Page 10 of The Suit

“Okay. How much cash is there?”

“Cash? Not much, maybe fifty mil. Owned assets? About ten billion.”

“What about the rest?”

“What rest?”

“I thought he was worth double that.”

“Nope. He lost about eight bil a couple of years ago when the stock market crashed. It’s why there’s such little cash, and why we can legit claim how low his wealth is. Thank fuck he’d been on a spending spree in the years before, and most of it is in fuck-ugly art.”

“Okay, thanks. It’s all I needed to hear. I have meetings all week to settle this, so can you stay available in case I need more info?”

“Yeah, but at normal hours only. Not before the fucking sun is up. And not at a time when I have to leave my wife in bed.”

I rolled my eyes so hard it hurt my brain. Fucking men.

“Anyway,” he continued, “why are you so rattled about this? Doesn’t sound like you. Thought you never lost.”

“I’m not fucking rattled; I’m just doing my job by making sure you’ve done yours.”

“Whatever, Holmes. Catch you later. Don’t fuck it up.” The line went dead.

I drummed my fingers slowly on my desk, thinking about his parting words. It wasn’t that I was rattled; I didn’t get rattled. It was that I was now up against someone who was as good as me, if not better – whether I wanted to admit it or not. We’d never been against one another in real life, but even in the years since college, I’d not met someone who excited me about facing them, who got me excited about the fight, because we had almost equal ability.

The adrenaline was already stockpiling in my veins.

I never thought I’d see Rafe Latham again, but I had only one thing to say.

May the best man win.

And by man, I meant me.

3

Rafe

Istood in front of the brick wall waiting to be granted access, but as per usual the dummies inside liked to make me wait, even though I owned this particular wall and this particular building it was helping to keep standing. Normally I’d enter through more direct means, but seeing as I’d marched down here as soon as I’d got to the office, this had been the quickest route, even if it meant I was kept waiting.

I knew they’d seen me too, because the cameras installed in the ceiling above where I was standing had sensed me walking down the corridor and shown up on the wall-to-wall screens taking up one end of the room.

You might ask yourself, why the ridiculous CIA levels of security and secrecy? And to that I should probably say, fuck knows. But in actuality, I worked with some veryveryparanoid people. Rightly paranoid, in fairness, but paranoid just the same because behind this wall was one of the finest hackers in the history of hacking.

When he was fourteen, he hacked into the US Department of Defense and changed all the colors on redacted files to pink with little hearts and smiley faces printed on them. The DoD was so embarrassed that someone had made it through their firewalls that they never told anyone it had happened, but did start the process of tracking him down.

When he was seventeen, he hacked into the CIA database, leaving a Mickey Mouse image on the face of every Most Wanted file. The CIA was less embarrassed and more pissed when they found out the DoD already had him within its sights but hadn’t shared intel, so they vowed to catch him first.

When he was nineteen, after a particularly hairy six months where he almost got caught eleven times, hacking his way through European defense agencies – MI5, MI6, Mossad, BND to name a few – he was finally discovered in a little cottage, in a remote village in Northern Cyprus, eating a bowl of Coco Puffs while he played Donkey Kong. What followed was a cross-border tussle of such enormous proportions - over who owned him based on the crimes he committed - that it almost caused arealdanger to national security because they weren’t paying enough attention to actual and important security issues.

Finally, the CIA and the DoD won because he was a US citizen and had caused more potential distress to them combined. He was extradited to Langley, given a massive slap on the wrists and promptly offered a job... Or rather told he would now be working for the CIA instead of facing life in prison, because someone who could get through its systems in under an hour was someone they should probably have on the payroll. Keep your enemies close and all that. Except he wasn’t really an enemy, just a bored teenager with an IQ of 180.

Five years into his new career on the right side – according to some - of the law, and I’d found myself working with him while defending a client that I signed a seventy-six page document agreeing not to discuss under any circumstances. As part of my payment for winning – obviously – the case, I wanted to keep the boy genius, also known as Cody. Not unlike this divorce settlement we were currently working, we agreed to joint custody, and they turned a blind eye to what he did for me, unless national security got out of control and they needed him more full-time.

Because national security takes precedence, annoyingly.

Thankfully, he was working for me right now, on this case, and that’s all that mattered. I leaned back into the wall, arms crossed over my chest, and waited to be granted access while I glared up at camera number seventeen until the wall slid open.

“Finally. It gets longer every fucking time.”

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