Page 65 of Tangled

Another man came over, shorter compared to Tristan and the others but still north of six feet. “Hey, hackers. Figure out how to make it work.”

Blaise lowered his head so that his hood draped past his face again. “You, of all people, should know how important cybersecurity is,Aaron.”

The toss of his head and how his NVGs drew an arc in the air suggested an exaggerated eye roll. “Not every Israeli worked on Stuxnet,Blaise.”

He walked away.

Shuffling and muttering grated from the other part of the camp, and then a tiny, quiet uproar.Somethingwas going on over there.

Tristan asked Blaise, “Did that guy work onStuxnet?”Stuxnet was an infamous computer worm that attacked Iran’s nuclear program twenty years before, causing the nuclear centrifuges to destroy themselves while feeding the monitors normal-looking reports. It was the first true cyberattack, and the code had been elegant.

Blaise scoffed,“Yeah,sure,Aaron Savoie worked on Stuxnet when he was seven years old.No.But I chide him about it, nevertheless. He is not a coder. He is a meat puppet for wetwork. But he will lead the team to extract your friends.”

“That guy?”

“Yeah. Don’t make him mad. I’m the only one who can make him mad and live.”

Tristan leaned in. “Why?”

On the other side of the encampment, a man’s voice called out, “Hey! Who are you?”

Softer voices whispered.

Blaise lifted his head. “Because I’m the hacker, and he doesn’t perceive me as a threat.But he is wrong.”

Tristan nodded slowly, rue filling his every movement. “Yeah, the casuals don’t respect that cyberwarfare is more dangerous than nuclear now.”

Blaise nodded along with him. “We could send them all back to the Stone Age with a few keystrokes, and they would never know what hit them.”

They stood in silence for a minute, pondering how they could very well hold the fate of humanity in their fingertips.

“Anyway,” Tristan said, “I hacked one of the hostages’ phones, so we have video and audio inside.”

Blaise gestured toward a black hump a few yards farther away from where the other mercenaries were assembled. “We’ll find a way to utilize your surveillance that we’re both comfortable with. This way to the brains of the operation.”

Behind them, in the main part of the camp, the commandos bunched up. Their whispered talking became louder.

Tristan turned toward the others. In the eerie monochrome plus green of his night-vision goggles, one much smaller figure walked away from the group of commandos and approached Tristan and Blaise.

The figure was petite, curvy, and bounced on her toes a little when she walked.

No way.

Some of the other guys were following her over.

The NVG’s image fuzzed for a second, and then Colleen’s face resolved into visibility like she stepped out of a television screen. She was already wearing night-vision goggles.

She sidled up to Tristan. “What’cha doing?”

“How the hell did you know where I was?” he asked her.

She rolled her eyes. “Something has been going on with you all day, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out you were writing all that terrible code to run out the clock. Of course, you were doing something to rescue Jian and Anjali. They’re at The Boulders, so that’s where you must be. And you logged into my Wi-Fi at my apartment, so now I can track your phone.Duh.”

What!“You shouldn’t have put tracking software on my phone. That’s intrusive.”

And why hadn’t his phone’s antimalware programs prevented it?

“I didn’t mean to,” she said. “I coded it a year ago for fun. No one ever comes over to my apartment, so I forgot it was even on there.”