Page 36 of Gryphon

“That sounds pretty clumsy and a little obvious.”

“Sure,” Harry pulled up his research on the screen. “But you can call their main line for references and you hit a live operator, with a majorly hot Italian accent. She’s breathlessly willing to send you verified coursework, student grades, even the pilot’s former mailing address in Italy.”

“She’s probably a ninety-year-old grandma.”

“Yeah probably,” Harry wouldn’t be surprised. “Then I ran him through all the Russian databases I managed to slip into.”

“Meaning all of them,” Jeremy laughed.

“That takes time. But the ones I could do fast, gave me nothing. Though Russia definitely runs pilots through the same Italian non-school to get Western pilot credentials. I may have dumped those names into the databases at Interpol, the FBI, Mossad, and a few others. Or maybe not.”

Again Jeremy laughed on cue, because they both knew he absolutely had.

“But no joy on your guy. They require that all their enrollees are already fully trained pilots. The school exists for one purpose, to convert unreportable hours into Western-world acceptable hours, but they don’t keep the proof afterward. Slick, huh?”

So easy he wished he’d thought of it back in his hacker days. Need a sleeper agent? Train them up on an Airbus, Boeing, or even a Cessna. All hours in Russia, China, or wherever were rewritten into certified experience in the West as part of the service. Nobody claiming that they were more than they actually were, so no incompetence existed—only disloyalty.

He'd cracked their dark-web page and their bank accounts.

A quarter-mil euro for a 737 pilot with five thousand hours. Write a little conversion code, pay the sexy-voiced receptionist, and pocket the rest. Oh, there were a few bribes to obscure airlines in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the like to verify hours that were never served. A flat fee of ten-k per call for the reference source eased verification significantly.

“You’ll keep digging?”

“Sure. But no idea if there’s more to find. What if there’s a name change in there somewhere that I missed? Huh. Name change going into the flight school, coming out a different person with all those hours. I’ll check that out. Not like I have anything else to do than to lie here like a lump and stare at my bare toes.”

“Wiggle them for me.”

Harry did. Then he tapped to switch from a voice call to video. Jeremy did the same. Harry focused the camera on his toes and wiggled them again.

“Good job. Everything’s still connected.”

“Sure, the doc was slick as can be. Hey, Jeremy?”

“Yeah.”

Harry didn’t know how to ask the question. Jeremy had been a hacker too, except he’d never finished his first big hack—cold feet an inch from the goal line. He claimed to have played it clean ever since and, because it was Jeremy speaking, Harry believed him.

“What is it, Harry?”

“You ever sorry you didn’t go through with it?”

“But I did. I married her and we have a kid. That’s what you should do, Harry.”

“No, wait. I was talking about… Never mind.” Dumb question anyway.

“Oh, not doing that hack?” Jeremy paused longer than was usual for him. Even his listening typically felt breathless. “No. And not just because it was for the wrong side. I don’t regret it. But I don’t think about it much. That’s the past. That’s before Miranda, and Taz, and now Amy.” And Jeremy kicked into high gear. “You’ll never understand the way having a kid changes your world view. I feel like there’s so much I never understood. I’m All-powerful Dad and totally freaked out at the same time. There’s nothing like— No, wait. Never mind. I didn’t say any of that.”

“Jeremy? What the—”

“I promised Heidi. No, wait! I didn’t say that either. Gottagobye” And he was gone without putting a period on the sentence.

Harry wanted to laugh; to tease Jeremy about an incomplete line of verbal code. But it caught hard in his throat.

Heidi pregnant? With their kid?

A girl with her mom’s unruly mop of hair, brilliant mind, and zest for life.

How had he never imagined that before?

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