“Is that anise?” I asked, after taking a sip. Shit, it was good.

“Good taste, it is. They’re doing some absinthe riffs with gin. I thought you would approve. How did it go?” he asked. I jumped a little, and fuck if he didn’t notice.

“You know that long stretch, where all the sea grass is?” I asked.

“Yeah, dreary stretch, lots of low-income housing,” he said.

“Yeah, I almost hit a woman with the car there. She’s in my bedroom. Look after her and make sure she doesn’t die,” I said. He would have questions, I could see them, but I was in no mood to answer them. I could feel the comedown creeping up on me. I couldn’t lie to Roan; he would smell deception. It was better to either divert to a different topic, or to simply be silent.

“The car will need a body shop. I had to put it into the guardrail to avoid running her over. The brakes probably need to be checked too,” I said, wrapping that item of discussion up.

“Who is she?” Roan asked, but I saw him make the mental note about the car.

“Someone I used to know. Her name is Sadie, Sadie Brooks,” I said. He nodded and added it to his previous note. “And while you’re taking care of the rest of her? Get rid of that goddamn blue hair. She looks ridiculous. She’s supposed to be a brunette. Make sure to clean her up, and for fuck’s sake, don’t tell her that we’re hitmen.” He nodded.

“So, did everything before that go well?” It was a perfunctory question; the job was fine, and he wanted to deflect me from the previous topic.

“Went fine. There was a lot of trash to be taken out, but we were only paid for the one, and that was what we delivered. Nice work as always,” I said. I hoped I didn’t sound impatient.What if Sadie woke up in my room,what if she wasn’t as stable as I judged her to be, what if she died?

“Payment has been made in full, and Verba is pleased with the suicidal death of his former partner, said he can’t spill anything now,” Roan said.

“I never feel bad when it’s taking down a trafficker,” I said.

“You never feel bad,” Roan said. “That’s why you make such a good hitman.”

“I’m going to shower and shave, is the McLaren ready to go?” I asked.

“It is,” Roan said.

“Don’t wait up,” I said.

Chapter Two

Roan…

Some jobs were harder than others. The Verba job was easy as far as that word has meaning in the field of being a paramilitary para-intelligence assassin. The difficult jobs involved either extreme differences in time zones, or heightened security. The first just messed with my sleep patterns – I had to be up when Lach was working, regardless of what time it was at Bootlegger Head. The second made me work much harder and put greater stress on the tech I had. There was no lack on my end. Our budget ensured that I had, not just the best gear money could buy, but that it had redundancy on top of redundancy, and that even the contingency programs had contingency programs.

St. Anne’s was in the same time zone as me, just much further south, that made things easier. Our basic plan of using tertiary airports made busting security a piece of cake. Spoofing the archaic systems at Ocean City was so simple that I had macros set up to do it for me, to the point that I could pick how much I wanted them to hassle Lach. Sometimes that pretty head of his got too big for his own good, and he would get too comfortable ghosting though security. It would throw him for a loop if I l gave the TSA people an eyeful of some strange sex toy, or curious thing to get their attention, never enough to get him in serious trouble.

As funny as getting him detained and strip searched would be, dealing with a handful of minimum-wage employees and legal attention was too expensive a joke.

Everything ran smoothly. One of the biggest security weaknesses in the world was the wide-open world of the IoT, the Internet of Things. The IoT was comprised of every piece of technology that was capable of accessing the internet. There was plenty of security and protocols for actual computers and mainframes, but the IoT was made of smart televisions, game consoles, doorbell cameras, and every other dumb gadget smart enough to connect.

Lach had no idea just how powerful a device his phone, with the programs and changes I had made to it, was. Everywhere he went, I had bait in the water, a mobile hotspot ready and eager to grab anything that wanted Bluetooth or internet connectivity. The colloquial term for this was aStingray, a device that law enforcement and others used to hijack cellphones and such during crisis situations. His pocket stingray grabbed game systems, smart thermostats, smart TVs, smart refrigerators, and all the rest. The number of these devices with no protection should be a matter of national security.

It let me hijack computers because unsecured phones connected to the local Wi-Fi, or smart pedometers, or one of my new personal favorite accessories, wireless headphones. Bored TSA agents, low oversight, listening to streaming music. Might as well have the front door wedged open for me.

The backdoors that these created? Well, it was a cyber-disaster in the making.

These back-channel portals were how I handled half of my work in the field. If Lach spent more than a minute near a closed-circuit camera, I could tie into its feed. More than ninety seconds and I could spoof its feedback. It was easy. It was insultingly easy. Known systems were even easier, like Ocean City’s security terminal. As long as Lach went through gate two, I didn’t have to touch a key. The macros went into action efficiently and silently, I just supervised the scripts running.

A few days in St Anne’s with that phone and the scripts I had written into it, I was inside their security system. It was surprisingly primitive. There was CCTV, the links were there, but they were still running what seemed like analog tape machines and not digital. There was no way to link the two. I supposed that was for their security and the privacy of their guests; the people who visited the island to get their rocks off. Lach had confirmed there were people there that most everyone knew, from celebrities to political types and even just top-tier high-money players. The sort of people who would have business with a couple of Adidas-wearing fiends like the Verbas.

While Lach was gallivanting across some unlisted island in the Caribbean, my time was less extravagantly spent. Our highlight reels could not have been more different. While he was rendering Radamir unconscious and staging his naked suicide, I had to deal with changing landscaping companies. To be honest, the thought of hanging the previous company’s rep by one of their mower belts was very tempting. Tedious, fucking patronizing asshole.

He was one of those ‘thank you for your service’ types, support the troops, all that nonsense. I couldn’t shake the military, it hung around me like some sort of cloud – my choice in shirts, exercise regimen, even the way I walked – or so I was told. I laughed the first time I was told that one. I absolutely walk like a military man, comes with having half my leg taken off and looking like someone tried to run me through a wood chipper, Fargo style, only getting tired halfway through.

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