City on Fire by Robert Boren

Author:Robert Boren [Boren, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: South Bay Press
Published: 2019-06-27T22:00:00+00:00

***

Stefan was setting up chairs in the room above the coffee house. The sound of footsteps pounded up the stairs, Stefan turning to see Vasil coming through the door. He carried a large monitor.

“What’s that for?” Stefan asked.

“To make the video conference easy to see,” he replied, setting it down. “We can plug it into one of those laptops.”

“Don’t touch that one,” Stefan said, pointing to the one on the last table to the right. “Albena is using that one to hack. She never shuts everything down.”

“No problem. Can she really do what you guys were talking about?”

“Oh yeah, she’s really good,” Stefan said. “Passed me by a year ago.”

“I was a little surprised,” Vasil said. “Don’t remember her being interested in that before.”

“She wasn’t.”

Penko bounded up the stairs. “Almost time.”

“Where’s Albena?” Stefan asked.

“She’ll be up here pretty soon. I’ll be going back down to greet the others. We got the coverage for the shop, so things should be fine downstairs.”

“This place might suffer a tad as we go forward, you know,” Vasil said.

“It is what it is,” Penko said. “We’ve got a good crew now. I feel comfortable letting them run the place for stretches of time.”

“How many others are coming?” Stefan asked.

“It’s tiny to start with,” Vasil said. “Three others. Makes us a team of seven.”

Stefan chuckled. “That’s hardly worth it. Why are we bothering?”

“This is the core team,” Vasil said. “We will build from there. You know we have a population to draw from. There are others involved as well. You’ll meet them soon enough.”

Penko nodded. “That’s true. I know of another twenty people who are interested.”

“I know of some as well,” Stefan said. “There’s probably a little overlap between our groups.”

“Maybe,” Penko said.

“Penko!” shouted Albena from below. “It’s almost time.”

“On my way,” he shouted back. “See you guys in a few minutes.” He rushed down the stairs, Albena coming up.

“The room isn’t ready yet,” she said. “Where’d that monitor come from?”

“I brought it for the video conference,” Stefan said. “You can use it for hacking later if you want to.”

She smiled. “That would be helpful.”

They finished cleaning the room, Albena changing a couple dead light bulbs, which brightened the room up quite a bit. There was conversation below, followed after a few minutes by footsteps on the stairs. Penko came through the door, followed by three woman.

“All, meet Eve, Taylor, and Laleh,” Penko said, introducing the others to them.

“There’s only seven of us?” Laleh asked. “Do we have some no-shows?”

“Our funder only wants those who he considers the core team in this meeting,” Vasil said. “There are others already involved. Taylor, I believe you met some of them this morning.”

“The security techs,” Taylor said. “Yes. They seemed a little too together to be your standard security system installers.”

“Cary’s brilliant,” Vasil said, “but enough of this. I’ll get the video link started. Have a seat.” He nodded to the folding chairs lined up in the room, then sat at the laptop, making the connection, routing the display to the big monitor, turning the laptop so the camera would pick up the group.

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