Page 139 of Agency

“Okay,” I replied. “Okay.” I fished into my hip pocket and found the USB stick, handed her the small device. “Plug this in.”

Her face twisted up, and she looked to me. “What is it?”

“Don’t worry about it. You’re just working a job, right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess.” She paused, her hand half-extended towards plugging in the geek stick, and then she looked back to me. “But I don’t get another paycheck for like two weeks.”

“Fuck me,” I growled. “USB’s going to work whether you plug it in, or I do, ma’am. Plug. It. In.”

“Right, right, right. Plugging it in now.”

“Good.”

She leaned under the desk and plugged in the USB stick.

A second’s pause, then a chime sounded from the computer as it recognized the new device. Another five-seconds-long pause, and then the PC’s fan was kicking on heavy and hard as the computer processor really started working.

“Um…” she began noncommittally as she leaned back in her desk. “What’s it doing?”

“Deleting everything on all those servers.”

“Oh.” A deep breath. “Cool, I guess?” Another deep breath. “I’m totally not going to have a job after this, am I?”

“Sorry. No. It’s alright, you don’t want to work for these people anyways.”

“But the pay’s really good,” she said as she gestured to the computer monitors. “And all I do isthis. Porn,dude.” She looked over to the right-hand monitor. “Wait. You said that USB is deleting everything on the servers, right?”

“Right. Wiping everything and making it unrecoverable.”

She leaned in closer to the monitor on the right, lifting her glasses as she did. She shook her head at whatever the monitor was showing, and then her hands went for the keyboard in front of her.

“Wait,” I snapped. “No touching the keyboard.”

Her hands went up. “Dude, I’m pretty sure even I couldn’t stop this thing, and I’m pretty damn good.” She chuckled, and there was a hint of nervousness to the sound. “And trust me, I’malsopretty sure you’ll shoot me if I do actually try, and no paycheck is worth getting executed over.” Her hand went to the mouse on the left side of the desk, but she kept her fingers splayed as she hovered half-way there and glanced back towards me.

“Can I show you something?”

Slowly, I nodded.

“Does that mean I can touch the mouse?”

“Only if you don’t get frisky with it.”

“Ha. Ha. Thought you weren’t kink shaming?”

“Sorry.”

“Apology accepted.” Sighing, she manipulated the mouse as she leaned in closer to the monitor on the right, clicked on a few things. “Besides,” she muttered as she brought up another program, a series of charts designed in green on black, “I don’t even like rats.”

I couldn’t help but smirk and shake my head, despite the fact I was holding a gun on her and things might be going pear-shaped for me and my team.

“See this?” she asked, circling one of the graphs with the mouse’s on-screen pointer, which I now realized was a Harry Potter wand. “This is an outbound data tracker.”

“Okay. That’s a big number?”

“Yes, it’s a big number. It’s big, because we’ve already transferred several gigs of information since I plugged in your flash drive. I can’t remember the last time I saw numbers like this, if ever, not with the low user count we typically have.”

“What’s that mean?”