Page 58 of Avenging Jessie
“They’ll think we’re the ones planning something,” Tessa finished grimly. “The Black Swan Division will be blamed for everything.”
Jessie looked at Spence, who had stopped pacing. His expression was carved in stone, his eyes locked on his glowing screen, as if he were trying to rewrite reality by sheer will.
Her heart pinched. He looked devastated. Haunted. Like this betrayal was branded now into his DNA.
She knew what they felt like. How disempowered it made you feel. “Take them back,” she said quietly.
Spence didn’t move or even glance her way. “What?”
She set aside her tablet. “The drones. Brewer’s only a threat if he has control of them. So take it back. Take control away from him.”
Spence let out a rough sound—half scoff, half groan—and raked his good hand through his hair. “Once a system’s been hijacked by someone like Brewer, it’s not as simple as yanking out the batteries. Hastings’ hackers probably already overwrote the operating parameters. Locked the original firmware out.”
Jessie crossed her arms. “You’re telling me there’s nothing left? You didn’t build in a backdoor? A failsafe? Something only you would know about?”
Spence’s mouth opened to argue—then snapped shut. A flicker passed across his face.
Tessa and Tommy both stopped what they were doing to watch him.
Jessie felt a rush of hope. “You did, didn’t you?”
Spence blinked, eyes narrowing as if mentally zooming in on some dusty part of code he hadn’t thought about in years. “During the prototype phase, I embedded a security override in the source kernel—a ghost protocol. It was never meant for production, just something I cooked up to test response thresholds in the field if we ever got to that phase.”
Tessa scooted forward on the seat. “And Brewer doesn’t know about it?”
“No one did. Not even Flynn or Del.” Del was Flynn’s favorite tech guru. “I encrypted it behind a misnamed string. Buried the trigger command in a fake boot error log.”
Hackers and their signatures.
Tommy let out a breath. “Please tell me that’s English forwe can use it now to stop this fucker.”
“I don’t know,” Spence said, frowning. “Maybe. The Pentagon likely cloned the firmware before building anything. If the ghost protocol was in that version, and Brewer didn’t spot it when he breached their security, then yeah. I might be able to force a reset. Trigger a kill switch that reverts the drones back to their original operating mode.”
“And that will sever Brewer’s control over them?” Jessie asked.
For the first time in the past twenty-four hours, he smiled. “It will revert control to me.”
They all let out a collective breath.
She hated to ask, but had to. “And if it’s not there?”
The flickering hope behind his exhaustion dulled. “Then we’re screwed.”
Jessie watched as Spence fully locked into figuring it out—fingers pecking one-handed while Tommy hovered over his shoulder, watching in awe. The screen was split four ways, decrypting firmware logs and tunneling through secure backdoors Spence had once built for himself and never shared with anyone.
God, he was brilliant. And clearly, this wasn’t something she could help with. Not without slowing them down.
Perfect time for a covert Rat Trap errand.
She stood and stretched, making a show of wincing and cracking her neck. “I don’t know about you all, but I’m starving. We passed a pub three blocks away—something McCallister’s? I’m gonna run down and grab food.”
Tessa’s gaze flicked up from her tablet. She immediately caught the subtext. “I’ll come,” she said casually, standing and slipping on her jacket. “I need air.”
Jessie slanted a look at Spence. “Want anything?”
He barely looked up. “Surprise me.”
Tommy didn’t even bother answering, which meant he trusted her to know what he’d eat. That, or he’d fully surrendered to caffeine and code.
