Bleeding Edge: Elliot Security (Elliot Security Series Book 2) by Evie Mitchell (short story to read .txt) 📗

Have a webcam? Why don’t I enable it with the help of your terrible 123ABC password so I can record you and your partner having intimate relations and use that to blackmail you?

My paranoia was evidence-based. Every example was a technique I’d used either while in the God’s Patriots or in the years before I’d gone legit. In an interconnected world, I was an anomaly in my desire to be disconnected.

Sawyer, on the other hand, let it all hang out. He believed privacy was no longer a guarantee and that to cut off interest, the best thing was to construct people’s understanding of who you were. He had multiple personas online, each more elaborate and creative than the last. A brief google search would turn up every personality from a transgender burlesque dancer to a conservative church-going anti-gay minister. And he used each to extract the information he needed. As abhorrent as we both found some of the personas, they worked because they were cultivated to be believable.

His real persona sat under layers of lies. It was brilliant in its simplicity and execution. The only problem was the amount of effort taken to construct and maintain the rouse. But for that, Sawyer and I had written code designed to mimic and interact in such a way to appear human. It worked 86.3% of the time.

Nothing was perfect.

So, seeing Sawyer sitting at Luc’s kitchen bench, typing away, muttering to himself as he troubleshot, made me uneasy.

“Could you do that elsewhere?”

“Settle, petal. I’m routing this through eight countries, and I built the bloody thing without microphone, speakers, or camera. We’re safe.”

I sipped my tea, still uneasy.

“Here.” He spun the laptop around, showing a birds-eye view of a bunch of buildings. I squinted for a moment, trying to work out what he was showing.

“Shit,” I whispered as I stepped closer. “It’s The Front.”

“The what?”

“The Front. It’s our… the commune.” My hands flew across the key pad, moving in, zooming around. The outer living quarters were the same, basic weatherboard white, tin-roofed shacks, hot in summer, freezing in winter. The church took centre stage, a large limestone airconditioned three-storey building with its own basement servers and computer labs. The deacons had a higher standard of living. The houses were large, each wife and child honoured with their own room. It was part of their psychological hierarchy, a way to make people strive to be better. It worked. I’d witnessed newcomers do whatever was asked of them in a bid to move up the ranks.

My family among them.

“Emmie?”

I lifted my eyes from the screen and looked at the three men watching me.

“How?”

“I have friends who owe me. Some of them still work in certain areas that are of use to me.”

I looked at the perfect satellite images. “Must be one hell of a favour,” I murmured. There were new buildings, new areas that had been cleared for some kind of large outdoor field. Animal pens and barns occupied land that had previously been covered in thick brush.

“Look at the solar farm. My God.” I ran a finger over the screen. “It’s massive.”

“Yeah.” Sawyer kicked back, frowning. For a man who normally embodied a human Labrador, he looked distinctly less-than jovial.

“It tells me they’re running more than they were when you were last there.”

“Like what?”

He lifted a hand, running it through his hair. “Canberra has a few solar farms that size. One can generate enough electricity to power over three thousand homes. There ain’t that many people living on the commune. Not based on the heat readings from the buildings.”

“Why would they need it then?” This came from Jack, the coffee obviously kicking in.

“Bing, bing, bing! That’s the million-dollar question,” Sawyer replied pointing finger guns at Jack and firing.

I glanced at Luc who remained silent, finding his eyes on me.

“What?”

He remained silent.

I turned back to Sawyer. “This is creepy, right?”

“Totally.”

I scratched my cheek. “How did they build it? I mean, apart from it probably being illegal, someone had to notice, right? You can’t get that kind of infrastructure into a remote area without passing at least a few towns.”

“I’ve tasked some of our guys with checking it out. The orders had to come from somewhere. This required serious investment. I’m talking $100 million easy.”

“Christ.” Jack coughed, raising his hand to his mouth. “Where do you even get money like that?”

“Depends,” I answered. “Hackers have options. Put out an ad for services on the dark web. You can hack bank accounts, blackmail people, push out some ransomware.”

“Ransomware?” Jack clarified.

“Yeah,” Sawyer answered for me. “It’s a type of virus that basically locks your computer until you pay the ransom. Sometimes the demand is set in bitcoin to make it harder to trace back to an individual.”

“Geeze. You ever do that, Em?”

“Not to individuals. Big businesses when they forced me.”

“Forced?”

“Yeah.” I shrugged at Jack’s question, eyes back on the computer, fingers navigating around the images on the screen. “We’d be punished if we didn’t complete our tasks.”

“Tasks?”

“Mm.”

“Like what?” Luc asked.

“I don’t know… Hack some websites. Steal some cash. Code a virus. See who can shut down a power grid. You know, stuff.” I glanced up in time to see Sawyer, Luc, and Jack all exchange a glance.

“And if you didn’t complete them?”

“If you failed or refused, you’d be punished.”

“What was the punishment?”

I pressed my lips together, not wanting to answer. The pause drew out for several long moments.

“Emmie?” Luc asked. “You gonna answer Sawyer?”

I drew in a breath. “Punishments depended on the crime and the teacher. Sister Ruth would make us clean toilets. Brother David would force us into the pit or cane us.”

I pulled my shirt up and twisted to show my back. Faint white marks crisscrossed here and there. You wouldn’t notice unless you looked closely. “I wasn’t often bad, but when I was, I didn’t go to the pit, I got the cane.”

“Jesus.”

“Fuck.”

“Em–”

I dropped my shirt and turned back to the computer shrugging. “It’s over, it’s done. Let’s get on with it.”

“Bravest woman I know.”

I blinked