Lotte Big Brain: Hostile takeover alert. We gotta hostage situation.
Fuck. That meant someone had breached our security – probably someone who was working for us – and they were holding an area of programming hostage for money, or just trying to steal an aspect of it.
Me: What do you need?
Lotte: You to log in. Can you?
I looked up at Otter as she walked back in, her skin glowing from two very recent orgasms.
“You decided what you want to eat for dinner?” She had a smile that made me think of summer flowers and meadows. Pretty.
But right now, I didn’t have time to write poetry about it.
“I’m good with whatever you want, but I’m going to need half an hour to sort something out.”
She nodded. “Sure.” Then there was a frown. “Is this where you spin round at warp speed and end up wearing a tight spandex suit with a big ‘S’ on it?”
I laughed. “Kind of.” I pulled on my underwear and found my bag, taking out my laptop. “I’m so sorry about this.”
“I thought you were a footballer.” She curled back up on the bed. “Although at first I had you pegged as some computer geek.”
“You’d be right.” I quickly messaged Lotte back to say I was logging in. “I coded for fun. If I hadn’t made it professionally, I’d have done this full time.”
“Done what?”
“Code programs. Apps. We – me and my business partner – designed one that sold well a few years back. She runs the business full time, and I work on stuff when I can. We’re low key – the team has various non-disclosures in place.”
“Do you need me to sign one?”
My laugh was genuine. “I really don’t think you need to. But someone’s managed to breach our security just now and Lotte wants me to have a look. See if I can evict them.”
“I’m going to pretend I understand every word that you’ve said while I order Chinese and then read my book.” She took a tablet off the floor where her stuff was sat.
“You sure you don’t mind?”
Ottie shook her head. “It’s all good. If you need to spend the night sorting this, we can always sort out the next time we’re near each other.”
It was the first time I’d ever wished I didn’t have the business.
“No. Let me see what I can do.” We had layers and layers of security. For someone to get past and into where it mattered, they probably had a rootkit or botnet rewriting security sensors, and this was not something that just happened. The hacker had probably been jacked in for days, sorting red herring code. Our security was even more sophisticated than our apps and programs and was one of my best designs. Lotte knew enough to monitor it and make repairs when needed, but she didn’t speak its language as fluently as I did.
It took me twenty minutes to isolate the hacker, who’d breached through three layers in about four hours – not bad going. They were based two miles from our offices, and in another fifteen minutes, I’d worked out who they were and breached their security, introducing a RAT to rewrite their macros – macros that were very different from the ones that Neva prescribed. Our hacker friend would soon find their drivers had been smoked. Reprogramming would be an option, but that would be a tricky task when they had no operating system and the computer would think the keyboard and mouse were unrecognisable storage devices.
Life would suck for them. Shame.
My phone rang at the same time as someone knocked at the hotel room door.
“Hey, Lotte.” She would’ve been watching what I was doing once I was in the system. “All sorted, but we’re one employee down.”
“I know. I sent the heavies after him. Can you repair where he breached tonight?” She sounded stressed. Right now, that wasn’t my problem.
“No. I’ll look tomorrow. Everything’s secure and I’ve alarmed various other bits so if anyone tries anything, my phone will ring. I’ll do a more detailed rewrite tomorrow.” I waited for her response, knowing she wasn’t going to like this.
“Are you with someone?”
And there we had it. When I’d been over with Lotte this summer, I’d gotten the vibe that she was interested in trying things out between us again. I’d played daft, ignoring the couple of hints she’d made, but the tone in her voice right now told me she had an agenda.
“Yes. I am. I’ve paused our evening to fix this.” I inhaled and counted to five. “There was no way he’d have gotten into anything important in less than another thirty-six hours. You know that, don’t you?” I found that patience I’d always needed when I was dealing with Lotte recently.
