by Boyd Craven
The metal target panged, as a hit rang out and Amy leaned back after she put the gun on safe. Dwight leaned back as well, and she slid off. She rolled her arm in a circle and then rubbed her shoulder a bit.
“That one’s stronger than daddy’s. I don’t know if I like that one,” she told her stunned family.
Dwight started laughing at their expressions and pretty soon Amy joined in, pointing at her sister that looked like a guppy trying to get air from the top of a tank.
“Didn’t that hurt?” Angela asked.
“A little bit,” Amy said, still smiling and pulled the front of her shirt down a little bit.
The recoil in the butt had left a red mark, but the slender girl was smiling, not wincing in pain.
“I thought for sure she’d—”
“Naw,” Dwight said, interrupting Angela. “See, she had no expectations going in on how bad it was going to hurt, so when she shot, it didn’t hurt.”
“What did you whisper to her?” Steve asked him.
“That she needed to brace the gun good, and that I was going to brace her good, so it didn’t launch her to the moon and back.”
“I told him I’m not an astronaut, so no flying lessons for me,” she said with a grin, “but I think I like yours better. I can shoot it a lot and get a little sore. This one is like ten shots of yours, daddy!”
Steve grinned. “It really is. Mine isn’t really for hunting the way Mr. Abbott’s gun is.”
“Then why do you have it?” she asked in the innocent way little kids have about them.
“Well, for lead therapy,” Amber finished off before her parents could speak, and dropped a wink at her dad.
Steve saw it and grinned. Since the Jeep had been purchased, the mostly snotty and bratty teenage girl attitude had been somewhat repressed, and a young mature woman replaced her for at least thirty minutes a day. At least, she was trying, Steve mused. He knew why too, summertime was coming, and the guy friend was trying to talk his way into taking her on a day trip to Six Flags.
“As long as lead therapy makes Daddy smile, I’m all for it. It’s kinda fun! Dad, can we shoot your pistols?”
Steve’s grin faltered, and Angela opened her eyes wide as the cat was let out of the bag.
“How did you know I got some pistols baby?” he asked her after a second.
“Mommy and I went shooting over here a couple of weeks ago. She said those were yours and until you taught us, not to touch them. She wanted to use her gun, and hers was in the safe, not in the case under the bed like yours.”
“Oh, I see….” He looked at his wife.
She just smiled back and pulled him close and kissed him.
“I would like to learn how to shoot them too,” Angela said.
“You knew? Wait, you….”
“I don’t mind,” Angela said, “I was scared to talk to you about it, but the little one outed the secret.”
“How is it a secret, since I’m the only one who doesn’t know about them?” Amber asked.
“I guess it isn’t. The truth is, I know how to shoot them but I’m not as good with them as I am with a rifle like this,” he said patting his AR. “Maybe we can all take a class on them, then? Together?”
They agreed, and Dwight shot him an amused look before making a finger gun and shooting it at Steve. Steve gave him a wide-eyed nod. Bullet dodged. Message received.
CHAPTER 5
Another month passed, and not much changed except the economy worsened. Iran sent more vessels to harass US warships, and again they responded by sinking a fast attack ship that had radioed that they were coming to blow up the “Great Satan.” A carrier battle group near the South China sea was repeatedly getting buzzed by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army helos and fighter jets. Tensions were high, especially with the new president refusing to acknowledge the China One policy that had been in place for a long time.
To combat a new trade war, the USA had started trading more with Taiwan, forgoing Chinese imports. That had only notched up the already heightened tensions and made the already nervous Asian stock markets tremble. In Europe, it looked as if Italy and Brussels, with Germany to follow, were headed down the same path as Greece. The times scared Steve more than he liked to admit. He hadn’t slowed down his preps, but hadn’t increased them either. He was getting near the one year mark of food and was loading groceries from Sam’s Club on his way home from work when he got an urgent text from his boss, Brandi Swartz.
He finished his loading and turned around and headed back towards IT Bytes, careful not to break any speed laws. It was almost an hour after closing and the lights were out, but one car remained in the small renovated building that had once been a mini-mall. Steve locked up his truck and headed to the front door, already pulling his keys and keycard out of his pocket. He was startled when a figure stepped out of the darkness and turned the bolt, unlocking the door. Brandi pushed it open and held the door.
“I wasn’t sure if you were going to come, you didn’t answer back,” she said ,and closed it behind him, locking it.
“I’m sorry, I was right around the corner. I must have gotten the message while I was shopping. I rushed over without answering.”
“I need you to see something,” Brandi said and motioned for him to follow.
Steve did, his curiosity piqued, but he still had a bad feeling. It changed for the better when Brandi bypassed the office and directed him towards the employee lounge. He followed her on inside where the news was on, but the TV was muted. Steve looked on at shock as a US battleship smoked, a huge hole smoking on the top deck as US military choppers covered the vessel from up high. In the background, lifeboats were in the water, but as Steve gave it a closer look, he didn’t recognize the emblem on the uniforms.
“It’s started?” Steve asked her.
“I think so. Apparently, the Chinese thought it would be funny to buzz the ship and then turned on their radar. The news is saying that the anti-aircraft guns tore it to shreds. They’ve been trying to get near the ship but—”
“How did our ship get a hole in it?” Steve interrupted.
“One of their pilots retaliated, and when a smaller PLO Navy vessel showed up, they were fired upon for not responding. We had just been attacked.”
“You’re worried about what we talked about?” Steve asked.
“That isn’t actually why I called you in; this just happened while I was waiting to hear back from you. We’ve had a client call who had a data breach. They are claiming it came in from our software. I need you to run down the scenario and look at the code.”
Steve’s mind was going a hundred miles an hour, and he mentally sighed. With the cutbacks, they had to make do with the teams they had. Was it possible that shoddy programming had left a system vulnerable? It might take more than a couple of hours to fix; it might take, with current staffing levels, weeks or months to sort it out.
“Ok, let me get the project notes, and I’ll get started.”
“I’ve already pulled them, and I’ll be working alongside you on this one,” Brandi said.
“I thought you always teased that the last thing you programmed was in Fortran, about a thousand years ago or something.”
Brandi let out a surprised bark of a laugh and then gave Steve a scathing look. She only held it for a second before laughing out loud again.
“You’re not that far off of the truth, but I stay current. Besides, I think you did more than your fair share of Fortran back in the day.”
“Guilty as charged,” Steve grinned, glad his boss took the joke in the context it was.
“You want to do this at your desk, or you want the big plasma in the conference room?”
Steve thought about it. “I’d rather have my setup at the desk, especially if time is of the essence.”
“In this case,” Brandi said, “it most definitely is. Losing government contracts, and then if word of a breach gets around…all we have is our name at this point. It’s pretty dire
. I feel horrible for putting this on you, but it’s one of the only things I can think of, and I want to limit exposure of the breach to as few as possible. There’s a lot of hurt feelings out there from the layoffs.”
“I’ll do my best,” Steve told her quietly, then hesitated before asking, “You do know that we might not find this right away? It might not be a quick fix?”
“That’s why I’m staying to help. I might not write code anymore, but I haven’t forgotten how to, and I used to proof every program on the quiet before we released it.”
Steve whistled. He knew she was sharp, she had once been a crack programmer…but he had no idea she was doing that. Some of their security programs and virtual firewalls had millions of lines of code. If she could read and understand that as well as he could….
“Let’s get started, but first, I have to call my wife.”
Angela had been frustrated but understanding of the need for him to work late. He’d had to do it often, but this was a case where he might not come home. He didn’t tell her what the specific problem was, but invited her and the girls to meet him for a late dinner of pizza. In the background the girls both cheered, but Steve could tell that his long hours were starting to wear on her, even with Amber upping her game and trying to help more.
Steve was working his way through the revision history, to get a feel for when a bug might have been introduced into the program. He’d personally coded the core of this one, so he knew it well, but he hadn’t worked on any of the third-party functionality and access, as that had been part of Parker Tsarnaev’s group to make that happen.
Right away, he found three entries on the day of the first round of layoffs. He was talking to himself and instead of Brandi working next to him, she looked over his shoulder, her eyes going wide.
“Put that on the plasma, my old eyes….”
Steve did and she walked about ten feet away to stand in front of the twenty-foot long projected image as Steve continued to dig into the revisions. It wasn’t the big plasma she was talking about, the resolution wasn’t as good, but they had often used it as a training tool or for presentations…but what he found…it was the second to the last entry that confirmed it.
“The doorbell….” Brandi said, hearing the front door’s buzzer.
Steve was looking in shock at what had been done, he’d hardly heard Brandi or the buzzer. One of the project leads had inserted a new line of code, essentially putting in a back door through one of the third-party applications. He even recognized the coding signature, like they weren’t even trying to hide what they were doing. Probably thought IT Bytes wouldn’t be around when the breach….
Steve hurried and started searching the darknet and quickly found the programmer had a profile set up on a 4chan style message board and had published the breach. He started screenshotting everything and then saw something else that made him bite his lip. The hacker had gotten a job with the same company that was being hacked. More screenshots. He could roll the revision back now to stop the plug but….
Steve ignored the smell of pizza and leaned over his keyboard and started typing lines of code furiously. He heard talking behind him and felt a hand on his shoulder, but he didn’t stop. To fix things, he left the breach open and began to—
“Steve, that’s a Trojan horse!” Brandi said in surprise.
“Yeah?” he asked her. “Anybody who logs in there is going to get their data wiped, but not after they send us a snapshot. This isn’t simple hacking, this is corporate espionage. The only way I can think of to quickly nullify any data they got from us, is to make sure it’s garbage and unusable.”
He turned to see Brandi chewing on her lip as his three women stood behind her with plates of pizza in hand.
“Do it, Dad. Get the bad guys,” Amy said.
“Kick some ass…I mean…butt,” Amber said a second later and covered her mouth after the slip.
Angela smacked her daughter on the back of the head, but she was smiling at Steve.
“Go ahead, finish it. Make sure you record every step and make sure we have documentation to have this prosecuted.”
“Already ahead of you,” Steve said and sat down.
An hour later it was done. He stood up and stretched, his shoulders tight, but they popped as he twisted and turned. His back and neck were sore too.
“I can heat some pizza up for you,” Angela said, walking up and putting her arms around his waist,
“That would be great,” Steve told her, kissing the top of her head. “Sorry about that, I haven’t had to do that in a long, long time.”
“That was the craziest, most brilliant, fly by the seat of the pants programming. Where did you learn that, and how did you know where to look?” Brandi asked.
“I try to keep up to date myself. Often times, it’s the script kiddies and the coders on the darknet that come up with the best breaches…so I study their methods and make sure I can defeat anything they throw at us. In this case, a woman named Calinda Braxton, a programmer under Parker is the one who did this. I don’t understand why she would go to work for them and then publish the hack, but I figure that’s something for the FBI to figure out, and who paid her thirty-thousand dollars to do it.”
“How did you find that out?” Amber asked, bringing a warm slice from the lounge’s microwave to him.
“Remember when he said he studied their methods?” Brandi asked.
“Keyboard cowboy, huh?” Amber said.
“Your dad is pretty much the badass of keyboard cowboys,” Brandi answered, and then covered her mouth at the slip as well.
Amy couldn’t take it, she busted up in giggles. She could read fine, and they all watched the code being generated on the big screen, but she understood the least of what was going on—just that Brandi and her mom had been talking nonstop for hours, and they had let her play one of the Xbox’s in the employee lounge with unlimited supplies of pizza and pop. Even Amber joined her for a while, though she stood out there next to her mother a bit.
Steve grinned at the compliment and then looked at his phone as he was taking a big bite of a slice of pizza. 8:50 p.m. Ten minutes away from Amy’s bedtime.
“I’m going to scarf this down, but are we good for tonight?”
“Yes,” Brandi said, and walked over to Steve and gave him a big hug.
Steve held the pizza away so he wouldn’t get it in his boss’s hair and after shooting Angela a look. She winked at him, so he hugged her back with his left hand. When she pulled away, a tear had started falling down one cheek.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” Steve asked, putting the pizza down.
“It’s…I’m sorry, I don’t want to worry you. This data breach and everything else has me emotional. You go get some rest. I’m going to head home and have a bottle of wine, if I can stay awake that long.”
“It’ll be ok,” Amy said, “we don’t worry much because my daddy tries to be ready for anything.”
“Anything?” Amber asked.
“Anything and everything. You know how he is. You shouldn’t worry, Mrs. Swartz. My daddy will fix it, if it’s broke.”
“Thank you,” she said to Amy. “And thank you again. I might have seemed calm on the outside, but I was slowly coming apart on the inside,” she finished, looking at Steve who had picked back up the plate and was doing his best to devour it. “And take some pizza, I already ate my fill.”
“Pizza!” Amber said with a fist pump, and both girls went running for the employee lounge, followed by Brandi.
“You did pretty good. I don’t know what it was, but it was good enough that your boss kept telling me that she didn’t know what she’d do without you. You shouldn’t worry about losing your job so much. You’ll worry yourself into an early grave.”
Steve finished his piece off, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and pulled his wife close for a hug. He was about to speak when both girls came running out: Amber holding two pizza boxes and Amy with a two liter of pop.
“Whe
n did we go to war with China?” Amber asked.
“Oh, crap,” Steve muttered.
“What’s going on?” Angela asked.
“The Navy is fighting the Chinese, they said it on TV, Mrs. Swartz is watching it.”
“What do you—”
“Let’s just go home,” Steve told his wife.
“Ok….”
“Steve,” Brandi said, walking out of the lounge, “feel free to have tomorrow off with pay. I’ve been running you ragged lately.”
“Uh, thanks!” Steve said after a moment’s hesitation as he fought down the guilt.
He knew how much more strain that would put on the others, but after a minute he realized that it really didn’t matter. It was a job, and it would be here when he came back on Monday. He hoped.
“Hey…that means a three-day weekend!” Amy said “Time for more lead therapy!” she said, and held up the two liter.
Steve took it and pulled her in close for a right armed hug, and gave her head a squeeze till she squealed before letting her go.
“Just let the FBI, or police, or whoever know how to get a hold of me, or I’ll talk to them on Monday.”
“Sounds good. You girls take good care of your dad. He looks dead on his feet,” Brandi called.
They waved and headed to the front door.
“Daddy, I’ll drive your truck,” Amber said holding her hand out.
“Hold on,” he said and locked the door, not wanting to leave it open while Brandi was finishing things off, and then handed them to her. “You drive; I’ll sleep.”
CHAPTER 6
That Friday, Steve headed out to check the mail and saw the back of Doug, walking quickly away. He hurried to his mailbox and found his mail and a fat envelope with the HOA’s letterhead. With a sigh, he walked back to the house and dumped everything on the kitchen table and went outside to the back patio and opened it. It was a summons to the HOA meeting later on that afternoon, signed by the president, Jeff Arellano, as well as Richard Hunter, Thomas Durazo, Matthew Fitzpatrick, and Cheryl Jacoby all from the council.
