Page 5 of Ignite

Delia Best, his eighty-nine-year-old neighbor and landlady, lived in the bottom half, and he occupied the top. The almost-nonagenarian rarely left her home, as she no longer drove and relied on her church people or Wolf to take her places. She had a son and a daughter, but one lived in Florida and the other in California. She spent much of her time watching TV or YouTube cat videos and scrolling through Facebook. It bothered Wolf that Delia was essentially by herself, and he did as much for her as he could to help her out.

“Wolf, is that you?” Delia’s wavering voice came from the open door, and the thin, frail woman appeared, bent over an old-fashioned metal walker with small wheels on the front and yellow tennis balls on the back legs. Life hadn’t been easy for her, but so far, she’d avoided any major falls or health issues. She waved a square paper on a stick at her face, making her wispy hair fluff. Delia’s part of the house had fans but no air-conditioning. He had a window unit upstairs if the summer heat became too much. The shade was one advantage of the encroaching greenery.

“Yeah. You need something, Dee?” She told him once that she loved it when he called her Dee. It made her feel special and wanted. “No, thank you. Robin and Barry from the church are coming by later to take me to the grocery store. I saw in the paper that bratwursts are on sale. If I get some, will you join me for dinner?”

“You bet. I’m gonna go crash for a few hours. I’ll get up and doJeopardy!with you later, yeah?”

Her faded blue eyes lit up. “That would be lovely.”

He hugged the fragile woman gently. She charged a ridiculously low rent, but he added an extra hundred every month as she cooked several nights a week for him. Sometimes, he was the only person she saw in a day’s time.

“Call upstairs if you need anything.”

“Enjoy your nap.”

The top of the house was composed of two large rooms with a bathroom in between. Wolf used one as a bedroom and the other as a kind of den. He owned very little furniture, just the basic bed-dresser-nightstand setup. He did have a couch in the other room, but most of the time, he used his recliner to watch the big flat-screen he had mounted on the wall. A small dorm-sized refrigerator sat in one corner of his den, filled with his favorite Iron City brews and bottled waters. A set of plastic white shelves held snacks and a microwave, but that was as much kitchen as he wanted or needed.

Wolf considered ordering food, but sleep called to him more. Instead, he opened his fridge to grab a water bottle and chugged down half of it in one go. The night had been a typical one. The dancers danced. The men drank and stared. Money flowed. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing special or significant.

Sometimes boring was nice. He’d take it any day over his past job.

He took the three steps needed to get to his bedroom, where he promptly stripped down to his boxers and fell onto his back. The cheap metal frame squeaked and bounced under his weight. Wolf heaved a great sigh and closed his eyes. Nope, nothing out of the ordinary. No drama. No glitches. No problems.

So why did he have this uneasy feeling in his gut?

3

“No,no, no, no! You don’t press the Windows key for that!”

The irritated voice blared through Jazz’s headset, and she bit her lip to keep from laughing. “I’m sorry. I thought you said press it. My bad.”

Tonight, instead of a confused old woman, she’d opted for a ditzy, clueless girly-girl. Appropriate for her mood, as she’d spent several days chastising herself about her brief weird interaction with Wolf.“No thing.” “Sure problem.”He must think I’m an absolute nutjob!

The last few mornings, he’d come in, grabbed his coffee, and gabbed with Bill. He didn’t speak to her, but he did give her a finger twitch and one of those head things where his chin jerked upward in a “what’s up” gesture. Nothing else.

Argh! I’m such a dweeby dorky dork! Enough. Focus on the task at hand, yeah?“Are you talking about the key with the squares on it? Oh, I got it now!”

She scrolled farther down, then highlighted and deleted a big set of files that included several programs. In the background, she heard other agents and guessed she was dealing with another call center.

“We have to start over, ma’am. Don’t touch anything this time.”

Oh no, you don’t, buddy.She watched as the scammer tried to take over her home screen, and then she blocked him again.

He cursed in Hindi, and she had to mute herself before the mirth she held back exploded. A glance at her Death Star clock told her she’d been on the phone with this guy for over two hours. She had a bet going with Bomber123 about how long they could keep a call going. Bomber had the record at three hours and twenty-three minutes. During that time, he managed to keep three scammers going until he hacked their systems and deleted their files. Jazz had heard of other shielders who’d done single calls for as much as eight hours. She wasn’t sure she had the stamina for that, but she admitted to having fun when stringing along a scammer for a long time.

Another outburst came from the scammer. “You have to stop pressing the key!”

Jazz took a breath to tell the guy off and that she’d already caught on to his act, but her fingers slipped and she hit some keys in a random sequence on her computer. The screen blipped once and then filled with scrolling pages.

“Holy shit!” she said out loud, forgetting to use the voice modulator.

Dates, times, names, and numbers—thousands of them—appeared from all over the world, showing active calls and amounts being collected, all in real time. This was a view of the call center’s entire operation. Millions upon millions in different currencies were being added, converted to dollars, and then moved from place to place to clean it. Deposits, withdrawals, new accounts created, old ones deleted, and more popping up as she watched. She had no idea how she’d hacked into this live feed, but it was both amazing and terrifying as hell. How many people did it take to support this kind of volume?

And what kind of havoc did it wreak on the hundreds of people getting robbed as the numbers flowed?

“What was that, ma’am?”

This was huge. She wished she had time to contact Bomber or Copperpot or any other shielder, but no one else showed online. If she tried to get further into this ginormous network, she could insert her special virus and shut down the whole operation. At least in theory. If not, she would at least do enough damage to slow it down.

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