by Ryan Schow
“You put it there,” she said.
“Not me, but someone. And you didn’t even know about it.”
“But you do.”
“I already explained that I did. So I can clean up my mess, and your mess, and I can help you guard against that, but you’re still a target. You’ll always be a target.”
“So says the criminal.”
“Think of it like this,” Brayden continued, undeterred. “Guys like me know exactly what to look for because we’re always on the offense until we get good enough and paranoid enough to study the defense, too. We write code, Whitney. We’re coders. Being malicious is our nature. We are all Cheshire cats. And your team? They’re alright with computers. Maybe they know a little bit about code and how to read it. They’re running defense, though. And mostly so that when they look at porn, they can better assess the risk of download and disbursement. You don’t have a single hacker on staff. Not a real one. That’s your weak spot—the gaping hole in your armor that guys like me use to tear earth-sized holes into your digital infrastructure.”
“And you’re here to close those holes and complete the terms of your agreement, right? That’s why you’re here, Mr. Good Samaritan?”
“I want my rights back.”
“Okay, I get that. So what now?”
“Right now Agent Clark and his little minion of retards are rebooting their computers, scanning for viruses, checking the usual breadcrumbs. You know…corrupt files, deleted files, config files that shouldn’t be there. The usual indicators. But they won’t find them, because the Master Boot Record is not encrypted, and that’s where they’ll never look. And even if they could, they won’t be able to do anything about it once they find evidence of it.”
“Which they won’t.”
“Bingo,” he said.
“So you’re saying we’re screwed.”
“Get these handcuffs off me,” he said, shaking them at her, “and give me that fucking soda before it goes flat.”
3
Agent Whitney Clark made a sour face, stood, then walked around the metal interrogation table and undid his cuffs. First thing Brayden did was reach over the table, take the second soda and start guzzling.
When he was finished, he didn’t burp; he simply sat up, refreshed, and said, “I can help you, and I will help you, but I’m not lifting a finger until I get word from the asshole whose number I gave you that once I complete my time with you I’m a normal citizen again with unrestricted access to computers and the internet.”
He took a deep breath, fixed his eyes on the woman and waited.
“As good as you are, do you really think he’ll put something like that into writing?” she asked, a half-amused look on her face.
“When I tell him what I left on the FBI’s main server in Washington, how it’s so much worse than this bootkit you’re infected with, when I tell him how his entire network is up for sale if he doesn’t keep his word, then yes, I believe he’ll give me every last thing he promised me, especially my freedom.”
“So you want to blackmail him?”
“I just want to remind him—if it comes to that—that I took out an insurance policy early on to make sure he remained true to his word.”
She studied him silently, her gaze penetrating, her body relaxed looking but alert. Like she was psychoanalyzing him.
“I’ll make the call,” she finally said. “But then you’re going upstairs to prove to me you’re not full of crap about my boys and their computers. I want my passwords back.”
“Aren’t you listening? Giving you fresh passwords would be like giving you an ice cube for third degree burns.”
“I want my system back,” she said, looking at the empty can.
He flicked the soda can in the middle, knocking it off the table where it bounced on the floor. “I’m not doing shit without that letter.”
“Do you even know the name of the person I spoke to earlier? The guy at the other end of this number?” She waited for a response, then she laughed, but it wasn’t a jovial sound, more like a cynical sound. “You don’t even know his name.”
“I know the tone of his voice,” he said, “and I know the number. Look at you though, the brilliant detective, figuring it all out on your own. It’s true, I don’t know his name.”
“So how do you know the letter will be authentic if you don’t even know his name?”
“Because I’m going to go home, get on my roommate’s computer and within four hours I will know everything about the guy, including his innermost thoughts. We’re talking financial history, copies of his emails, pictures of his kids, his wife, his girlfriend, his dick—if he’s one of those Anthony Wiener type of guys. I’ll know his Facebook besties, his favorite color, all the things he’s trying to hide even from himself, including any addictions, bad habits or criminal behavior. But that’s only after I learn the easiest thing about him, and that’s his name.”
The way he says it, he’s got himself worked up and she knows it. Even he’s feeling flush with nitrous. When he’s looking at her looking back at him—and she’s trying her best not to make that deer-in-the-headlights look while he’s feeling every bit the wolf he is—all he can think is, I’m the alpha here, fire crotch.
Not you.
Then he smiled, all easy and slick, and she let him go telling him she’d call when she had the letter. Of course, she made sure before he left that she had his cell number and his solemn promise to never again call her Whitney.
He promised.
It was a promise he’d break. He would break it at the perfect time, and when he did, it would be the same as telling her to get penetrated. I’m the alpha, he thought as he left. And he was.
For now.
4
After barely escaping the FBI’s field office without getting arrested or soiling himself, the first thing he did was go home and put an ad on Craigslist. He wanted a guy. Just one.
He wanted the kind of guy like him. Rather, like he was.
A total doofus.
An AFC.
The first ad read: PICK-UP ARTIST LOOKING FOR A PROTÉGÉ. IF YOU’RE SCARED AROUND WOMEN, I HAVE SOLUTIONS TO YOUR PROBLEMS. LEARN THE ART OF PICK-UP FROM SOMEONE WHO USED TO BE LIKE YOU. SERIOUS INQUIRIES ONLY.
He sat back and looked at it. It was so plain-Jane. Boring, really. Then Titan walked through the front door and said, “Where’ve you been?”
“Detained by the FBI.”
He stopped, got that slack-faced look.
“What?” he said.
A teenaged strawberry blonde followed Titan inside. An HB9 with big blue eyes and straight teeth and shopping bags from the mall in hand. She was looking around at their three thousand square foot house in awe. Okay, maybe she was an HB8. A true HB9 would act like wherever she was, that’s where she belonged. Like it was good, maybe almost not good enough.
Titan turned to her and said, “Upstairs, the master bedroom at the end of the hall, that’s us.” She walked around him, looked at Brayden with a polite smile, then headed up the stairs. “I’ll be up in a minute, Breezy,” Titan said after her.
In the back of his mind, Brayden was wondering if Breezy was her real name or just something Titan called the girls he was going to ride hard after a few drinks and some clever conversation before kicking them to the curb.
“So this thing you’re doing…with my computer and the FBI, that’s not going to blow back on me is it?”
“You won’t get any heat, bro,” Brayden said. “Honestly, I’m just getting a job while I’m here.”
“So you hacked the FBI and…they’re supposed to…give you a job?”
“It’s complicated.”
His eyes slid off me, fell onto the computer monitor. He leaned forward, read my ad and said, “Too vanilla.”
“I thought the same thing.”
“Work on it,” Titan said, heading upstairs. Then: “Leave a girl like Breezy unattended for too long and she’ll start going through your shit.”
Breezy was an HB8 for sure.
He went back to the computer, started typing, deleting, typing again. Finally he had something workable. Something he liked. He scrutinized the proposed ad one last time, then started the submission process. Right before the ad went live, he read it one more time.
SKILLED PICK-UP ARTIST SEEKING PROTÉGÉ. MUST BE 21, UNF*CKED AND PISSING YOURSELF AROUND HOT GIRLS. I USED TO BE A CHUMP LIKE YOU—A VIRGIN AT 21. NOW I’M GETTING LAID REGULARLY. IF YOU WANT TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE AND STOP BEING SUCH A P*SSY, I’M LOOKING TO TEACH YOU THE ART OF SEDUCTION. SERIOUS INQUIRIES ONLY.
Yeah, he thought, now that’s an ad.
He went into the kitchen, made himself a Black Forest ham and Havarti cheese sandwich, walked out back where Romeo was sitting on an outdoor chaise lounge in a skin tight, square leg speedo with big sunglasses on. Brayden fell into an empty chaise lounge beside him. It was cold AF, but that wasn’t stopping anyone from enjoying the warm, sixty three degree day.
There were tall orange glowing lamp-stand heaters going, so even though they were outside in the winter weather, it was like a heat wave in a ten foot box. He looked up and around, then thought, genius.
“What’s up?” Romeo said.
His bronze skin was slicked with sweat and all his muscles were chiseled and on full display. There were three naked girls in the heated pool, girls Romeo surely drilled a few times but now just kept around as social proof.
“Five hotels have five heated pools,” Romeo said in his English-rocker accent, not looking at Brayden, but speaking to him none-the-less. “All warmed to a lovely eighty degrees.” He began ticking them off on his fingers. “The Bellagio, the Boulevard Pool at Cosmopolitan, Breathe Pool at The Hard Rock, the MGM Grand Pool and the Palazzo Pool. The only difference between us and them?” he said, now turning to Brayden. “The girls in our pool are naked.”
Now the trademark grin, followed by a matching grin from Brayden.
A few minutes later, Titan and Breezy walked outside in swimsuits. Breezy hesitated a second when she saw who was in the pool, but then she acted like it was no biggie. Brayden offered Breezy the chaise. She thanked him, but instead, she shrugged off her bikini top and jumped in the pool with the other girls.
“Where are your boys?” Brayden asked Titan. The two students he met the night before.
“At the mall running lines, working out the shivers. They’re passable in bars and clubs, but their day game blows, so now they’re out sarging.”
“Without you?”
“They need to know what it’s like to have capable wingmen and then not have wingmen. You know the drill. Basically I said don’t come home without a girl, and that was that.”
Brayden laid his face back and caught the heater lamp just right. Ah, yes. He remembered his training. And he remembered the blinding fear.
“Let’s talk about that, Brayden,” Romeo said. “You’re going to be here, you need a protégé. Where’s he at?”
He leaned forward, lowered his glasses, put his bare eyeballs right on Brayden.
“He’s got an ad out,” Titan said. Looking at Brayden, he said, “Did you spice it up a bit? From what I saw last?”
“Yeah.”
“Well go check it,” Titan said. Breezy was asking Titan to come in the pool and he said, “You’re still overdressed for the occasion, don’t you think Breezy?” She nodded her head, so he said, “When you’re wearing what they’re wearing, then I’ll come join you.”
“But they’re not wearing anything,” she said, looking at the other naked girls.
“Exactly.”
Romeo looked at Brayden and said, “Seriously B, go check your ad.”
“I just posted it half an hour ago.”
“If it’s good,” he said, “you’ll already have responses.”
“Let me finish my sandwich,” Brayden said as Breezy got out of the pool. She walked in front of Brayden, Titan and Romeo and stood there dripping, small nipples pinched tight and wet. Then, she undid the ties on the sides of her bikini bottoms and peeled them off.
“Is this what you’re thinking?” she asked Titan.
Everything about her was fitness solid. Fully exercised. Okay, so Breezy was an HB8 who just became an HB9 and that was Brayden’s cue to go check the ad. He was walking inside when he heard Breezy and Titan jump into the pool.
He grabbed himself a Mountain Dew from the fridge, moseyed into the living room then logged on to Craigslist.
He already had fifteen responses.
5
After thirty minutes of texting and emailing, he’d set up several group interviews at the local Starbuck’s. The way he set it up was he’d see four different groups over the next four days. By the time he was done setting that up, he had three more requests. He added these three to the existing groups, cancelled the ad, then jumped on the internet to find someplace suitable for a larger group venue.
Twenty minutes later he decided the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino had the perfect place for him. He called and booked a meeting room from the Studio Collection ten days out. The room he chose was perfect for a party of twelve. By the time he did his Starbuck’s interviews, he’d narrow the group to just that.
When the lady on the phone asked him if he wanted it catered, he was like, “Do bears poop in the woods?”
Then he heard nothing. Static and the far away sound of crickets. Finally, the woman cleared her throat and said, “I believe they do. Yes.”
“Well then there’s your answer.”
The way Titan said it, if he wanted to stay in Vegas and run his own venue, Brayden would have to select one or two guys to mentor for free. Doing that would help him develop his own version of their PUA program.
What Titan had said earlier was, “What you’ll learn from teaching, from being a mentor, will tighten your game like you can’t imagine. You think you’re giving back, and you are, but you’re also fine tuning your craft. That’s the secret of mentoring brotein-shake, you actually get better by doing it.”
After spending five days with his top two picks—his potential protégés—Titan said he’d need to call the guys from the Hard Rock group and offer them a heavily discounted course.
Titan then said, “Show them the phone numbers of the girls your protégés pulled, then let them sell these guys on your skillset. Charge four of them $595, but only take four. You need to remind them it’s an exclusive course. And you have to get these poor fuckers laid otherwise you’ll never go anywhere with this, got it?”
“Got it,” Brayden said.
He was already working out the logistics in his head.
Romeo then jumped in and said that after Brayden developed his own repeatable program and perfected it with a dozen or so guys that he should start charging $1295 for a weekend course.
“You’re going to want to bring in your best pupil as your guest instructor and wingman,” Romeo explained. “You’ll want eight students max. Two for your protégé and six for you. Part of this is you’ll go into the field with your six, watch over your protégé’s two, then see how your protégé is doing. How you’re doing. Scale it back if you’re overwhelmed, but don’t scale up because the metrics just won’t work this early into things. This is how you pay for this lifestyle, for your rent, for the parties, the meeting rooms and goodie bags for the broads.”
Brayden didn’t tell either of them who his father was or that he was still on the parental tit, but that’s because it was no big thing but a chicken wing. He was more concerned about pulling his weight as an instructor than making money.
The fart app he developed last year—the one they used on Cameron in Professor Teller’s Psychology class—had since rocketed into the stratosphere. His partner in the app was like, “Dude, we need to take this shit deep and wide,” and Brayden agreed. The problem was he was in charge of programming and his partner was all about distribution and marketing. His partner was doing his part. Brayden was not doing his. He had to break free of the
short FBI leash if he ever had any hopes of expanding the app and making his own living.
Assuming things went his way, he’d be clear of the FBI dog-chain in six months; all he had to do was make sure Agent Clark secured his deal in writing. Then he’d take the fart app wide and sell it off for a few hundred grand. That would be great, but it wouldn’t be monumental. Monumental would be unleashing hell on the hacking world, and that’s what he’d do after he sold the app.
When he went back out to the pool, Romeo, Titan and the four naked girls were swimming. One of the girls he didn’t know said, “Come in, the water’s amazing.”
Everyone was laughing and having a good time. And everyone was buck freaking naked. He stole a deep breath, steadied himself, then undressed, jumped in and joined the fun. The girl he ended up with that night, she was this brunette named Polly who wasn’t great looking but had a pretty good body and was amazing in bed. Somehow, to Brayden, that made her seem that much hotter.
When she was leaving the next morning, Brayden said, “Be a good girl and leave me your number.”
“You be a good boy and leave me yours,” she teased, which got him laughing. He hadn’t realized it last night, but this morning he knew for sure: she was a PUA with a vagina.
“I’m not a clinger,” he said.
“Good,” she said, “then we can do this again.”
She took his number, then left him with a kiss. As he was getting out of the shower, a text came in from Agent Clark saying she had his guarantee and to get his bony ass into work. He said to send him a copy and if it looked good, he’d come in and sign the original. The copy came in a few minutes later. He didn’t respond right away. He needed to make sure the deal was on the level, so he read the letter twice.
Thirty minutes after that he was downstairs eating breakfast when Aniela walked in and gave him the mother of all death stares.
“You smell like sex,” she said, her tone accusatory.
“That’s just me being happy to see you.”
