Page 84 of The Deals We Make

She shakes her head.

I tip my chin at her bag. “Do you have your laptop in there?”

“I have two. Company and personal non-traceable.”

“We should get to work. Our two heads were always better than one.”

Calista smiles sadly. “When we hacked into the school reports?”

“You came up with how to hit the network from the math department computers.”

“And you came up with the code.”

“So, what are we waiting for?”

I grab my laptop from the office, and she removes one of hers from her bag. As I’m opening mine up, there’s one more question I need to ask. “Do you still hack? Outside of things for work?”

Calista bites her lip as she looks at something on her computer. “Sometimes. Yes.”

“Why?”

She shrugs. “Because sometimes corporations and individuals have way more money than they need that was built on the back of other people’s hard labor at a less-than-fair price. I like to redistribute it.”

“Give me an example.”

“Okay, so you heard about that firm that has a workforce that’s seventy percent women but removed birth control from their health care plan option?”

It was all over the news. “Sure.”

“Their CFO loves classic rock, so I found his social media platform and figured out what exactly he was passionate about. I made a flyer of five big bands I knew were his favorite and said they were doing a festival together. Made a website for it and everything. Got his email, sent him the flyer, and invited him to register using the website. The link activated the code. I stole two million dollars and sent it to Planned Parenthood, who want to enshrine reproductive rights into law.”

“How did I never hear about them losing that kind of money?”

“Because I hit it nice and slow. Super small amounts. I set it to mimic amounts they are used to paying. Set up the bank account name to mimic one of their vendors with a small difference, a Cyrillic letter as opposed to a regular English alphabet letter. No one in their finance team noticed. Took the two million, sent it to a bank in the Caribbean. A friend withdrew it and sailed it back to New York. It was cycled through a shell company and presented as five-thousand-dollar donations to four hundred different centers.”

“Why split the donations like that?”

“Too low for anyone to be overly suspicious.”

I huff at that. “Clever. But there’s no one who would fall into the organized crime category?” My heart thuds in my chest.

“Not recently. And I feel like this is someone working alone.”

She dismisses the organized crime angle quickly, and I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing. “Why’s that? You know better than to close out variables.”

Calista smiles at me. “You and your variables. I guess some things never change. I haven’t heard your design of experiments speech in a long while either.”

I roll my eyes. “You know both things are powerful. But back to variables. Why do you think it’s an individual?”

She pulls out her phone and shows me the texts. “I feel like they are the messages of an angry man, but that doesn’t tie with the woman we just saw.”

Rage is a wild thing. It’s like a forest fire. Unpredictable. Violent. Destructive.

And mine grows as I take in every name he’s called her, every threat he’s delivered. I want to find the fucker and cut his balls off for threatening my…

I nearly said woman.

“Fuck,” I mutter. “We should check where these messages are coming from. Maybe we can?—”