By the time we finished the process I’d forgotten all about Victor and it seemed that Zach had too. No wonder he used baking as a distraction.
But then there was a knock on the door and reality came crashing back.
Just as Wyatt had promised, Slade was there, with a laptop bag in hand and a smirk on his face.
“I heard you needed me,” he said and I made room for him so Lookah could give him the seal of approval.
The goats bleated at him as Lookah sniffed his shoes then his pants legs before wagging his tail and trying to climb the tall, Black man.
“Apparently, but I’m still not clear on why,” I said and showed him to the kitchen island.
He took a seat opposite Zach, and he pulled his laptop out.
“You’ve been getting messages from Lombardi?” he asked Zach who glanced at me before he nodded. “Fantastic.”
Slade started typing something on the laptop and I was stumped once again. What about any of this was fantastic to these people? Had my teammates lost it since they joined Wyatt? It wouldn’t surprise me.
“Can I have your phone number?” Slade asked Zach.
Zach grimaced and answered him and when he was done, he turned to me looking for information, as if I had any.
“Want to tell us what you’re doing there, bud, or are you going to leave us in the dark?” I asked Slade.
“Oh. Didn’t Wyatt tell you?” I shook my head. “Oops. Sorry. My bad. So yeah. Basically, I’ve written a self-propagating payload that piggybacks on metadata that auto-executes at the firmware boundary and gives me full access to a person’s cell and their GPS location.”
He was still breathing normally when he finished even though it sounded like he’d done a verbal gymnastics routine that would have made me sweat.
“Uhm…what?” Zach vocalized my confusion.
Slade looked from him to me and back to Zach.
“Oh sorry. Plain English. Basically, I wrote a virus that acts like a hitchhiker. It piggybacks on a message and gives me full access to the recipient's phone and pings me their location.” Slade smiled, notably pleased with himself.
And why wouldn’t he be. That sounded ingenious.
“Is that even legal?”
He glared at me with a gaping mouth and hummed.
“Well…” he said.
“Got it,” I answered.
Slade turned to Zach.
“So you can find him?” Zach asked.
“Sure,” he replied and clicked enter on his laptop.
Zach’s phone beeped. He jumped and looked at his device full of terror.
“It’s okay. That’s just me, piggybacking onto you,” Slade said.
“Oh,” Zach said and picked up his phone. “It just says hi.”
He showed me the message and I nodded in confirmation.
Slade chuckled.
