Turned out the little man with the soft smile and hard eyes worked for some shadowy Chinese intelligence group. And they, along with their partner high up inside the U.S. government, a man who went by the code name Bishop, were planning an attack on Texas’s power grid.
Not to engage in espionage, as it’d been explained to Vinny in the information on the thumb drive. The scheme was government sanctioned, a partnership between the U.S. and China to convince Texas’s electric reliability council there was a weakness in their system.
We’re talking real inside spycraft shit, Vinny thought now, pride filling his chest.
He still found it hard to believe the powers that be had tapped him to participate in the intrigue. After all, wasn’t this a job for the CIA? Or the NSA?
Then again, when the federal government was looking to pull one over on a state government, maybe itwassmart to co-opt a civilian. Less red tape. More plausible deniability.
That was the thing, though, wasn’t it? Vinny wasn’t just any civilian.
When he’d asked Yang three days later,“Your U.S. source knows what I do for a living, right?”Yang had only shrugged.
“They understand that sometimes it takes a criminal to stop criminals. This is your chance to do something sanctioned. Your chance to answer the call of your country. Are you in?”
Vinny had been in.Morethan in, he’d been freakin’pumpedat the chance to do some real-deal undercover work backed by Uncle Sam himself. Alegitimatepaycheck.
Nanna will be so proud.
He’d packed his bags and flown to Austin the next day. And he’d been living in a hotel by the airport and working at the power plant ever since.
His job left much to be desired. Being part of the janitorial team wasn’t exactly glamorous. But the government-approved espionage made up for the drudgery of mopping floors and replacing the urinal cakes in the men’s bathrooms.
He’d learned the layout of the plant and the schedules of the various workers. He knew exactly how he was going to get the malware uploaded when the engineers changed shifts. All he’d been waiting on was Yang to tell him it was go-time.
Then that D.O.D. chick had stumbled upon their plan.
Vinny wasn’t real clear on how all that had come about. Something involving her finding the encrypted communications between Yang and Bishop. But it’d culminated in them deciding the best way to clear her piece off the board and ensure she kept her mouth shut was to frame her for some shady shit guaranteed to have the feds locking her away.
It’d been easy enough to create a dark web trail from the D.O.D chick’s work computer to the contact person Yang’s handler had given to Vinny, ostensibly someone associated with Red Square. And it’d been even easier to fabricate communications between the two that had made it appear as if the D.O.D woman was passing along highly classified Dominion Pipeline information. Then, it’d just been a matter of Yang planting a bug in the FBI’s ear via an anonymous tip. And voila! The frameup was complete.
Except, the woman had thrown a potential wrench in the works by escaping.
“What does this mean for us?” he asked Yang now. “Does it change anything?”
“Bishop asks you to be prepared to move on the target at a moment’s notice.”
“I’m ready now.”
“Good.” Yang sounded pleased and Vinny felt another punch of pride. “Stay by your phone. I will contact you when it is time.”
After the call clicked off, Vinny sat back and grinned, excited his job in Texas was almost finished.
Wide-open spaces, ten-gallon hats, and everyone smiling at him all the time had lost their charm. He missed dirty sidewalks and good bagels and cabbies who yelled out the window that he was a motherfucker when he crossed the street in front of them.
No one’s called me a motherfucker in three months, he thought grumpily.
It was starting to affect his mental health.
13
Black Knights Inc.
“You think the Chinese plot to knock out the Texas power grid is somehow linked to Red Square taking the Dominion Pipeline hostage?” Ozzie asked as he pecked away at the keyboard on the laptop he’d brought with him to the conference table.
Hannah wasn’t offended by his split-attention. As a cyberpunk herself, she knew it was possible to surf the web, code, or do a little light hacking while also attending a conversation.
Most hackers had the ability to multitask. Oftentimes, in the land of spyware, spear phishing, and trojan horses, there were multiple data streams to contend with and onehadto be good at keeping more than one ball in the air.
