They were standing close, and she was looking up at him and he down at her. She wound her hand into a fist around the phone, and then she leaned into him, hard, and it took a moment for him to catch up to the fact that she was hugging him.
He could feel the heat of her through his shirt, her arms wrapped tight around his lower back. Her hair was soft and thick. He patted her shoulder, breathed in the scent of her—sweat and citrus—and realized with equal parts alarm and concern that she owned a small piece of him.
A brisk knock at the door startled them apart, and then the door opened and a portly man with ruddy cheeks and round eyeglasses entered. He wore a uniform with a nameplate that read CALVIN BLICKENSDERFER, SCHOOL PORTER.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Vera. I was checking in to tell Ms. Sara that the offensive graffiti on her locker has been removed.” He cleared this throat. “And this is your…?”
“Uncle,” Joey said at the precise instant that Evan said, “Cousin.”
The porter gave a confused smile to fill the silence.
“My Uncle-Cousin,” Joey said. “You know. It’s weird, with my parents, the accident—some distant relatives have stepped up.”
“Oh,” the porter said, brightening, swinging his focus to Evan. “You came to fill in for the father-daughter dance? How thoughtful!”
Evan felt the blood leave his face, saw the points of Joey’s jaw flex as she clamped her teeth.
He said, “Um…”
“The welcome reception for all parents kicks off in”—the porter consulted his polished silver watch, which no doubt kept exemplary Swiss time—“twenty-three minutes. I’ll make sure seats are held. You’d best hurry and get ready.”
“Yeah,” Joey said. “Great.”
The porter gave another twinkly grin and withdrew, easing the door shut so it barely clicked in the frame.
Evan said, “Fuck.”
Joey regarded him flatly. “Language.”
26
Celebrating Individual Strengths
Evan and Joey sat in the rear of the dark auditorium as the PowerPoint continued, urged glacially onward by a matronly headmistress who seemed intent on reading every last bullet point.
“—our philosophy of fostering community while celebrating individual strengths.”
Evan leaned over. “Is this really what school is like?”
Joey rolled her eyes over to him. “She’s gonna say ‘climate.’ Wait for it.”
A mother in flaking maroon lipstick and a mink stole turned around to hush them. Her kid shrugged apologetically at Joey.
Onstage the headmistress raised her remote control and another slide appeared: Diverse Kids Playing Frisbee in Quad.
“We seek to provide a climate that focuses on the individual student’s interests, abilities, and educational goals.”
Joey muttered, “Nailed it.”
Evan had once sat a sniper post in a tree in Sierra Leone for fifteen hours without moving. He’d lain in wait beneath a bridge in Kirkuk, sipping from a CamelBak, eating protein bars, and pissing on the same spot on the wall for three days.
But this? This was actually going to kill him.
Not that the preceding twenty-three minutes and change had been any easier. On the way over, they’d run a gauntlet of teachers and administrators, each one stopping Evan to tell him what a wonderfully well-behaved student Vera was.
Now the headmistress was talking about mission statements and institutional values, pacing the stage like a charisma-challenged stand-up.
“How much longer?” Evan whispered, keeping his voice even lower so as not to draw the wrath of ü bermom in the row ahead.
Joey slid out of her seat and crooked a finger for him to follow. They moved in stealth mode out of the auditorium and into the corridor.
He hustled to keep up with her. He was still adjusting to seeing her wearing the school uniform—white polo, navy blue slacks, navy blue sweater, saddle shoes—rather than torn jeans and a loose flannel.
They turned the corner, running smack into an austere gentleman in a no-shit three-piece suit. He was lanky and tall enough to regard them down the length of his nose. “Vera, what are you doing out here? The itinerary’s very specific about—”
“I’m really sorry, Dean Anders.” Joey bent her knees slightly inward. “It’s just—I need to get to the bathroom. Girl problems, you know.”
The dean and Evan stiffened in uncomfortable tandem.
“Okay,” the dean said. “And this is your—?”
“Cousin-uncle,” Evan said, recovering and shaking the dean’s bony hand. “It’s nice to meet you, sir. Vera was in some pain from, you know … cramps, so I thought I’d see her to the bathroom.”
“Very well,” the dean said. “Hurry back.”
Evan wondered what kind of upbringing a person had to have to say “very well.”
The dean coasted past them on an effluvium of aftershave. As the sound of his loafers clicked away, Joey’s posture transformed and she grabbed Evan’s arm. “Move it.”
They cut up another corridor and paused before a locked door, Joey fishing a thin tension wrench and a hook pick from somewhere in her hair. She was through the dead bolt in seconds, and they were inside. She closed the door behind them and relocked it.
The windowless computer lab hummed with electricity from the monitors, a few dozen screen savers projecting patterns onto the walls. The room held the hot-metal scent of outlets working overtime.
“You’re looking at my own personal robot army,” she said. “After hours I reconfigured the network and code for all these stations to make it a compute cluster and harness all the computing power in the lab. Of course no one’s figured it out yet ’cuz, you know, I’m me.”
She sat down at a station, slid a keyboard into her lap, and then her hands did that thing that made her look like a piano maestro playing Rachmaninoff in double time.
“I’ve been working on a chipset designed just for deep learning,” she said. “I wrote a program that uses machine learning to, like, self-teach, self-improve, and ferret out data I don’t even know is relevant. It’s not rule-based—it’s all analytics of Big Data now, ya know, scrutinizing massive sets of unstructured data to discover previously unknown connections. Like if someone searches for mouthwash effectiveness, it doesn’t mean their next move is ordering Scope from Amazon, it means they make an OpenTable reservation for a date. Get it?”
“Not really.”
“Basically, I’m a warlock.”
“Copy that.”
Various windows proliferated on-screen—internal school documents, transcripts, confidential bank records, the search history and other documents pertaining to a male student named Matteo. Evan pointed to the raft of data about the handsome senior. “What’s that?”
“That is a fucking rapist. No—to call him a fucking rapist is too flattering. He’s an aspiring necrophiliac molester of unconscious underage girls. But that takes too long to say. So: ‘fucking rapist.’ I’m gonna scorched-earth his ass. And destroy his family, too, while I’m at it. Seems his old man’s tangled up in some insider trading, and let’s just say CONSOB’s gonna get an anonymous e-mail with attachments—”
“Joey.”
“Sorry. It’s just … cyberworld’s so much more interesting than meatworld.”
“Meatworld?”
Ignoring him, she plugged the Boeing Black smartphone into an ATX tower. “Okay, what’s your plan?”
“My plan?” Evan said. “My plan is to ask you what to do.”
She grimaced at him. Then scanned the screen. Did some clicky things. Grimaced again. “As I suspected, the Secret Service network isn’t totally air-gapped.”
“How can you tell that?”
“Because your girl”—a squint at the screen—“Agent Naomi Templeton, she logged in to her e-mail once through an encrypted program from a work computer.”
“So—”
“Don’t talk.” Joey pinched the bridge of her nose, squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. “Okay. Here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna infect the Secret Service’s private secure network with a corrupt Windows update and let their secure update server pass it around their net. We make them infect themselves.”
“And you’ll do that how?”
She tore off her sweater impatiently and hiked her sleeves over her deltoids. “We’re gonna get a sploit payload in through this broad’s e-mail. We log in as her, put the bad payload in a PDF doc attachment, send it to herself, then modify it so it’s, like, hidden inside the icon for a JPEG file. The next time she logs in on the secure network, my tiny little sploit execution engine uses that hidden code and actively modifies the private Windows update server with a series of corrupted patches. At the next update push—and they usually push at least biweekly on setups like this—it’ll automatically install our modified patches to all the computers inside the private secure network. Once that goes down, my recon code’ll probe around for a way through the outbound firewalls to find the Internet. It just takes one touch to the outside. Then we use, like, a hidden reverse SSH backdoor for you to get in at will and see whatever data you need. After that, all you have to do is sit on your ass, drink vodka, and watch the monitors. Got it?”
“I understood the sit-on-my-ass-and-drink-vodka part.”