Blast Wave by Leo J. Maloney

Author:Leo J. Maloney [Maloney, Leo J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyrical Press
Published: 2022-08-18T13:43:40+00:00

Chapter Nine

As he worked, Shepard remembered the pure joy of this kind of hacking. There was a remarkable sense of power, and the thrill of breaking the rules—or, more accurately, the law.

There was a time in college when the group he had founded with a friend had gone way over the line of legality.

The Friends of Feynman had definitely broken laws, but Shepard had made sure they had never harmed any people or institutions—or stole anything of value.

Nevertheless, the group had had a lot of fun. They broke into systems that had been judged impossible to crack. They also developed plans and conducted simulations that had massive implications.

However, from a hacking point of view, what they had done was the equivalent of breaking into huge mansions, throwing gigantic parties, and then leaving after making sure everything was in its proper place and there was no sign they had even been there.

Yet the pull to do more was strong for Shepard and, he had sensed, too strong for others in the group, including his partner.

By then, the group was fracturing for other reasons, so it was easier than Shepard had expected to shut it down. And when it was done, he had felt nothing but relief.

Though he was still uneasy about some of the things they had done, or at least planned, he was satisfied that they had been thought experiments without real-world consequences.

And he was gratified at how often the skills he’d developed with the Friends of Feynman had been useful in his work at Zeta. He’d been able to recognize and then fight more than one terrorist plot or Ares operation directly because of his illicit work in college.

He put the finishing touches on the final software packet and sent it over to Karen’s station.

“I have it,” she said.

Shepard turned his chair to her and said, “I don’t have to tell you to be careful, but I’ll remind you to tread very lightly around the Interbank Payment Systems. If something goes wrong with any one of the four—”

“Are you really telling me about Interbank Payment Systems?” she asked, looking genuinely surprised.

That made Shepard smile. “Of course, I don’t know what I was thinking.”

That was when his computer alert told him that Alex was entering the anteroom door on the vault level. He watched the monitors and made sure each one on the floor was being fed a video loop and confirmed that the fake time stamp would show accurately.

He watched for glitches in the system, and not for the first time today, he had the sense that someone like him was on the other side of this operation.

That was a frightening thought. He knew Ares had resources similar to Zeta’s. However, he had let his own pride convince him that they couldn’t have a computer and engineering department as good as Zeta’s—as good as the one that he and Karen had built.

But what if he was facing a hacker with the same access to the company systems, and the

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