Page 39 of Mile High With the Bikers
“Aw, she’s a sexy little criminal.” Diesel ruffles my hair. “So smart, and yet she tried to drink toe to toe with two biker sluts at a bar.”
I swat his hands away. “No! It’s just that in order to learn how to keep things safe, someone needs to learn how to break them.”
“Angel, look around. I’m not throwing stones. We’re inside the fucking glass house together. The world doesn’t always fit into neat little boxes.”
“I—”
Bull’s right. I don’t know exactly what a motorcycle club like the Screaming Eagles does, but I know it’s not all parties and wild sex. They were on my father’s plane in the first place because a literal mob boss called in a favor. I was probably not supposed to know, but doing a little searching on the name Luca Giordano gave me enough to make some good guesses. This compound might not be in the fanciest part of town, but it takes up an entire city block. That doesn’t come cheap.
“Okay, it all boils down to this theory that ultimately, society needs transparency and information to be freely available in order to achieve the type of progress that people like my father want. About a year and a half ago, Dad put me on one of his personal projects. He named it Hermes after the Greek god of messages and thieves. We designed an algorithm that sortof sidesteps traditional cryptography, and rearranges the whole dataset of possible access parameters into a data structure that can be solved in a way where access is inevitable. It's a similar concept to quantum computing, but we found a way to do it on more traditional hardware. In a nutshell.”
All three of them look at me like I just fell from the moon.
But then Bull cocks his head. “You made a fancy key that can fit into everybody’s locks.”
“Yeah, actually. Pretty much. See, with traditional encryption, you need to?—”
Shrapnel puts a finger against my lips. “I love that you’re smart, and if you wanna roleplay slutty scientist with me later, I’m all for it, but can we skip to the part where the club is at risk?”
“Dad really believes in this stuff, but power and money are games for him. The people on that plane were all given a taste of the damage Hermes can do. We walked into an investment firm and split it open in front of a bunch of rich tech people and powerful white collar criminals.” A shudder goes through me and my face tightens. “It worked well. Too well.”
“How?” Bull shifts out of his chair to right in front of me, putting his big hand on my thigh and squeezing in comfort.
I tell them the whole deal about Howard Westminster, how Dad’s need to send a little taunt to the company about our hack exposed Westminster’s secrets, and what it made him do. I look away. “So I guess I am a criminal. I helped break into a secure network and was an accessory to a man’s death. You have to understand. I spend my days in the lab, or at home. I knew Hermes was dangerous, but it felt very theoretical until I watched it get aimed and fired.”
Shrapnel runs a hand over his shoulder where I’ve seen and felt the scarring. “It's not your damn fault. It’s what you were trained for. It’s how training works. Puts layers between things, and then gets you so used to your part that you stop seeing how everything fits together until there’s blood on your hands. We've all done things with consequences, but you’ll make yourself crazy trying to take responsibility for how other people react to shit. That sour feeling in your gut? It doesn’t mean you’re guilty, it means you’re fucking human.”
I nod, not entirely sure I’m ready to believe it. “Dad wants to run another demonstration. He believes it’s going to help him figure out who’s responsible for what happened on the plane.”
“And he needs your help?” Bull asks.
“The way Hermes works, it needs to have access to the network, and right now the production version is on my laptop, which is?—”
“In your room in the fucking clubhouse,” Diesel completes with a snarl. “And on our network.”
“Exactly. My laptop needs to be up and running, waiting for his signal.”
“Can't you leave it off? Disable it somehow? Tell him it broke.”
“Yes, but everyone there knows it works. We proved that. They just want to see it for themselves. Plus, humiliation would just make Dad unpredictable. He’s totally obsessed with becoming the face of the future, and I think he’s getting a weird thrill out of stepping outside the law to do it.”
Diesel shrugs. “If you can’t disarm the bomb, minimize damage, right?”
“Yeah, can we just take it somewhere else?” Shrapnel asks.
I can’t believe I didn’t think about that. Sometimes the simplest is the best. “Um, yeah. It just needs to be online and in range of a network I can point it at.”
“Then let’s get this damn thing out of here. If he absolutely needs to hack something, he can have fun with some shitty public network.”
“I'm still a security risk for you guys, though. Eagle-eye should know that Dad isn’t targeting you specifically, but he doesn’t care if you get caught in the crossfire.”
Bull’s smile looks downright scary. “Oh don’t worry, we’ll make sure to pass on the message.”
20
RORY
“Alright, got everything?”Bull throws his leg over his bike and starts it.
