Page 70 of The Money Man
“Well, Ivan kicked them across the room a couple of times but otherwise they’re fine,” Barsky said before his smile vanished. “Seriously, I don’t give a shit about your cats. Never even saw them.”
“Can we go check on them?” She wanted to make sure Barsky’s first statement wasn’t true. Even more, she hoped it would give her a chance to talk to Derek without listeners. “You said there’s no way we can leave or call for help, so just let us go look for them. Please.”
Derek’s grip on her hand went tight and she glanced sideways to see a ferocious frown on his face.
“Women and their cats,” Barsky said, giving Derek a wry look of false comradeship. “Ivan, take her to see her pets. Killion, you stay here.”
Derek half rose. “I’m going with her.”
“Do you have a gun? No, but I do.” Barsky angled his weapon so the dark metal caught the overhead light. “So you stay here. Don’t worry about her safety. You’re more Ivan’s type than she is.”
Alice shuddered as the implication of Barsky’s words twisted her stomach in a nauseating way. Her gaze flew to the large black-clad man stepping away from the counter, his gun held by his thigh, but Ivan’s face still held no expression. Which was even more frightening. So her plan had backfired in a big way.
Derek eased back down onto his chair and turned to Alice, saying in a low voice, “Scream if you need me. I don’t care how many guns are pointed at me, I’ll find a way to get there.”
“So melodramatic. Nothing’s going to happen to her. Yet.” Barsky sounded bored.
As she left the powerful comfort of Derek’s presence, Alice hoped that was true.
“I can’t figure you out,” Derek said as soon as Alice left the kitchen. He wasn’t sure if their separation was a good thing or a bad one. Maybe it was good to get Barsky used to them moving around in the apartment. It might give him more chances to reach some of the built-in security features that the hacker might not have discovered. Unfortunately, Alice didn’t know where any of them were.
Barsky had pulled out his cell phone and was scrolling through something with one thumb while he kept the gun in his other hand. “Then don’t try,” he responded with no visible interest.
Derek wanted to pull Barsky’s attention away from anything electronic because he was bone-deep certain that Leland and Tully were doing everything they could to wrest away Barsky’s control over the apartment and its communications. Derek had shoved his cell phone in his back pocket when Barsky had surprised him, knowing that it was his lifeline to the outside world.
When KRG had hit a certain level of financial success, Tully had called a meeting to warn his partners of the very real dangers extremely wealthy entrepreneurs could encounter. He’d also had an unnamed friend of his modify their phones in a semi-illegal way so that the phones had some secret dirty tricks. The devices could look dead while still being active. They could be tracked even when they’d been turned off and smashed. They could be used to communicate in nonverbal ways. Of course, the latter meant that Leland and Derek had been forced to learn Morse code.
“It’s just not enough money for all you’ve done,” Derek said, gesturing toward the man on the barstool. “The fake headquarters, the time and coding expertise needed to break into my apartment, holding two people hostage for however long. It makes more sense to cut and run.”
Barsky looked up. “It’s simple. I don’t like to lose.”
“But why a bunch of small businesses when you could get so much more money from hacking into one large corporation?”
The other man put down his phone, making Derek do a mental fist pump of success.
“Corporate security tends to be harder to penetrate because they can afford consultants like KRG,” Barsky said in a tone of a teacher instructing a particularly stupid pupil. “Small businesses are easy targets. Stupid mom-and-pop operations with no knowledge of how vulnerable their financial information is. Put enough of them together and you can get a nice return on your investment in stealing from them.”
“How many software packages did you sell?” Derek asked.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Barsky smiled. “As soon as I rip them off for their last penny, all the client information will be wiped clean so that you can’t track them down and help them in any way. Another benefit of decentralized theft.”
Derek was picking up an ugly undertone in Barsky’s responses. “It’s not just about the money.”
“It’s always about the money,” the other man said. “But I enjoy knowing that I will destroy a whole shitload of people’s livelihoods with just a few lines of computer code. That’s all I had to write, you know. Just the module that breaks into the credit card transfer system. Not that it was easy. Even your resident computer genius should be impressed ... since I’m sure he’s trying to hack it without success. However, I bought the rest of the accounting system from some talented but gullible software engineers at a fire-sale price. And it’s not a bad system, all in all. Too bad I’ll have destroyed its reputation forever.”
“Why do you want to wreck people’s lives?” Derek found himself needing to know. He couldn’t understand the kind of hatred Barsky projected. Personal hatred, maybe, but not hatred for a group of people just going about their business, trying to make a living.
Barsky hesitated before he pivoted on the stool to face Derek fully, his eyes hard, his posture taut. “Because my father made me stock the shelves in his pathetic little convenience store in a run-down suburb of Dallas every day after school.” The man vibrated with fury. “I’m a fucking genius but he forced me to waste my time on hauling around boxes of soup. He told me that I needed to learn the value of hard work because in America that’s all it takes to succeed. Some stupid Mexican could have done it just as well. Butno onecould write perfect code like I could. My father didn’t understand the brilliance of his own son.” He stopped to draw in a deep breath. “The happiest day of my life was when he got shot by an addict who robbed my father’s crappy convenience store of $150.” Barsky smiled. “I might have told the addict that the store was an easy mark.”
Derek’s blood chilled at Barsky’s admission. So it was personal in a warped way. As personal as Derek’s own ambitions had been. “It’s tough when your father doesn’t appreciate you,” he said in a neutral tone.
“Don’t feel sorry for me. My mother used my father’s life insurance money to buy me the best computer equipment available at the time. She understood my brilliance.” Barsky continued to smile, his eyes gleaming with malevolence. “Pretty convincing motivation for my evil scheme, don’t you think?”
“It sounds true to me.”
The other man shrugged. “Believe what you want. It won’t matter soon. Now shut up and let me make sure your friends at KRG aren’t trying to get past my firewalls.” He picked up his phone again, setting off a string of mental curses inside Derek’s head.
A few seconds later, he had to suppress a shout of triumph as the phone in his back pocket vibrated with three quick taps in succession. Leland had broken through.
