Page 60 of Meeting Her Mate
I hurriedly got in my truck and reversed it, forgetting that the cup of coffee was resting on the roof. The cup crashed on the pavement and broke into a dozen pieces, spilling black joe everywhere.
Damn. That was my favorite cup.
But I had bigger fish to fry than to worry about my Dora the Explorer cup. I had an impulse to alert Will and let him know about this new development, but given that he still hadn’t understood how to use a smartphone, it would be a futile attempt. Besides, there wasn’t exactly a concrete development as of yet. I’d tell him when I’d have something tangible to report.
***
I held my breath as I stood at the transom of Maliha’s apartment. Right now, this was a Schrödinger’s cat sort of situation. If I didn’t knock, nothing bad would happen. If I knocked, Maliha would alert me to something either terribly good or terribly bad.
Before I could rap my knuckles on her door, Maliha opened it herself. The girl had deep circles under her eyes. Her hair was all wild and unkempt. And she was grinning like a maniac.
“I went big, Lexi. Holy Mary, I went big,” she whispered. I had barely registered the glee in her tone before she grabbed me by the arms and pulled me into her room. I had lost count of how many times she had done that.
As many times as I had been here, I had never actually been inside her bedroom. Maliha had made it clear that her bedroom was her Fortress of Solitude. It had piqued my interest several different times to find out what exactly was in there. We made a guessing game where I had to guess what was in her bedroom, and she’d say warmer or colder based on my answers. I’d guessed if there was a BDSM dungeon in there or maybe a slaughter room. So far, I was as cold as one could be.
“Come in,” Maliha said, beckoning me to that very same bedroom.
“You cannot be serious,” I said. “No one’s allowed in there.”
“Yeah. I was up all night about it. But given the scale of the thing, I gotta let you in. I mean, if you want to see what I’ve been up to. You see, baby girl, last night, I had an epiphany. Hacking Blair wasn’t hard, but the thing that you’ve got to understand with hacking is that you don’t exactly hack someone once, and you unlock everything about them. Blair’s a man who knows how important and secure his digital footprint has to be. He’s like a ninja, leaving no clues about his online activity. When I hacked into his phone, it didn’t offer me much insight. So, for the past twelve hours, I’ve been busy hacking into Beckett Pharma’s enterprise-level security. There’s no coming back from something as big as this. I’m officially a cybercriminal now. See for yourself.” Maliha then opened the door to her bedroom, allowing me to see inside for the first time in my life.
A loud gasp escaped me.
If her living room was any indication of the kind of tech freak she was, her bedroom was like the heaven those tech freaks went to after they died. It wasn’t even a bedroom. There was no bed, to begin with. All four of the walls were covered with sixty-five-inch LED TVs, all of them showing Linux interfaces with commands running in the terminal. All along the walls were shelves with PCs, keyboards, computer mice, and a ton of equipment that I didn’t even know the names of. Well, some of them I could understand as routers. But others were more complex, with antennas jutting out of whirring machinery.
“This is madness,” I whispered as I entered the room, surrounded by blinking lights, blaring screens, and RGB keyboards.
“You see, this is what the inside of my mind looks like. For me, this is the most sacred place on the planet. My sanctum sanctorum. I have done things from here that would be undetectable to the common mind,” Maliha said. As she walked through the room, armed raised grandiosely, I followed her meekly, not knowing what to expect.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Oh, let’s just say that I hacked through Beckett Pharma’s entire security. If they so much as a whisper in that building, I’ll know. But I think your aspirations are a bit higher than mere whispers in corridors. Tell me what you want,” she said.
“I want to know what Blair’s doing,” I said. “And I want to see what he’s been working on in the lab.”
“We can totally do that. I hope you cleared your schedule. Unlike what they show in the movies, hacking takes a lot of time. And spying on someone using your hacks and exploits takes an even longer time,” Maliha said.
“I’m yours for the entire day,” I said.
She wasn’t kidding about the process being time-consuming. When she meant everything, it was indeed everything. From simple clerical company records detailing the attendance of everyone entering and leaving the building to hours of audio and video logs that the pharmacists had made while experimenting with the drugs they were manufacturing, the extent of Maliha’s hacking was as thorough as it could get, begging the question: How do I get through this much data in a single day?
“I have a solution for that as soon as you tell me what you’re looking for,” Maliha said, smiling slyly at me. “Compression-based AI search-bots can scour through the entire data within hours and come up with key phrases, search terms, and anything related to the query that we input.”
“Like a search engine, basically,” I said, nodding slowly. All this time spent with Maliha, and now I was finally getting the hang of all her tech jargon.
“Exactly like a search engine,” Maliha said, clapping me on the shoulder. “So tell me what we should search for. Or, if you’d rather do it alone for the sake of privacy, I’m cool with that too. I’ll leave you to it.”
“Really? Isn’t this your Fortress of Solitude?” I asked. “You’d trust me to be alone in your bedroom with all this stuff?”
“This may be the Fortress of Solitude, but you’re my sister,” Maliha gleamed at me. “Now, do what you’ve got to do.” With that brief farewell, she left me to my own devices, sitting in front of one of the giant screens, looking at the search bar.
First, I typed in “Maurice.” Blair’s chat records, call history, and emails came up in a matter of minutes, allowing me to go through all the records one by one. It was mostly very banal stuff that they were talking about. Politics, the next election, Maurice accepted bribes for some illegal Beckett Pharma expansion within the city, and so on. But the one thing that stuck out was a fifteen-minute-long call session between Maurice and Blair.
I clicked on the call recording and played it. Halfway through the call, Maurice said something that caught my attention.
“As for our canine friend,” Maurice said.
“You’re my canine friend,” Blair said, then burst into his sociopathic laughter.