Chapter THIRTY-ONE
The run took less than three days to set up. Irene Elliott turned stone-cold pro and made it happen that way.
In the limo back to Bay City, I laid it out for her. At first she was still crying inside, but as the detail mounted she clicked in, nodding, grunting, stopping me and backing me up on minor points I hadn’t made clear enough. I showed her Reileen Kawahara’s suggested hardware list and she OK’d about two thirds of it. The rest was just corporate padding and Kawahara’s advisors, in her opinion, didn’t know shit.
By the end of the journey she had it down. I could see the run already unfolding behind her eyes. The tears had dried on her face, forgotten, and her expression was clean purpose, locked-down hate for the man who had used her daughter, and an embodied will to revenge.
Irene Elliott was sold.
I rented an apartment in Oakland on the JacSol account. Elliott moved in and I left her there to catch up on some sleep. I stayed at the Hendrix, tried to do some sleeping of my own without much success and went back six hours later to find Elliott already prowling about the apartment.
I called the names and numbers Kawahara had given me and ordered the staff Elliott had ticked. The crates arrived in hours. Elliott cracked them open and laid out the hardware across the floor of the apartment.
Together we went through Ortega’s list of virtual forums and worked it down to a shortlist of seven.
(Ortega had not turned up, or called me at the Hendrix.)
Mid afternoon on the second day, Elliott kicked on the primary modules and cruised each of the shortlist options. The list fell to three, and Elliott gave me a couple more items to go shopping for. Refinement software for the big kill.
By early evening the list was down to two, with Elliott writing up preliminary intrusion procedures for both. Whenever she hit a glitch, we backed up and compared relative merits.
By midnight we had our target. Elliott went to bed and slept eight solid hours. I went back to the Hendrix and brooded.
(Nothing from Ortega.)
I bought breakfast in the street and took it back to the apartment. Neither of us felt much like eating.
10.15 local time. Irene Elliott calibrated her equipment for the last time.
We did it.
Twenty-seven-and-a-half minutes.
A piece of piss, said Elliott.
I left her dismantling equipment and flew out to see Bancroft that afternoon.