Page 100 of Wild Frost

Frank smiled. “See how easy that was?”

My heart thumped. There was no way he was just going to let us walk away, despite his prior monologue.

Snowflakes fluttered down from the heavens. It was the most surreal thing I’d ever seen.

Trenchcoat held out his hands, palms to the sky in a reverent way, and smiled. “Sometimes I feel like God. Then I realize I’m not. God has the capacity to forgive. I do not.” His grin faded, and he commanded his goons, “Kill them all!”

They shouldered their rifles, and fingers drew tight against triggers.

Ethan’s and Casey’s eyes rounded with fear.

“Might not want to do that just yet,” I said.

“And just why is that?”

55

“Because I left a worm in your system the last time I was there,” Ethan said.

Frank’s eyes narrowed with doubt. “That’s not possible. Our system would have detected it. Just like we detected and tracked your intrusion.”

Ethan laughed. “Okay, boss. You got me. I didn’t bury a polymorphic payload inside a dummy config file. Nothing to worry about. It’s not like I set up a heartbeat check where it pings a ghost server every 48. Two missed check-ins and it deploys. I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s not like your satellites will come crashing out of the sky.” Ethan frowned and shook his head. “That would be expensive. Hell of a show, though.”

Ethan had delivered the speech with the right amount of detached snark. It was enough to give Frank pause. His eyes narrowed at the kid, trying to see through his bluff.

“What’s the name of the config file?” Frank asked.

“Why should I tell you?”

“I think that’s obvious. Unless of course you prefer to have your brains splattered all over this nice fresh snow.”

Ethan hesitated a moment. “Default_orbital_123x.cfg.”

Frank nodded to his assistant. “Log onto the server. Find that file.”

The assistant did as instructed. He tapped the keys, his face buried in the screen. The glow illuminated his intense eyes as he searched the system. “Got it!”

“Verify it’s a foreign file,” Frank said.

After a few taps of the keys and swipes of the trackpad, he replied, “That file was copied to this system the day of the intrusion.”

Frank grimaced. “Delete it.”

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Ethan said.

Frank glared at him. “Why is that?”

“By all means, if you want to activate it, go ahead.”

“How do we get rid of the worm?” Frank demanded in a low growl, his intense eyes staring into the kid.

“It’s really simple. I can do it with a few keystrokes.”

“Then do it!”

“This is where we renegotiate,” Ethan said.

"You have thousands of satellites in orbit. Expensive. I doubt you have the working capital to replace that. Not to mention the time involved. When those start falling out of the sky, your wholeoperation will go up in smoke. Your stock will tank. All of those wonderful revenue projections you've made will disappear.”